The Dark Day

Yesterday our sky was filled with a haze and the smell of smoke. For a long time, there was no explanation. Later in the day we heard that it was caused by a forest fire in the Boundary Waters between Canada and Minnesota. That is 400 miles away from here.

The first time I heard of such an occurrence was more than 30 years ago while reading the Revolutionary War pension file of Owen Briggs. In it, he wrote that he had left his home in Connecticut that day to fight for our Country’s independence. All those years later he knew that the exact day he left his Connecticut home was May 19, 1780. That day is known as the Dark Day in New England because from Maine to New Jersey the sky was as dark as night in the middle of the day.

It was many years later when I finally found a source that explained what the Dark Day was most likely caused by a prairie fire. Of course, the smell of smoke was not unusual as all cooking was done over an open flame and houses were heated by a constant fire in the fireplace.

Today you can search Dark Day on the Internet and find references to it immediately. Wikipedia lists a sources that concluded that the fire was located in Ontario, Canada. There was so much smoke in the air that by noon it was dark as night. The following day, the sun was red and the sky yellow.

Another source explains that when a fire does not kill a tree and the tree later grows that scar marks are left in the growth rings.1 This makes it possible to approximate the date of a past fire. Researchers examining the scar damage in Ontario, Canada and can now attribute the Dark Day to a large fire in the area that is today occupied by Algonquin Provincial Park.2

It is amazing that all this information is available at your fingertips in minutes. However, can you even begin to imagine what the colonists must have thought as an ordinary day suddenly took on an ominous feel as the sky turned dark as night?

1. "A Brief Introduction to Fire History Reconstruction". 2005-07-11. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/impd/impd_data_intro.html.

2. McMurry, Erin R.; Stambaugh, Michael C.; Guyette, Richard P.; Dey, Daniel C. (2007-07-03). "Fire scars reveal source of New England’s 1780 Dark Day". International Journal of Wildland fire 16 (3): 266–270. doi:10.1071/WF05095. http://www.publish.csiro.au/paper/WF05095.htm.