Connecticut and Rhode Island, May 1930
May, 1930 Fire Outbreak in the Northeast
The articles that follow are from the New London Day documenting a break out of wildfires in Connecticut and Rhode Island (as well as the rest of the northeast).
There were warning signs at the very end of April, with a large fire in Colchester, East Hampton, and Marlborough consuming 3,000 acres. Even by the standards of the day that was a fairly large fire:
A few days later Waterford had a woods fire.
This one only covered 100 acres, but something ominous was occurring:
Foreman Thomas B. Woodworth of the Quaker Hill fire department [said] some of the “new” fires broke out 1,000′ ahead of the firemen. He said that it was possible the blazes may have been started from blazing bits of dried chestnut wood.
Ok, so we’re also in the middle of the Chestnut Blight that put a very large load of dead fuels in the forests. But that aside, since the trees were dead the year before and the year after and we didn’t have these intense fires every year…they were seeing “spotting” 1,000′ ahead of the fire. In Connecticut. (This is the first documentation I’ve seen that gives a distance with what we can expect for spotting in our area in an extreme fire year).
Then all hell broke loose.
From The New London Day on May 5, 1930:
Six homes, thirty other buildings, and 3,000 acres in Westerly and Charlestown, RI that burned essentially to the sea:
250 homes in Nashua, NH are destroyed by a brush fire that turned into an urban conflagaration:
A fire in Glastonbury, later put at around 2,500 acres, would burn five miles in length from it’s origin, and at one point reach four miles wide. Being fought by 1,000 men. “Small” fires burning 60 to 150 acres destroyed buildings in Newtown & Windsor. Another 1,000 acres in Bristol. And a 2,500 more acres in New Britain / Southington / Plainville. So a 1,000 men…that’s what, a request for 40 strike teams today? And oh by the way, we have two more fires of this size within 20 miles of here, too…oh I’d love to be a fly on the wall when that request arrives at the DEMHS.
Meanwhile in Massachusetts, 1,500 acres was burning by Marlborough and 2,000 acres in Russel, two of the “20 bad and 75 minor” fires that day:
Niantic was busy trying to protect their cottages from a brush fire:
I only got the last half of this article on New London County…multiple fires in Waterford with hundreds fighting them, Gungywamp in Groton, 2,500 acres in Preston, Ledyard, and North Stonington:
On the sixth comes an article that would have folks throw a fit today:
Finally, at the risk of pulling a Ron Popeil and going, “But wait, there’s more!”
Connecticut’s first state forester, Austin Hawes, would later place the total acreage in Connecticut that burned in this first week of May, 1930 at around 25,000 acres. And they were actually kind of pleased by that — the last bad year of 1922 had seen 80,000 acres burn.
Washington County, RI would see some 30,000 acres burn. An article up above already mentioned the 3,000 acre fire in Westerly. North of Westerly there were two more fires that burned along the Connecticut and Rhode Island borders, in Rhode Island alone one consumed 10,000 acres and the other 12,000.
The worse of these ignited around Glasgo, CT (Griswold by the Voluntown town line) and burned all the way to Nooseneck Hill Road — today’s R.I. Route 3, or spitting distance from where I-95 crosses the state today. The proximity of the two big fires, along with the spotting that was occurring, it’s quite likely they were a single fire and/or merged along the way.
