Bringing Down the Colonel by Patricia Miller

She crossed paths with the storm’s original landfall near Havre de Grace, Maryland, early on the morning of the thirtieth, just as the oystermen and the market duck hunters with their Chesapeake Bay retrievers would have been setting out to provision the restaurants and markets of Baltimore and Washington with those mainstays of the nineteenth-century diet.įor Jane Tucker-Jennie to her fractious family and her friends-the rushed journey southward was a desperate gamble to break free from the rut of low-paying jobs and lecherous bosses that had come to define her life as part of the first generation of women to foray into the formerly forbidden-and largely male-realm of office work.

She took a ferry across the Hudson River to the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in Jersey City, dashed off a letter to her sister as she sat in the ladies’ waiting room, and then boarded the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad’s midnight express to Washington. By the time she reached New York, the full force of the blizzard had descended on Boston, burying it under snow. As the tempest gathered strength, a young woman hurriedly made her way from Boston down its path, as if the swirling storm were itself drawing her southward.

A fierce gale and snow pounded the eastern seaboard into the next day, whipping Atlantic City with winds that reached sixty miles an hour, and wrecking the schooner Aberdeen off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts. On January 29, 1894, a depression formed east of the southern Atlantic coast, moved inland over the Chesapeake Bay, and traveled northward, where it collided with another area of low pressure coming from the west and exploded into one of the most severe coastal storms the region had seen in years.

Bringing Down the Colonel by Patricia Miller