The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

Wednesday, September 21, 1938, was a perfect morning of airy fresh blue skies in Tiverton when I stepped onto the bus bound for Durfee High School. It was my last year, and I was 17.

I got home about 3 p.m. and my mother was there as usual. The first thing that struck me was how extraordinarily windy it was. I went out in the yard with my two younger sisters, Norma and Kathryn. We girls spread our arms wide, and the wind held us up. The next thing I noticed was how swiftly the clouds were moving in.

The house, where I still live today, was on six acres of open land on Main Road, across from what is now Pardon Gray Preserve. Toward the back, the property overlooks Seapowet Marsh, an expansive wetland that slopes down to a picturesque inlet of the Sakonnet River called Seapowet Cove.

On the cove, barely visible from our yard, were three summer cottages on a narrow spit of land. That’s where five of my relatives and one friend were on that ill-fated September day.

Seapowet Avenue was a dirt road, with a breach north of the cottages, where the water from the Sakonnet River on the west spilled into Seapowet Marsh on the east. You could travel over the short gap in the road on a span of planks called Seapowet Bridge. I remember it was supported underneath by wooden struts that were painted black. There was a deep hole under the bridge that boys I knew would dive into. The tides originating in Rhode Island Sound ran up the Sakonnet River. Usually the water flowed easily from the river and cove into the marsh, looping under this little bridge, and drained out again. However, that Wednesday was anything but usual.

My Aunt Lizzie owned the two-story summer house nearest the bridge. The other two homes were single-story cottages. The middle one belonged to family friends, and the farthest one to Captain Norman Strickland and his wife, Emma, of Fall River.

After Labor Day most people returned to their year-round homes. However, Aunt Lizzie, 71, liked to enjoy a few extra weeks in her cottage. Visiting her that day were Grandmother Hathaway, 70; Aunt Alice, 58; Aunt Etta, 62; and Ida Chace, in her 80s, whom we called Aunt Chace because she was considered part of the family. Mrs. Strickland, about 50, was staying a bit longer, too. The middle cottage was closed for the season.

That afternoon, Mrs. Strickland walked to Aunt Lizzie’s to join the group for cards. They didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary until about 5 p.m., when they saw the river rising. They became alarmed when the water quickly overflowed its banks, swelled up under the small bridge and flooded the marsh on the other side. Water was washing over the road from both sides, the river on the west and the marsh on the east.

Inside our home on Main Road, my mother was getting nervous. My father, a construction contractor, was on the job building a house in Little Compton. The wind was getting higher. Below our backyard, the marsh was filling up with water. My mother, my sisters Norma and Kathryn, and I looked down at the cottages in the distance and asked each other, Why don’t they leave? We couldn’t call; there were no phones in the summer cottages. If they needed anything, they would signal us by tacking a white cloth on the green shutter on Aunt Lizzie’s front door. The sight distance, as the crow flies, was probably a mile. We kept watching. Finally, six figures emerged from Aunt Lizzie’s and started out toward the Strickland cottage. We thought, good, because Mrs. Strickland had a car.

Suddenly they turned around and went back to Aunt Lizzie’s. We became sick with worry — why didn’t they keep going? After a few minutes we saw them head out again toward the Stricklands’, struggling against the wind, with a cage. They had forgotten the canary! We were thankful they were again en route to the Stricklands’ garage — and the car that could take them to safety.

The wind was getting angrier. We could not see what was happening, and heard this part of the account later. The door of the Stricklands’ garage was blown off its hinges, and knocked Aunt Etta down. By now, the water on Seapowet Avenue was too high for the car to get through, so they sent the two youngest women for help. Mrs. Strickland and Aunt Alice headed toward my Uncle John’s dairy farm, which was adjacent to the Stricklands.

Uncle John lived with us in our house on Main Road and went down to work on the farm each day. Back then there was a farmhouse, cow barn and cornfields; now the area is dotted with homes from Little Harbor Road to Driftwood Drive. Uncle John’s nephew Chester Brown worked with him. When they saw the weather conditions change quickly, they knew that the people near Seapowet Bridge would be in trouble, so they jumped onto a tractor and headed down the dirt road toward the cottages.

Although the farmhouse was less than an eighth of a mile up the road, it must have seemed very distant to the women. With the water rising and visibility decreasing, Mrs. Strickland and Aunt Alice had difficulty making progress. Then, out of the haze, they spotted something approaching — a tractor! But unexpectedly, it turned around. The water covering Seapowet Avenue was so deep that the tractor could go no further. They were alone again with the water still rising. A few minutes later they saw something else coming. Uncle John and Chester were crawling toward them — this time on a bigger tractor. The two women climbed aboard and got out.

Behind them the spit of land was totally covered by water, and no one saw when the four oldest women were washed away. Aunt Lizzie, Grandmother Hathaway, Aunt Etta and Aunt Chace had vanished.

My father got home from work about 5 p.m. and heard what was happening. He raced with neighbors to try to reach Seapowet Avenue from the south. At Four Corners they turned west off Main Road, onto Neck Road, but could not get past Nonquit Pond. It had spilled over the road, filled the Nonquit School grounds on the opposite side, flooded the basement and climbed the stairs to the front doorstep. The caretaker’s cottage on the pond was reduced to splinters. The men backtracked to Main Road and tried to approach from the north end of Seapowet Avenue, but at the left curve where the road bends to parallel the river, they were again stymied.

