LEWES, TUESDAY NIGHT,
SEPTEMBER 15 , 1903
THE VAGABOND HURRICANE
Lewes, Delaware ,
September 15, 1903, Delaware Pilot.
It will take several days
until an estimate of the damage from the storm last Tuesday night
will be
clearly known, especially
that done to the vessel's. Lewes got off with a number of trees
uprooted,
and damaged buildings, the
most serious being the power house smoke stack bown down which
left the town in darkness.
In the 1900's weather
forecasting was incomplete, wind direction and barometric readings
were 'it'.
When a storm came up, it
was anyones guess when it would abate.
This particular 'vagabond
hurricane' was one that proved to be unpredictable and came out of
the
Atlantic , having been born
a 1000 mile to the east of the Bahamas and stayed at sea until it
turned
northward and raked the
Delaware coast. It caught residents by surprise.
The three masted schooner,
Hattie A. Marsh, was driven into the new outer breakwater, and
broke
up, taking five crew
members with her. Two, crew members, the mate and one sailor, were
saved by
the Lewes Life Savings
Station crew.
Farm crops, corn and
orchards suffered but the late tomato crop survived. Fish plant
piers and the
governments telephone line
were done in. There was no communication down the coast south of
Lewes.
Source: Micheal Morgan,
Delaware diary, Delaware Cast Press, 10/04/2017: Delaware Pilot &
“Weather
Underground”. Abstract: Harrison H.
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