About Connections: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history think it irrelevant; many who love history think it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest road map to how we got here: America in the twenty-first century.
In the history of Berkshire County there have been weather events astounding in their ferocity. Tornados, blizzards, and floods correctly characterized as disasters. The next three columns will revisit these from the onset into the midst of the storms to the aftermath.
Pittsfield, Massachusetts: Wednesday, July 16, 1879, 2 p.m.
It was a gentle spattering of rain. It followed days of oppressive heat, and it was welcome. No one sheltered from the light rain; folks went about their business unaware of what was moving toward them.
Without warning the rain mixed with ice pellets and the world exploded into light and sound: the pinging of the hail interspersed with the flashes of lightning and claps of thunder.
When it appeared, the tornado was full blown and angry. An observer in the Berkshire Life building estimated the height of the funnel cloud at 900 feet. In 1874 the Berkshire Life building was in the center of Pittsfield on the corner of West Street and Park Square. The observer was looking west.
He saw it come as if the tornado was born out of the Taconic Range. It cut a path about 1,000 feet wide and traveled east. He watched as it veered south before the Square and missed him, the building in which he stood, and the center of town. That was the last of Pittsfield’s good luck.
Mills on Housatonic Street were destroyed. A worker at the Pomeroy Mill, Michael Collins, was killed.
People ran for cover but some were not fast enough. Driving on South Street, possibly trying to reach her home in Lenox, Mrs. Beckwith was killed by a falling tree. On the other hand, Judge Rockwell, traveling the same route to his home in Lenox, was able to perceive the danger in time. He left his rig and found a farmhouse where he rode out the storm in safety.
Not all houses were safe havens. One eye-witness saw “a portion of the apple tree and house moved some 15 feet from their foundations by the tornado.”
Another witness watched as the tornado stripped the roof off a house and tossed it into the air “as if it were wood shavings.”
It is hard to imagine the swirling mess as the tornado flung trees and barns into the air and dumped bridges into the river below.
One of the oddest occurrences was that the home of dentist George M. Wentworth on South Street was lifted, completely turned on its foundation, and then set down. The house was in one piece but stood back-to-front on its foundation.
Some estimated the tornado moved at so swift a pace that it lingered in any one spot just 40 seconds. For those 40 seconds everything in its path was ripped from its moorings and set in motion. The air was thick with destruction, and then the tornado smacked into Washington Mountain and was gone.
The Pittsfield Sun appeared to be writing while still in a state of shock: “Pittsfield is so admirably protected by the sheltering mountains that its record for a century and a quarter since its settlement shows no great damage… the storm of last Wednesday was entirely phenomenal and exceptional.”
If those statements were strictly accurate, a century-long record was broken in July 1879. The damage was extensive.
Giant elms were bent almost to the ground and stripped of leaves. Barns and other outbuildings were reduced to matchsticks. Debris was thick on the ground. An iron bridge was lifted into the air like a child’s toy, set sailing through the air, and then deposited in a stretch of river half a mile away.
People were lifted out of carriages and off the ground. They too flew through the air and were deposited far from where they meant to be. There were only two deaths reported but many were badly injured.
Once the storm passed, almost immediately the people of Pittsfield “set to work to remove the ruins and repair the damage.” They vowed “all marks of the storm would soon disappear.”
They felt certain another storm of this magnitude was unlikely to visit Pittsfield. They were correct for nine years until the next major storm: the blizzard of 1888.
