THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 17, 1994 TAG: 9407150599
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GEORGE TUCKER
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
NOW THAT THE annual hurricane season is here again, I'd like to devote today's column to the 24-hour blow of Sept. 6, 1667. It was the great-great-grandaddy of all of the recorded latter-day rain-drenched summer or autumn storms that have periodically left the area reeling in their wakes.
Two contemporary accounts of the 1667 tempest have survived. The first appeared in the pamphlet ``Strange News from Virginia'' published later the same year in London. The second and more detailed description was included in a letter written from Jamestown in November 1667 by Thomas Ludwell, secretary of the Virginia colony, to Lord Berkeley of Stratton, a favorite of Charles II and a brother of Sir William Berkeley, then governor of the Old Dominion.
According to age-old tradition, the present Lynnhaven Inlet was created by the 1667 hurricane. Until then the entrance to Lynnhaven Bay was by way of Little Creek. Before the 1667 blast, the eastern and western banks of what is now the inlet were joined by a range of sand dunes. Earlier in the 17th century fishermen had dug a narrow canal through this connection to avoid having to reach Chesapeake Bay by way of the tortuous Little Creek route. According to the long-told tale, when the big blow of 1667 came, the canal was widened by the wind and waves into the present inlet.
``Strange News from Virginia'' reported that the 1667 tempest ``overturned many houses, burying in the Rivers much Goods and many people, beating to the ground such as were any wayes employed in the fields, blowing many cattle that were near the Sea or Rivers into them, whereby unknown numbers were perished to the great affliction of all people, and great quantities of tobacco have been lost, to the great damage of many and utter undoing to others. Neither did it end here, but the trees were torn up by the roots, and in many places the whole woods blown down so that they cannot go from plantation to plantation. The Sea (by the violence of the wind) swelled twelve feet above its usual height, drowning the whole country before it, with many of its inhabitants.''
Ludwell's account was equally vivid. Comparing the tempest to ``the reduction of the Creation into a second Chaos,'' he stigmatized the hurricane as ``the most Dreadfull tyme that ever I know or heard of.'' Ludwell's letter is too long to quote, but here are some of the facts he imparted concerning the damage inflicted by the 1667 storm.
At least 10,000 houses and barns were blown down, while the loss of human life and livestock was appalling. Added to these calamities, the entire tobacco crop, the colony's mainstay, was destroyed along with other crops of corn, wheat and other edibles. According to Ludwell, the storm ``blew some ships from their Anchors and carried them safe over shelves of sand where a Wherry could with difficulty pass.''
Of particular local interest is Ludwell's description of the destruction of the fort that was then being built on the site of the present Fort Monroe. According to Ludwell, the ``water carried all the foundations of the fort at Point Comfort into the river and most of our Timber which we very chargeably bought thither to perfect it.''
Almost a century later, Fort George, a military bastion on the same site mentioned by Ludwell, was again destroyed by an equally ferocious storm. At the same time what is now known as Willoughby Spit was thrown up by the tempestuous winds and waters. But that was in 1749, and is only inserted here to show that the 1667 hurricane was only the first of a series of lethal tropically spawned storms that have ravaged Virginia over the past three centuries. by CNB