It Happened in Connecticut

The Dark Day

May 19, 1780

The darkness appeared in the western sky around daybreak, then approached steadily and ominously. By midday it blotted out the sun, making it impossible to work outdoors or read a newspaper inside.  Chickens fooled into thinking night had fallen returned to their roosts, while nocturnal whippoorwills started to sing.

            This may sound like a scene from an alien invasion horror movie – think Independence Day – but it actually happened in Connecticut.  On a spring morning in 1780, the heavens turned mysteriously – and alarmingly – dark across much of the state.

            Friday, May 19 dawned partly cloudy, with scattered light showers. In Norwich the darkness first appeared around 8 a.m. By 11, a person “standing in the middle of a room furnished with 3 windows . . . could not read one word in a common newspaper,” wrote attorney Benjamin Huntington.

            In Thompson, about 40 miles northeast of Norwich as the crow flew – or would have flown if the false nightfall hadn’t sent him back to his nest – Joseph Joslin first noticed the darkness around 10 in the morning, while he was building a stone wall. By noon, the gloom was so dense Joslin couldn’t see far enough to continue working. He went inside, where candles had to be lit in order to see to prepare the midday meal. At that very hour similar conditions were recorded in New Haven, 70 miles southwest of Thompson, by Yale divinity professor Dr. Napthali Daggett.

            In Hartford, the Connecticut General Assembly was in session when the darkness began to manifest itself.  Jedediah Strong of Litchfield, clerk of the House of Representatives, reached deep into his Yale-graduate vocabulary for words impressive enough – although likely incomprehensible to the average man on the street – to describe the weird transformation. “A rolling, lowering sky, the vapours forming as it were an extensive concave integument in our hemisphere” created “a solemn gloom of unusual darkness” by 10 a.m., Strong wrote in the Journal of the House. Conditions lightened briefly, “so that the sun became barely apparent through the heterogeneous penumbra.” But soon a darker cloud arrived, so completely blocking the sun’s rays that people couldn’t read or write or even recognize each other at short distances. The House adjourned at 11 a.m. . . .