The Search: An Account of the Fort Road Tragedy

The Search

An Account of the

Fort Road Tragedy

By Paul Johnson Moore

Published by Roderick W. Moore at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Descendants of Paul Johnson Moore

Distributor: Roderick W. Moore

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Cover Photo: Fort Road after the 1938 Hurricane

Table of Contents

Preface

Foreword

Fort Road

September 1938

September 21

September 22

September 23

September 24

September 25

September 26

September 27

September 28

September 29

September 30

October 1

October 2

October 3

October 4

October 5

The Last Four Days (Fred Moore’s Account)

Photographs

Preface- This book was written by my paternal grandfather, Paul Johnson Moore, shortly after the Great Hurricane of 1938. It first appeared in print, however, fifty years later, when my grandfather was almost 87 years old. Two subsequent printings occurred in 1990 and 1994, thanks in large part to Paul’s children.

This book relates the tragic tale of my grandfather’s efforts, together with his father and stepbrother, to locate his sister (my great-aunt), Havila, and his stepmother, Jessie Mary Jackly Hurst Moore, after they went missing in the 1938 hurricane. Together with 40 other houses on Fort Road in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, the Moores’ cottage was swept into Little Narragansett Bay by the howling winds of the hurricane. The hurricane carried its human and structural toll over a mile across the Bay, a testament to the extent of nature’s fury that day. Sadly, the Moore women lost their lives just a few days before my great-grandfather, Fred W. Moore, had planned to close down the cottage for the season and bring back his women folks to their year-round home in New York City. The storm also took the life of my grandfather’s first cousin, Louise Presbrey Breckinridge, at nearby Charlestown, Rhode Island. My father, then six years old, had been at the Fort Road cottage just a few days before the hurricane struck.

Watch Hill has always been a magical place for my family, and we maintain a connection to it to this day. My great-grandfather and his family summered in the Fort Road cottage for about two decades until the hurricane destroyed it on the afternoon of September 21, 1938. A few years later, my grandfather, the author, purchased another home in Watch Hill, which he kept until 1968. I grew up hearing the stories about my father’s teenage adventures in and around this house during the Watch Hill summers of his youth. Amazingly, my mother and her family – many years before my parents married – also spent several summers with the Moores in the very same house, thanks to the friendship between my parents’ families in Schenectady, New York. In recent years, my parents and I have wistfully driven past that home, regretting my grandfather’s decision to sell it so many years ago. My grandfather’s daughter, Jane Buffum Moore, resides to this day in Avondale, in Westerly, just about a mile from where the body of her aunt Havila was found.

As a child, I recall hearing stories about the hurricane that occurred 26 years before my birth. Only in recent years, however, have I come to learn more about the ancestors who perished and about the anguish that struck my grandfather’s family. My grandfather writes little about the main characters of the book – including himself, his father, and the victims. I hope in a future edition to add more biographical details about the book’s dramatis personae, drawing upon the genealogical research that my grandfather himself initiated and which my father and I have continued.

Perhaps aware of the momentous events he would witness, my grandfather brought along a movie camera, certainly a rarity in those days, when he drove down from Schenectady in September 1938 to launch The Search. Parts of the film he took were featured in the 2001 PBS documentary, American Experience: The Hurricane of ’38.

This book is being published mainly to contribute to the study of the 1938 Hurricane and its victims. But I have an ulterior motive as well. When my father first showed me the Moore family plots at Swan Point Cemetery in Providence in 2003, I was struck by the fact that there were no grave markers for Jessie or Havila, the two Moore women who lost their lives in the 1938 hurricane. Any proceeds earned from the sale of this book will be directed toward purchasing gravestones that will ensure that Jessie and Havila are remembered by future generations.

Please contact me with questions, corrections, and comments at rod7834@yahoo.com.

Roderick W. Moore

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

October 2011

Foreword — About two months after the hurricane of September 21, 1938, I wrote down a few notes about The Search for my sister at Watch Hill, Rhode Island. It was my intention to expand those notes into a brief account to send to my relatives. Once begun, I soon found this meant far more to me than a mere answering of questions. Some have asked me how I remembered all the details — my difficulty has not been remembering. Perhaps writing about The Search will get it off my mind, though I fear nothing ever can.

I should be ungrateful if, at the very beginning, I did not express my appreciation to the many people of Westerly, Rhode Island, Pawcatuck, Connecticut, and elsewhere who proved friends in need. They gave their aid freely and unselfishly. Without their help The Search would have been hopeless.

Paul Johnson Moore

Schenectady, New York

December 1938

Now almost 50 years later, we have decided to publish this little story on the anniversary of the hurricane. In reading it again even after the lapse of all these years, I can still visualize the happenings as if they were taking place right now. They are indelibly etched in my memory.

The name Havilah is rather unusual. Just before my sister's birth a book called The Mountain Girl, in which the heroine was named Havilah, was very popular. The name itself appears in the Bible as the land of Havilah, where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good.

