The Dark Days
by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column was published in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, May 10, 2019.
Tuesday, September 6, 1881 was a weird day. “Early in the morning the sky was entirely obscured by clouds which continued without a break until evening,” reported the Exeter News-Letter. But this was no ordinary cloudy day. The clouds “were so dense as to prevent even the outline of the sun from being seen, and to create a darkness that compelled the use of artificial light in the factories, stores and offices.” Defying the usual, it was darkest that day at 9:30 in the morning. Editor John Templeton noted that “it was almost impossible to read even by an open window.” Even though people back then were more accustomed to low light levels than we are today, the daytime darkness unnerved people. “A peculiar feature of the light was its ghastly yellow color. The grass and foliage took on a peculiar shade which appeared to some as a dark green and to others it looked blue. The heat was intense and the air was loaded with moisture. It was altogether the most disagreeable day of the season.” You can almost feel Templeton’s shiver of discomfort.
By the time he’d put his thoughts to print on Friday, he had regained his composure. This was not a solar eclipse, which would have been easily predicted by astronomers. Nor was it a rising storm. “It has been ascribed to everything, from the ‘coming together of the planets’ to smoke from the forest fires in Canada. At the signal service station (which would become the weather bureau in ten years) in Boston, it was ascribed to a mixture of smoke and fog.” And this explanation, smoke and fog, was the one Templeton correctly took to be the cause. These were modern times, after all, and science provides us with answers. But Templeton, who, like many New Englanders, would later remember September 6th as the “Yellow Day,” couldn’t help but recall another weird day that occurred one hundred years earlier. “On Tuesday, almost the whole of New England was visited by a dark day which in many respects resembled the dark day of 1780. The advance of knowledge prevented any of those displays of fear which marked the dark day of a century ago.” No one living still remembered the event, but the stories still circulated about the dark day of May 19, 1780.
Jeremy Belknap, a clergyman and historian living in Dover in 1780, recorded the strange occurrence on that day. “About 11 o’clock it began to grow dark; it was not like the darkness of a thunder cloud, but a yellowish vapour like the fume of a malt house or a coal kiln; about 1 o’clock the darkness was such that we lighted candles to take up dinner, and kept them burning till bed-time.” Samuel Lane, living in Stratham, noted that, “on the 19th of May it being so dark from 10 or 11 o’clock in the forenoon, ‘till 3 or 4 in the afternoon, that people were oblig’d to dine by candle light, which caus’d great terror in the minds of abundance of people.” Lane doesn’t mention whether he succumbed to ‘great terror,’ but by the time he put his words to paper, he’d clearly realized that the world wasn’t coming to an end. Later writers would all mention the terror of the population. An article in the Berkshire County Eagle written 96 years after the event, claimed, “Sober men, unaccustomed to such a freak of nature, deemed the Day of Doom at the door,” who rushed to their ministers or consulted the family Bible. There they found verses like Isaiah 13:10, “The rising sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light,” not at all comforting in the short term.
But there are no accounts of widespread panic. Abraham Davenport, then serving in the Governor’s Council, resisted his colleagues’ call to adjourn with the words, “Mr. Speaker, it is either the day of judgement, or it is not. If it is not there is no need of adjourning. If it is, I desire to be found doing my duty. I move that candles be brought and that we proceed to business.” A Reverend Cutler of Ipswich wrote that, “the fowl went to their roost, woodcocks whistled as they do in the dark; frogs peeped; in short there was the appearance of midnight at noon-day.” If anything, the animals around us make a folly of our time measured in hours instead of light. Most accounts note that the week’s weather had had a lingering pall and scent of smoke. Maybe there were fires burning far away? Jeremy Belknap remembered soot, and this “joined to the exceeding strong smell of smoke which there was all day, are undeniable proofs that the darkness must have been the effect of clouds and smoke.” But Bishop Edward Bass of Newburyport, who mostly agreed that it was smoke, left the door open just a crack. “The forementioned darkness was no doubt occasioned by an unusual concurrence of several natural causes, but to pretend fully and clearly to account for it, argues perhaps too great confidence.”
We’ve been down this road recently. The June 1st, 2010, Exeter News-Letter leads with the front page headline, “Smoke from Canada Fires Reaches Seacoast.” Many of us well-remember attending Memorial Day events that year with a haze of Canadian smoke sitting on the horizon. “While smoke had been drifting down all weekend it became intense Monday morning. Dozens of fires were burning in southern Quebec. Exeter Fire Lt. Bob Irish said residents who called his department were relieved to hear the smoke was coming from far away.” It was a weird holiday weekend, to say the least. But few people ascribed the haze to anything supernatural. Perhaps we leaned heavily on Belknap’s advice: “Should anyone say that these things ought to be improved to strike conviction and terror to sinners, I reply that the Word of God is the proper mean of conviction, and all the terrors that are wrought into the mind by natural means without application to the Word, or the truths it contains are merely animal affections and can produce no solid effect.”
