Ice Storm Photos Frozen in Time

HISTORY MATTERS

Technology changes, but Nature stays the same -- human nature too. In December 2008 an icy nor’eastern left tens of thousands without electrical power, some for more than a week. How our Victorian ancestors reacted to a similar storm in 1866 is visible in photos and newspaper accounts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Through a winter window

See pix & read accounts from 1886

The pictures look hauntingly familiar. Down both sides of the street the magnificent tree limbs, weighed down by snow and ice, bow to the ground in unison as if to welcome a passing monarch. Crystals shimmer like jewels in the morning light. Curious Portsmouth residents examine the fallen branches, snapped like twigs by tons of frozen water. Severed telephone and telegraph wires twist in the winter breeze.

Wait a minute. Telegraph wires?

We are looking, not at the devastating ice storm of December 2008 from which Seacoast residents are still recovering, but at very similar photographs of "The Great Ice Storm" of January 29, 1886. Within days of the disaster, photographers Lewis and Charles Davis were advertising souvenir pictures, mounted on heavy cardboard and suitable for framing at just 35 cents apiece. Hi-tech "stereoscope slides", shot with a specialized camera, made it possible to remember the ice storm in 3-D.

Painting word pictures

Meanwhile, three local newspapers offered colorful accounts of the event. Never in living memory, according to the Portsmouth Chronicle, had the trees been so coated with ice "from the ground to the tips of the smallest twigs" and hung with millions of tiny icicles as thick as pipe stems. Walking was almost impossible, according to the reporter, because both streets and sidewalks were "as slippery as greased glass". For three full days the sound of branches crashing to the ground was heard in every corner of the city. One man, according to the Portsmouth Journal, experimented with a chunk of ice that weighed 40 ounces. When he melted away the water, the twig at the center weighed only a single ounce.

The Portsmouth Daily, however, took time to ponder the "destructive beauty" of the storm. The "arctic artist commands our admiration," one journalist noted:

"The glittering trees reflecting the gas lights, presented the effect of bowers of diamonds, rivaling …the most startling productions of Alladin's lamp. Every object was brilliant with reflected light … from the street lanterns hung pendants of silver, and ordinary fences were radiant with nature's silver varnish."

 

Comparing the impact

Then as now the ice storm toppled trees and tore off branches that, in turn, ripped out wires. But Portsmouth in 1886 was on the very edge of the electrical age. Telegraph offices connected cities. A few buildings were electrified and some even had telephones, but our great energy dependence was unknown. Homes burned coal or wood and were mostly lit by gas. Modern appliances were often manually operated. Portsmouth residents got their news from newspapers, kept food in ice boxes, did not yet attend movies, knew nothing of radio or television, traveled largely by train or horsepower, and still warmed themselves in front of fireplaces.

A week without electricity was like any other week for most people in 1886. Stores were not required to shut down because they could not process credit cards. Companies did not collapse without Internet access. Carriages were stored in barns, so little damage was done by falling limbs. While hundreds of thousands of New Hampshire residents struggled without power last month, our "old fashioned" ancestors were warm, safe, well fed, and back to work the following day. The greatest inconvenience, according to reports, were the few roads still blocked by broken branches.

Nature’s awesome power

They did not blame Unitil. They mourned the loss of their stately oaks, chestnuts, willows, maples and "thrifty elms" that lined all the major streets in Portsmouth, including Islington, Daniel and State streets. South Cemetery was hit especially hard, as were the fruit trees in many gardens. Richards Avenue, a street named in memory of a vigorous tree planter named Henry Richards was devastated. An even more prolific figure, Mr. Joseph Fuller of Sagamore Road, had planted over 2,000 trees around the city from 1812 to 1865. Now many were mangled and split.

Portsmouth was especially proud of its shade trees. Earlier experiments with sycamores had failed due to an infestation of caterpillars, causing trees to be cut down, according to one historian, faster than heads were guillotined in the French Revolution. Many grand elms would soon fall to disease. But in 1886, the noble urban trees were as much a part of the city’s identity as its faded wharves and colonial mansions.

More than the cost, Victorian citizens were troubled by the loss of balance and beauty to their town. According to the Chronicle:

"Thursday must have amounted to many thousands of dollars in this city and its immediate vicinity; and worse than this, it will be many years before the shade and garden trees can recover the symmetrical beauty they possessed last summer."

And similarly, from the Portsmouth Daily: "All of this sort of beautiful shade trees fared alike, the uppermost branches breaking off and crashing through the lower limbs, making sad havoc of their naturally symmetrical beauty."

CLICK TO CONTINUE ICE STORM

 

The photographer’s eye

Images captured by early commercial photographers like the Davis Brothers and Lafayette Newell show both the beauty and destruction of the 1886 ice storm. Many are collected in the archives of the Portsmouth Athenaeum. They also show us how little Portsmouth has changed in nearly 125 years. Victorian views of Richards Avenue, Middle and Pleasant streets and Market Square are easy to identify, even in photographs dominated by white snow. Such images, printed from glass plate negatives, offer astonishing detail.

So it was, ultimately, the advancing technology of photography that allows us to compare our energy-dependant era to our own Victorian past. Curiously, Portsmouth was among the first cities to experiment with the photographic craze. In February 1840, just one year after the photographic process was revealed in France, a "sketch" of the Universalist Church in Portsmouth was created "merely by the operation of rays of light." The photo, now lost, was among the first taken in the United States, and the church, formerly on Pleasant Street, no longer stands.

Although the editor of the Portsmouth Journal at first thought the French photographic process was a hoax, a local experiment changed his mind. Portsmouth painter Samuel P. Long demonstrated the "daguerreotype" process for the public at his studio in the Portsmouth Academy (now the Discover Portsmouth Center) on March 12, 1840. The image of the church taken from Auburn Street, although the building was only an inch wide in the photo, stunned Portsmouth residents.

And in that very first photograph, was the first recorded image of a humble Portsmouth tree. "An intervening elm tree with all its naked limbs and most minute twigs is perfectly delineated," the Journal reported. Photography, the newspaper announced with excitement, is the "greatest discovery of the age".

Portsmouth photographers like the Davis Brothers who followed have left us an astonishing record of a growing city – through good weather and bad – by which we can measure our own lives.

© 2009 by J. Dennis Robinson on SeacaostNH.com. All rights reserved.