Westerly, Rhode Island

September 1988

The Search

An Account of the

Fort Road Tragedy

Fort Road — Moving water created the sandy beaches of Rhode Island's South County. The running water from the melting glacier carried its accumulation of earth and sand, gravel and boulders into the sea, there to be ground into ever finer sand by the untiring surf and formed into beaches by the waves and the currents of the ocean, the rivers, and the bays. For three hundred years people who love moving water have found happiness in South County by the sea.

I know no other beach like Napatree, whose narrow crescent is an island-tying bar of ocean sand thrown up a few feet above the sea by the surf. The bar connects the diminishing island once called Nap-o'-Trees with the cliffed headland that is Watch Hill and separates the Atlantic Ocean from Little Narragansett Bay. The Naps were heavily wooded knolls when they were named, but have been bare of trees for more than a hundred years, and even the knolls themselves are being relentlessly worn away by the sea and rebuilt by the tidal currents into the sandy spit appropriately named Sandy Point, which is gradually growing toward Stonington on the Connecticut shore.

In the year 1614, Adrian Block, the Dutch navigator after whom Block Island was named, sailed past the Naps and around Sandy Point into Little Narragansett Bay (probably causing great consternation among the Indians on the shore). Exactly two hundred years later, the British fleet arrived off the Naps and bombarded the village of Stonington, thus showing how civilization had advanced in that brief time. There was a cottage then on the Naps, but it escaped bombardment.

At the time of the Spanish-American War, the yellow journals had worked up the people of the Atlantic seacoast to such hysteria that they actually expected the Spanish fleet to bombard New York City. So, shortly thereafter, three concrete forts were built on the western half of Napatree to help guard the entrance to Long Island Sound. The forts have been abandoned for many years, now forming a playground for children, and at times providing an outlet for the talent of those adults who find it mentally stimulating to write their names or more important things on the walls. The road to the forts ran along the bay side of Napatree, and this whole area came to be known locally as Fort Road, rather than Napatree.

My family bought a cottage on Fort Road twenty years before the hurricane, and in those twenty years I learned to love Fort Road as no other place on earth. To those people who must be artificially entertained, Fort Road was a desolate waste of sand, but to a true Fort Roader it was everything a place could be. Salt air, sunshine, and surf. Air blown over a thousand miles of open sea. Sunshine on sand and water from glorious sunrise over the ocean to gorgeous sunset over the bay. Ceaseless, ever-changing surf that sometimes shook the earth, but lulled one to sleep at night with its rhythm. Night at Watch Hill. Foggy nights, stormy nights, clear starry nights, moonlit nights, each worth treasuring in memory. The Watch Hill Light would come on just at dusk, four white flashes, two red flashes, flashing white and red all night long, sixty feet above the water. It was an old friend winking at us across three-quarters of a mile of sea. The moon seemed to rise from the ocean beyond the lighthouse point, and as it climbed the night sky it would set the sea on fire with moonbeams. This was Moonlight Bay, if there ever was such a place. On clear or moonlight nights alike the horizon glowed with lights, lights on passing ships, on flashing buoys marking the reef passages, and distant Montauk Light, seventeen miles due south on the eastern tip of Long Island. On clear nights the stars so crowded the sky it seemed they must fall. They were so near that if none fell we could surely reach up and pull them down, although when we tried they were just barely out of reach. Friends visiting there for the first time looked out over the ocean for the Great Dipper and the North Star, but as they were looking to the south, they seldom had much success. I guess we have to know where to look for what we seek.

Fort Road was a place of freedom, a place for many moods. There was solitude in the walk out to the forts. There was exploration on rocky Napatree Point beyond the last fort where the ocean had worn away the Naps. At low tide the pools among the rocks were full of marine life: barnacles, snails, rock crabs, starfish, mussels, and seaweed. There were occasional tautog, the blackfish, in the water off these rocks, and always the voracious cunners. The rotting hulk of a ship was beached here, immovably settled into the sand. There was always something to arouse interest and stir the imagination.

To live on Fort Road was to live as near the water as one could. All of its three dozen cottages were actually a stone's throw from the ocean and were protected by low seawalls, which could be washed by a heavy sea at high tide. The cottages were only a few feet back from the seawalls, and this nearness to the sea was their fatal charm.

We talked about the hurricane long before it came.

When only three and a half years old, I had spent four summers at Pleasant View, the next beach east of Watch Hill and now called by its Indian name of Misquamicut meaning salmon. The ocean made such an impression on me then that I can remember vividly one scene just as though I were seeing it now. Evidently the women had talked of the storm to come for some time, for I remember standing on the front porch and looking way out to the sea, then pointing my finger at the biggest wave in sight and saying, Mother, is that a tidal wave? The sea that day was the bluest blue, and that wave wore a cap of white.

Charlestown Beach is about ten miles east of Watch Hill, and we summered there every year from 1907 to 1915 except for the summer we spent in Maine, and one brief excursion to Block Island. There were great dunes covered with beach grass in front of our cottage all through the earlier years, but when we arrived early in June one year we found the dunes all gone and the cottage right on the beach. The next beach to the west toward Watch Hill was Quonochontaug, and when several other boys