From newyorkalmanack.com
Hurricanes are infrequent visitors to New York City. Major hurricanes, those with winds 111 miles per hour and above, making landfall in the city are rarer still. One of these was the first storm of the Atlantic Hurricane Season in 1821, originally called “The Great September Gale,” it’s now known as the Norfolk and Long Island Hurricane.
The Category 3 storm came ashore in Jamacia Bay, on September 3rd. A 13-foot storm surge, which luckily hit at low tide, rose within an hour and flooded Manhattan Island from the Battery to Canal Street, uniting the Hudson and East Rivers. It tossed ships into the streets, and destroy harbor docks and the bridge to Ward’s Island. It also resulted in a major scientific discovery.
William C. Redfield
William C. Redfield (1789 – 1857), a native of Connecticut, was no stranger to storms. It’s said of his grandfather, Captain William Redfield (the younger added the C. to distinguish himself), that “his four sons who reached maturity all followed the sea, and of these the fate of the elder two was never accurately known.”
William C.’s father, Peleg Redfield, was a privateer during the American Revolution who was captured, and then escaped from the British. He also “followed the sea” his whole life.
As a boy, the bookish young “Bill Redfield” was saved from drowning in a mill pond. At 13 he was apprenticed to a harness and saddle maker. In a few years he was a member of several young men’s improvement societies, which were in fad at the time when many could not afford the cost of higher education.
He later wrote that he read “history, voyages and travels,” before turning to geology, “and pretty nearly all there then was upon chemistry,” before tackling zoology and the medical sciences.
Tramping Through America
Leaving Connecticut with a friend in 1810, he tramped to Hartford, New Hartford, Stockbridge and New Lebanon to Albany and then up the Mohawk Valley, keeping a diary handed down to his son John Howard Redfield, who described his travels:
“He spent the first Sunday in visiting the Shaker settlement near [New] Lebanon, and in attending their worship, of which he gives an interesting account. At Albany his attention was drawn to Fulton‘s new steamboat, and we may imagine with what care it was examined. How little could he then conceive that in after life steam navigation was to become his chief vocation.
“Continuing the journey up the Mohawk Valley, tramping from thirty to thirty-five miles per day, and stopping at night at such Dutch taverns as they met, they reached Whitesboro in Oneida County, a Connecticut settlement, where they tarried a day or two to visit some relatives of his companion.
“Henceforward the journey was through a wilderness, in which settlements became sparser and more insignificant, through Canandaigua to Buffalo. There they diverged to visit Niagara Palls, then a rarely visited wonder.”
He reached Ohio, then turned toward Pennsylvania, and passed through Virginia and Maryland. During a trading visit to Savannah in 1812 he encountered an earthquake.
“I have often heard him tell of the alarming vibrations which set in swinging motion everything pendulous, and of the unceremonious manner in which he and his companion were forced to leave their dwelling in the night, to seek shelter in the street,” his son wrote.
He seems to have traded over the next 15 years, presumably by sea, including to Alexandria, Virginia in 1819. His wife having died the previous spring, he married again in 1820.
The Great September Gale
“On the evening of September 3, 1821, while [his new wife] was lying upon her death-bed, a gale, short in duration but terrific in violence, passed over Connecticut,” John Howard Redfield wrote. “Its greatest force lasted from about 7 pm till midnight. For many years thereafter it was spoken of as the ‘Great September Gale.’
“I can remember how the wind roared, how the house shook, how I shared the alarm which was manifest in all those who were about me, and how I was impressed the next morning by the devastating force which had overturned out-houses and large trees in the vicinity of our dwelling.”
William C. Redfield saw something else in the storm:
“My father’s habits of close observation led him to watch the fallen trees and other effects of that destructive wind. At Middletown and Cromwell the wind had been from the southeast and the trees lay prostrated with their heads north-westward. But on reaching Berkshire he was surprised to see that they lay in an opposite direction, and he repeatedly called my attention to this fact.
“In conversing with the residents of that region and enquiring the time when these trees were prostrated, he was still more astonished to learn that the wind, which at 9 pm had been from the southeast at Cromwell, had been in Stockbridge and that region from the northwest at precisely the same hour. These facts at first seemed to him irreconcilable.
“It did not appear to him possible that two winds of such violence should be blowing directly against each other at the distance of only seventy miles.”
Ten years later his findings were confirmed in another hurricane and he published an article on the subject in the American Journal of Science. His “rotary theory of storms” helped change the way cyclonic storms were understood and he is considered a father of meteorology.
Steamboats, Railroads and Mount Marcy
In 1824 Redfield moved his family to the city of New York, where according to his own account he “was engaged in the construction of the steam vessels Commerce and Swiftsure, and the safety-barges and freighting vessels which have since been towed on the Hudson chiefly by these steamers; having acted as principal engineer and general agent of ‘The Steam Navigation Company,’ to which these vessels belonged.”
In this way he helped advance the Hudson River towing industry. (Safety barges were a solution to the general public’s fear of boiler explosions on early steamboats).
“His mechanical taste and engineering skill here found ample scope, and many improvements in steam boilers, in paddle wheels, and in the framing of hulls were introduced by him, to general favor,” according to his son. He was called on to give testimony about the dangers of boiler explosions.
In 1828, when railroads were being introduced he proposed “a great railway from the Atlantic to the Mississippi” running up the Hudson River, and out the Mohawk Valley to the west, putting the knowledge of the country he gained while tramping across it as young man to use.
His pamphlet was titled Sketch of the Geographical Route of a Great Railway, by which it is proposed to connect the Canals and navigable waters of the States of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and the Michigan, North West, and Missouri Territories, opening thereby a free communication at all seasons of the year between the Atlantic States and the great valley of the Mississippi.
In 1837, Redfield helped organize the first scientific expedition to Mount Marcy with Ebenezer Emmons, guessing then that it was the State’s highest peak. For his efforts Verplanck Colvin named one of the peaks in the Great Range of the High Peaks Mount Redfield in his honour.
William C. Redfield was awarded an honorary Masters degree from Yale in 1839, went on to help found the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1843, serving as the organization’s first president. He published more than 60 academic papers.
Redfield died at the age of 68 in the city of New York on February 12, 1857, and is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Illustrations, from above: Waterways of New York City (Map by Julius Schorzman) 1. Hudson River, 2. East River, 3. Long Island Sound, 4. Newark Bay, 5. Upper New York Bay, 6. Lower New York Bay, 7. Jamaica Bay, and 8. the Atlantic Ocean; the track map of The Great September Gale; and an engraving of William C. Redfield by A. H. Ritchie from Genealogical History of the Redfield Family in the United States (1860).
https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2024/04/william-redfield-1821-ny-hurricane/
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