Welcome
The last day of April, 1942 was pretty typical along the Connecticut and Rhode Island borderlands. It was warm, it was dry. Gusty winds blew across the greening pastures and unplanted corn fields, and rustled the dead leaves covering the forest floor.
Edward LaCasse, a thirty year old railroad section foreman and volunteer firefighter from Plainfield, was in the woods of Sterling, Coventry and neighboring towns setting them on fire. As a section foreman he was responsible as part of his routine maintenance duties for keeping railroad right of ways clear of brush and to help organize the suppression of fires along them when a coal fired locomotives threw a spark. According to my parents, he also worked as a lookout in the fire tower on Ekonk Hill. He was someone who knew very well when and where to set forest fires for maximum impact.
These woods were primed to burn, beyond the normal yearly variations of weather that made the spring of ’42 on the dry side. Three and a half years earlier the ’38 Hurricane had hit these woods hard. Three and half years is long enough for sticks the width of a thumb up to the size of shattered tree trunks to have become extremely dry, but not long enough for them to rot. Stacks of salvaged timber were scattered around the countryside, but there was not enough men or markets to have cleaned up all the woods. That was laborious work in those years when the chainsaw had not yet replaced the axe and cross-cut saw, and when only trucks small by today’s standards still competed with teams of horses and oxen for supremacy as being the prime movers in the woods.
Over the next week some fifty square miles of eastern Connecticut and particularly western Rhode Island burned, despite the efforts of thousands of men from both states and the help of Mother Nature to control them.
Thirty five years later some of my favorite childhood memories are from driving through these woods with my parents. Sometimes my dad would recall his experience as a 20 year old farm boy from Plainfield helping on the fire line, although he didn’t provide much detail in keeping with the manner of his generation. As an eight year old in the back seat of our yellow Scout II bouncing down those dirt roads listening to the story, while imaging the woodlands around us, it certainly ignited my life long interest in forest fires and probably was the start of my interest in the fire service in general.
Maybe one day I will turn my research and opinions into a book, maybe not. I’m not sure such a niche product as the history of forest fires and control in southern New England it would attract much interest from a publisher. But for now I will use this blog to organize and share my notes. I’ve chosen the name, “The Wooden Nutmeg” for this blog as a nod to the mimeographed newsletter of that name published in the years before World War II and distributed to Connecticut Forest Fire Wardens and others interested in our forest fires.
Matt Kivela
Brooklyn, Conn.
