New England's Titanic: The Tragic Story of the Steamship Portland & the Thanksgiving Weekend Storm of 1898

 It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving off the New England coast.  November 26, 1898.

The sea is calm and temperatures are seasonably cool and crisp.  Weather stations all along the eastern seaboard note nothing out of the ordinary that day except for one thing: the color of the sky.  The sky that evening is yellow.  It is glowing with an ominous and almost surreal luminescence as the sun begins to set.

Sailing Master, Joseph Kemp, employed aboard a steamship in Boston Harbor noted that the yellow sky off the coast of Massachusetts on November 26, 1898 looked like, “The greasiest evening you ever saw.”

On that “greasy” evening two low pressure fronts, one charging eastward from the Great Lakes, and the other, a warm weather system moving northward from the Gulf of Mexico are about to collide off the Massachusetts coast and create one of the most ferocious and destructive nor’easters in American history.

Late 19th century forecasters know through barometric readings that some sort of storm is headed their way.  They know that over the last forty-eight hours the upper midwest received nearly a foot snow during the Thanksgiving holiday, but what they don’t know, what the technology of the time gives them no way of ever possibly knowing, is that not one but two massive storm-fronts are about collide and slam into the shores of New England at the same time!

Before all is said and done, the storm that hit New England on that Thanksgiving weekend in 1898, will claim 450 lives.  It will sink an  estimated 150 vessels both in harbor and out at sea and create storm surges over ten feet high along the shores of Massachusetts.  The damage and destruction wrought by the Thanksgiving nor’easter of 1898 will block the harbor in Martha’s Vineyard with debris for a full six months.  It will completely reroute the course of the North River in Scituate, Massachusetts, and cause flooding so severe that residents will travel along streets via canoe in downtown Boston.

What will become known as the “Portland Gale” or the “Great Thanksgiving Nor’easter of 1898” will be remembered as the most intense snowstorm to strike the New England coastline for 80 years until finally being passed in severity by the Blizzard of 1978.

Damage from the Storm of 1898

Years later, when recalling the force of the Portland Gale of 1898, Lieutenant Worth G. Ross, a Massachusetts Naval Station Inspector remembered that, “The wild fury of the driving snow continued without abatement until late in the afternoon. (November 27, 1898) The force and roar of the tempest was so appalling as to be indescribable.”

Not only the severity, but also, perhaps, the timing of the Portland Gale of 1898 is what has kept this particular storm so etched in New England’s collective memory.

Only thirty-five years earlier in 1863, Abraham Lincoln through a Presidential decree had made Thanksgiving a federally observed nationwide holiday each November.  At the time, in the midst of the seemingly endless bloodletting of the American Civil War, Lincoln felt that it was important that the nation take a moment to pause and reflect on all that we as Americans had to be thankful for and to pray to God for a speedy and victorious end to the War Between the States.  However, for hundreds of years prior, a Day of Thanksgiving had been a locally celebrated regional holiday throughout all of New England each November.  It could accurately be said that no single day was as important to families throughout the New England states in 1898 as Thanksgiving Day.

Therefore, on the weekend of November 26-27, 1898, at the exact moment when the great storm hit, tens of thousands of New Englanders were traveling north, south, east and west to return home from visiting their loved ones and the preferred method of travel for most in the year 1898 was via steamship.

Abraham Lincoln's Thanksgiving Day Proclamation

        One such steamship was the S.S Portland.

The steamship Portland left India Wharf in Boston Harbor bound for Portland, Maine, on the ominous evening of November 26, 1898.

Onboard the Portland that evening were approximately 200 passengers and crew, most traveling back home after having celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday in Boston.  The steamship Portland would never make it back to its home port in Maine and all souls aboard the ship would perish at sea as a result of the great Thanksgiving nor’easter of 1898.

The storm, forever after, would be remembered as the Portland Gale in honor of that ill-fated steamship and locals would come to refer to the S.S. Portland as the “Titanic of New England”.

The Portland was a sidewheel oceangoing steamship.  The ship had been built in 1889 with the express purpose of providing passenger service between Portland, Maine and Boston.  Prior to being lost at sea in the great blizzard of 1898, the Portland had made the journey between Maine and Massachusetts hundreds of times.

Last know photograph of the S.S. Portland

Sometime on November 27, 1898 somewhere off the rocky coast of Cape Ann in northeastern Massachusetts, caught in a raging blizzard at sea, the Portland was lost at sea with all hands aboard.  For over a century the exact location of the shipwreck of the S.S. Portland remained a mystery.

As reported in the San Francisco Call (of all newspapers!) on Wednesday, November 30, 1898, the only inkling that the public had of the true fate or final resting place of the S.S. Portland was due to the few bloated corpses that began to wash ashore on the 28th of November.

As the Call reported on November 30, 1898, “Last night at midnight a body was  found on shore wearing a lifebelt marked STEAMER PORTLAND OF PORTLAND.  A gold watch in his pocket had stopped at exactly 10 o’clock.”

Even the exact number of passengers aboard the ship was unknown at the time since the only known passenger manifest from November 26, 1898 had gone down to the bottom of the Atlantic with the Portland and no one had survived the disaster to give even a semi-accurate estimate of all who had been onboard.  

Days after the disaster the New York Times reported simply that, “The Steamer Portland bound for Portland went down off of Cape Cod Sunday morning.  Every man, woman and child on board at the time of the disaster was drowned.”

Only 18 bodies ever washed ashore in the days after the shipwreck and accounts of the true death toll from the Portland disaster in newspapers at the time varied wildly, though most historians today agree that about 192 or 193 individuals lost their lives aboard the S.S. Portland, making it the worst maritime disaster in New England’s history prior to the year 1900.

Boston Herald Headline November 1898

It wasn’t until 2002, by using ROV’s or Remotely Operated underwater Vehicles, that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was able to finally document and photograph the true location of the wreck of the Portland lying at the bottom of the Atlantic nearly 500 feet below the surface off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts.

In 2005 the site of the wreck of the steamship Portland was added to the National Register of Historic Places.  And then, in 2008, five local scuba divers became the first people to ever successfully reach the site at the bottom of the Atlantic.  The divers found a treasure trove of late 19th century artifacts, though unfortunately, they were unable to locate any human remains since the below decks portion of the ship was considered too unsafe for further exploration.

In fact, the wreck of the Portland itself is so far underwater, lying at a depth of nearly 500 feet, that divers due to the extreme pressure, are only able to safely explore the site at all for increments of no more than ten minutes at a time.

Today, almost all of those who tragically went down to the bottom of the ocean with the steamship Portland, the Titanic of New England, remain buried in their watery grave, perhaps fittingly, never to be disturbed.  And just as fittingly, the Great Thanksgiving Weekend Storm of 1898 that ravaged the coast of New England well over a century ago is now remembered forever as “The Portland Gale”.