Barbara Rimkunas is curator of the Exeter Historical Society. Support the Exeter Historical Society by becoming a member! Join online at: www.exeterhistory.org
Photo: Woods along the bank of the Exeter River in the 1880s. This might have been a place to observe the “Yellow Day” of September 6, 1881 and to reminisce about the “Dark Day” of May 19, 1780.
This "Historically Speaking" column was published in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, May 10, 2019.
Tuesday, September 6, 1881 was a weird day. “Early in the morning the sky was entirely obscured by clouds which continued without a break until evening,” reported the Exeter News-Letter. But this was no ordinary cloudy day. The clouds “were so dense as to prevent even the outline of the sun from being seen, and to create a darkness that compelled the use of artificial light in the factories, stores and offices.” Defying the usual, it was darkest that day at 9:30 in the morning. Editor John Templeton noted that “it was almost impossible to read even by an open window.” Even though people back then were more accustomed to low light levels than we are today, the daytime darkness unnerved people. “A peculiar feature of the light was its ghastly yellow color. The grass and foliage took on a peculiar shade which appeared to some as a dark green and to others it looked blue. The heat was intense and the air was loaded with moisture. It was altogether the most disagreeable day of the season.” You can almost feel Templeton’s shiver of discomfort.
Jeremy Belknap, a clergyman and historian living in Dover in 1780, recorded the strange occurrence on that day. “About 11 o’clock it began to grow dark; it was not like the darkness of a thunder cloud, but a yellowish vapour like the fume of a malt house or a coal kiln; about 1 o’clock the darkness was such that we lighted candles to take up dinner, and kept them burning till bed-time.” Samuel Lane, living in Stratham, noted that, “on the 19th of May it being so dark from 10 or 11 o’clock in the forenoon, ‘till 3 or 4 in the afternoon, that people were oblig’d to dine by candle light, which caus’d great terror in the minds of abundance of people.” Lane doesn’t mention whether he succumbed to ‘great terror,’ but by the time he put his words to paper, he’d clearly realized that the world wasn’t coming to an end. Later writers would all mention the terror of the population. An article in the Berkshire County Eagle written 96 years after the event, claimed, “Sober men, unaccustomed to such a freak of nature, deemed the Day of Doom at the door,” who rushed to their ministers or consulted the family Bible. There they found verses like Isaiah 13:10, “The rising sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light,” not at all comforting in the short term.
But there are no accounts of widespread panic. Abraham Davenport, then serving in the Governor’s Council, resisted his colleagues’ call to adjourn with the words, “Mr. Speaker, it is either the day of judgement, or it is not. If it is not there is no need of adjourning. If it is, I desire to be found doing my duty. I move that candles be brought and that we proceed to business.” A Reverend Cutler of Ipswich wrote that, “the fowl went to their roost, woodcocks whistled as they do in the dark; frogs peeped; in short there was the appearance of midnight at noon-day.” If anything, the animals around us make a folly of our time measured in hours instead of light. Most accounts note that the week’s weather had had a lingering pall and scent of smoke. Maybe there were fires burning far away? Jeremy Belknap remembered soot, and this “joined to the exceeding strong smell of smoke which there was all day, are undeniable proofs that the darkness must have been the effect of clouds and smoke.” But Bishop Edward Bass of Newburyport, who mostly agreed that it was smoke, left the door open just a crack. “The forementioned darkness was no doubt occasioned by an unusual concurrence of several natural causes, but to pretend fully and clearly to account for it, argues perhaps too great confidence.”
We’ve been down this road recently. The June 1st, 2010, Exeter News-Letter leads with the front page headline, “Smoke from Canada Fires Reaches Seacoast.” Many of us well-remember attending Memorial Day events that year with a haze of Canadian smoke sitting on the horizon. “While smoke had been drifting down all weekend it became intense Monday morning. Dozens of fires were burning in southern Quebec. Exeter Fire Lt. Bob Irish said residents who called his department were relieved to hear the smoke was coming from far away.” It was a weird holiday weekend, to say the least. But few people ascribed the haze to anything supernatural. Perhaps we leaned heavily on Belknap’s advice: “Should anyone say that these things ought to be improved to strike conviction and terror to sinners, I reply that the Word of God is the proper mean of conviction, and all the terrors that are wrought into the mind by natural means without application to the Word, or the truths it contains are merely animal affections and can produce no solid effect.”
Barbara Rimkunas is curator of the Exeter Historical Society. Support the Exeter Historical Society by becoming a member! Join online at: www.exeterhistory.org
Photo: Woods along the bank of the Exeter River in the 1880s. This might have been a place to observe the “Yellow Day” of September 6, 1881 and to reminisce about the “Dark Day” of May 19, 1780.
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