On 6 October 1804, noted Salem, Mass., diarist William Bentley noted an “uncommon scarcity of Fish in our Bay” and pondered, “Do the storms drive fish from our surroundings?” One wonders if he answered himself in the affirmative when, on the morning of 9 October a violent storm bore down, bringing fierce winds, heavy rain, and an early season snow in some areas. In succeeding days, Bentley detailed the damage done in Salem, recorded reports of damage from elsewhere, and made a remarkably prescient statement about climate change (although he did not understand it as we do today) and the increasing violence of storms.

I cannot refuse to adopt the belief that the late storm was the most severe ever felt in this part of America. All the accounts which I have seen represent nothing like it. In Boston, the old people are said to represent that a storm like it happened 16 September 1727. As yet I have found no tradition of such a storm among our old people or upon record or any report of its consequences. I suspect that as our winters have less horrour we partake more of a southern climate from the great quantity of heat & consequently have more stormy weather of this kind & therefore may expect more of it in future years.

So wide and severe a havoc

While wind and rain were the chief cause of storm damage near the coast, inland snows—arriving before crops were harvested for the season—were of chief concern. From just north of New Haven, through the Berkshires of Massachusetts, and north to Vermont, snow blanketed the region as documented in the Political Observatory of Walpole, Vermont.

Accounts from every direction prove the destructive effect of the late storm of snow, particularly on timber and fruit trees. So wide and severe a havoc was never before made in this part of the county. We have seen the devastation in some of the orchards nearly equal to that of a tornado; Scaresely [sic] a tree remains uninjured; many have left but here and there a solitary branch, and some are rent through the length of their trunks and prostrated each way on the earth … The quantity of fruit must be lessened for years to come, which is more unhappy as there is but a small supply of cider the present season.

Apples were not the only crop destroyed—unharvested onions and potatoes were frozen in the ground until spring, and the late corn toppled. Some areas in Vermont received in excess of 20 inches of snow, which in some places, lasted until spring. When the weather cleared, the snow hurricane of 1804 would be long remembered, at least until the next “big one.”

And down came the steeple

Erected in 1740 and having survived (and played a starring role in) the Revolutionary War, the steeple of the Old North Church was no match for the October 1804 storm. As depicted in the sideways image on the top of the broadside, the steeple toppled in the wind, destroying a house below whose occupants were fortunately away from home. By 1806, a new steeple designed by Charles Bulfinch, 15 feet shorter, but crowned by the original Shem Drowne weathervane, towered over the North End. That steeple would survive until it was razed by Hurricane Carol in 1954. As in 1804, only the weathervane survived and a new steeple, true to its original 1740 design, rose again over the city the very next year. The Old North was not the only church to lose its top in the 1804 storm. According to Perley’s Historic Storms of New England, the roof of the Baptist Church in Charlestown was blown off, the spire of another “much bent,” churches in Danvers “unroofed,” and the roof of King’s Chapel “torn from the tower … and conveyed two hundred feet.”