I remember the 1938 hurricane vividly. I was caught in East Providence and did not make it home for three days. Downtown Providence was a mess - looting taking place- the smells were terrible - everything in shambles. Let's hope it never happens again. Claire

...Okay...for what it's worth....the '38 Hurricane....My dad left the King Tom Farm, Old Post Road Charlestown RI with one of the biggest farm potato trucks they had...the thing could get through fairly high water...two ton, with a double-shift axle...and went down to the Charlestown Breachway....stopped at beach cottages all the way along Charlestown Beach...asking everyone he could find to climb on and come stay at the farmhouse... ....A few took him up on his offer... ....Most of the rest who wouldn't come...were never seen again.... ...Something similar happened at Watch Hill, Westerly....as I understand it, the Rector of the Episcopal Church...(Is it Christ Church, Westerly?) was down to Weekapaug where a Church event was taking place at one of the beach cottages, when high winds and rain came up. If I recall the story...he offered a ride back to Westerly to those present when he started back from the beach, and...of those who stayed behind, almost all were lost... ...To give everyone an idea of how capricious nature could be...our Browning cousins down on Matunuck Drift Road, (who have lived on the same property for about 8 generations now), went about their dairying and milking as usual, only momentarily reflecting on the rain and wind which appeared to be...somewhat intense, but not particularly out of the ordinary. Not more than a mile further south, down at the beach(today from Carpenters Beach, through Roy Carpenter's Beach, all the way to Green Hill)...whole blocks of beach cottages were being destroyed...along with the people in them.... ...The way my dad explained it...when the first of the Narragansett Purchasers came to the area, among other stories they heard from the resident Narragansetts/Niantics were tales of an occasional "Big Wind" which supposedly came through every few years.....but the accounts of the destruction attributed to these "Big Winds" seemed so...outrageous and obviously fictional....until the day came when these early settlers actually experienced one.... The '38 Hurricane struck Rhode Island some "12 years before I was even thought of"...but my perception of the event is/was shaped by the number of times when the subject came up, when I can recall a...distant, tragic look from someone I knew who survived it...the kind of shock, and even....a sort of sense of guilt that one had survived, when others hadn't....the sort of reaction I have only seen elsewhere from survivors of the Second World War.... ...For the generation who lived through it, the '38 Hurricane was a...defining moment....everyone can/could recall where they were, and what they were doing, when it struck....in much the same way that those of my generation remember what they were doing when they heard that President Kennedy had been shot... Since the "King Phillip"/Metacom Indian War of 1675, it was the most distructive, devastating event to occur in the Rhode Island Colony. Wistfully, Barry Hale Browning