Historic Storms Of New England

Sidney Perley wrote the book on New England weather. His masterpiece, Historic Storms of New England, first published in 1891, graphically describes every major storm and natural disaster in the region from 1635 to 1890.

Riveting narratives include: the first earthquake in recorded New England history, the “strange appearance in the heavens” of 1667, the wreck of the pirate ship Whydah, the “great freshet” (spring flood) of 1770, an avalanche in the White Mountains that wiped out an entire family, and the cyclone at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1890 (pictured here). Over seventy storms, incidents, and anecdotes, “amusing and pathetic,” are described in detail. This new edition is the first to be illustrated.

Born in Boxford, Massachusetts, in 1858, Sidney Perley was a successful Salem lawyer with a surpassing love of history and genealogy. He published his History of Boxford, Massachusetts (1880), when he was twenty-one. Other works include Poets of Essex County, Mass. (1889), and a History of Salem, Mass. in three volumes (1924, 1926, 1928). Perley died in 1928.

Intensely religious, Perley wrote Historic Storms of New England with an apocalyptic fervor, describing each disaster as though it heralded the end of the world. He was a fitting interpreter of this region settled by Puritans, where every untoward heavenly event of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was viewed as an act of God, or the devil.

Historic Storms of New England is a classic study of natural disasters, regional history, and the New England psyche.