From the vantage point of our home on high ground, we saw the angry whitecaps whipped up by the wind, but could not distinguish the wall of water later reported. Evidently, at the height of the hurricane, the storm surge up the Sakonnet River appeared as one huge tidal wave.

Around 6 p.m., my mother, my sisters Norma and Kathryn, and I were peering out an upstairs window when we saw Aunt Lizzie’s two-story summer house break apart and drift away in pieces. The other two cottages floated away more or less intact. The wind and the Sakonnet River surge were pushing them northward onto the marsh, away from the teeming river. It became so dark we could see no more.

My father’s next foray into the storm was an attempt to trek down the flooded marsh behind our house, but it was impassable. Reluctantly, he returned to wait with us.

When the two cottages came to rest in the marsh after the storm, Mrs. Strickland’s dishes were still on the shelves. Two-story structures usually break apart while one-story cottages, called floaters, tend to do just that. Sometimes I wonder if my family members had stayed inside the Strickland cottage, they might have survived as it floated on the floodwaters, but I also know, in the terror of the moment, the first impulse must have been to flee.

The two floaters settled upland, on the east side of Seapowet Avenue, in a grove of trees beyond the fields that today are planted in potatoes. Later they were moved to their current locations — one floater is the left half of Pat’s Auto Repair on Main Road, and the other is the small white building visible from Seapowet Avenue as it heads north toward Main Road.

The winds died down about two hours later, and just like that, the violence of the storm was over. Between 7:30 and 8 p.m. a car pulled into our driveway. Uncle John was bringing the two women rescued by the tractor. Since all communication was down, this was the first time we knew that Aunt Alice and Mrs. Strickland were safe.

Daybreak on Thursday was just as sparkling as the one 24 hours earlier, but a terrible kind of history had been made between those two mornings. The first thing my father did the day after what became known as the Great Hurricane of 1938 was put on high boots and gather two or three neighbors to search the marsh for our missing relatives. Amazingly, the water had receded to almost normal levels, so they could walk down the wetlands. They went onto Seapowet Marsh by hiking past the group of tall trees on the hill, and slogging down the fields behind what is now Wampanoag Lane, across from Tiverton Town Farm. They were gone all day. There was no electricity, no one could travel anywhere and wreckage was everywhere. Still, word got around that people had been lost.

By the end of the day, the men had found three of the four bodies they were seeking, washed up on the marsh: Grandmother Hathaway, Aunt Lizzie and Aunt Chace. Darkness forced them to stop looking for the fourth, so they began the climb back uphill. As they neared the crest, they noticed a huge mass of marsh grass in one of the tall trees. One of the men said it looked like a leg hanging down. As they got closer, they saw it was. Somehow they got the mass down from the tree, and saw that they had found Aunt Etta, the final victim. The storm had torn every scrap of clothing from her body.

With all the destruction and debris on the roads, it was several days before travel by car was possible. There was still no electricity. About the fifth day after the hurricane, we held the funerals for my relatives. It was a long, sad day. In the morning, the caskets of my grandmother Hathaway, Aunt Lizzie and Aunt Etta were placed in the front of Amicable Congregational Church for a combined funeral. Afterward, we crossed the street to Hillside Cemetery to bury my grandmother and Aunt Etta, and then drove to Oakgrove Cemetery in Fall River to bury Aunt Lizzie. The fourth memorial ceremony, for Aunt Chace, was also in Fall River, at her grand Victorian home.

In February of 2006, I had a vivid reminder of 1938. It was a very stormy day, with the wind blowing from the east so fiercely that I couldn’t go in or out my front door. To get to the mailbox in the afternoon, I decided to use the back door and circle around the north side of the house. As I rounded the porch there was an odd noise, a loud whoosh, but I kept going, fighting the wind. When I turned from the mailbox to go back to the house I could barely make any headway through the wind. When I finally got to the back door, I could not open it. The whoosh was the sudden shift of the wind, which now came from the west and northwest. I was so weak by then I burst into tears. I looked past the marsh, at the river. I don’t remember seeing it so rough, with such enormous waves, since that day long ago. That night’s weather report said the wind reached 70 miles per hour.

Nevertheless, this recent reminder was not the perfect storm that the Great Hurricane of 1938 had been. Those winds and waves had been much more brutal. On that momentous September day 70 years ago three forces of nature: the autumnal equinox, the full moon and high tide, converged to make it deadly for so many, including four women from my own family.

Ruth Hathaway Manchester was born on Sept. 10, 1921, and lived with her parents and siblings in her maternal Grandmother Schlegel’s house until her father, a construction contractor, completed their new house next door. She graduated from Rhode Island College in 1943 and started her teaching career at Nonquit, the same elementary school she had attended. That was also the year her father died.

In 1944, she married Andrew Manchester and they lived at the family home with her mother. When her mother died in 1965, she left the six-acre property to her five children, and Ruth and Andrew bought out their shares. About 1975, Andrew had the idea to name their home Marsh Winds, and as a gift for Ruth, made the sign that stands there to this day.

Ruth and Andrew both taught in Tiverton, she at Nonquit and he at Pocasset, the Middle School and the High School. Generations of children who attended Nonquit fondly remember Mrs. Manchester as their second grade teacher. Andrew’s specialty was carpentry and shop. They retired together in 1981. Andrew died in 1994 and is buried in Hillside Cemetery, adjacent to Amicable Congregational Church.