08/23/2026
“That Awful Day”
Rising up from a bed of untamed grass, the schist gravestone of Susanna Brown (d. 1786) stands resolute against a verdant background. A typical early production of esteemed gravestone carver Elijah Sikes, though backdated by five or six years, Susanna met an untimely fate when she was “kill’d by the fall of a house” during the August 23rd, 1786 Sturbridge-Killingly Tornado, the storm’s sole fatality. A bespoke epitaph, likely penned by a member of the community, quaintly tells how Susanna “was taken out of time”
“That awful day, the hurricane came
When I was in my prime
Blew down the house, and I was flung
And taken out of time.”
It was shortly after 5pm on Wednesday, August 23rd, 1786, that the skies high above central Massachusetts and northeast Connecticut darkened to an inky black, and from their base, a funnel formed. Touching down near Sturbridge, Worcester County, Massachusetts, a tornado—or in colonial vernacular, “hurricane"—quickly showed incredible strength as it tracked southeast over the Connecticut line, striking the communities of Woodstock and Pomfret in Windham County. Said to have “tossed stone walls into a state of disarray,” and “unroofed more than a hundred buildings, indicative of a “significant” tornado (EF2+) on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, it was further south at Killingly that the most damage was done. Here, the newly constructed house of Othniel Brown was “blown entirely to pieces” with the boards, timbers, and furniture carried a “considerable distance.” A miracle that anyone, let alone the six people inside, managed to escape, unfortunately Otheniel’s 23-year-old wife, Susanna, wasn’t so lucky, as while escaping, the house fell upon her, ending her earthly existence.
Aspinwall Cemetery, Putnam, Windham County, Connecticut | July 14th, 2026
Information sourced from “Historic Storms of New England,” by Sidney Perley (1891).
