Note: Bangor Daily News archives dating back to 1911 are now available at newspapers.com. In order to fully access and search them, a separate subscription is required.
Growing up, just like the man in the nursery rhyme, I lived in a crooked house. By crooked, I don’t mean figuratively — I mean literally. The framing and basement supports of the 1815 former schoolhouse my family bought in 1986, located on Main Street in Searsport, were actually crooked.
The floorboards bowed visibly. If you put anything that wasn’t flat-bottomed on the dining room table, it would roll off. Our dog, a corgi, used to zoom around the house when she got excited, and if she misjudged the speed with which she’d take the corner from the kitchen into the dining room, she’d bail out and slide sideways down the slightly angled floor into the wall, like a stubby-legged bowling ball.
Why was it crooked? Because 100 years ago, on Sunday, May 22, 1921, our house was hit by a tornado — an extremely rare occurrence in Maine.
According to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, Maine averages two tornadoes per year, most of which do not hit populated areas. By comparison, Texas averages around 140 tornadoes a year. Kansas averages around 80. Maine, and the rest of New England, sometimes have years where not a single one touches down.
1921 was not one of those years. According to a story I found in our archives on newspapers.com that ran in the May 23, 1921, edition of the Bangor Daily News, the tornado was part of a major wind event that barreled through Maine, wreaking havoc from Portland, north to Waterville and then east to Penobscot Bay. It was one of those freak, once-in-a-century occurrences that uproots lives — something anyone who lived through 2020 can understand.
Nowhere in the state was hit as hard as Searsport during that wind event. Miraculously, no one died, and no serious injuries were reported.
“Nothing like it was ever known here,” read the BDN story that ran in the next day’s paper. “Calls were sent to Belfast for physicians, for at first it appeared as if many people must be buried in the ruins of the houses, but there were no very serious injuries.”
Ray Seamans, a Stockton Springs resident who has done extensive research on local history, said that the tornado initially touched down in the mid-afternoon that Sunday, somewhere in the vicinity of Prospect Street and Brock Road.
According to Seamans, it was an unseasonably hot day. At around 1:30 p.m. black clouds began to pile up and thunder began to rumble. A storm was coming — a big one.
“My uncle Florian, who was about 13 years old at the time, was walking back from Maple Grove Campground on the Brock Road, when he actually saw the tornado touch down,” Seamans said. “He jumped down into a ditch and laid down to protect himself. He’d have been a casualty if he hadn’t.”
Within minutes, the tornado had reached Main Street, where it laid into several homes, including 51 West Main St., now the site of Horowitz Chiropractic, and the Havener house across the street at 50 West Main. The Havener house was completely leveled, though thankfully no one was home at the time. A new home was later rebuilt at the site.
My house, next door to the Havener house, was at the time also thought to be beyond repair. According to Seamans, the house was twisted sideways 5 feet or more off its foundation, and an attached barn was destroyed.
L.M. Sargent, its owner at the time, managed to fix it up enough to keep living there, though he was badly injured after being thrown against a wall during the storm. He never fully fixed the framing, and neither did any of the house’s subsequent owners until we moved in 65 years later.
After the destruction on Main Street, the tornado cut through the fields leading down to the shoreline, touching down again between Steamboat Avenue and Mosman Park, where it damaged several more buildings. It then went out into the harbor, causing a huge water spout, before finally dissipating near Mack Point.
It took town residents months to clean up the felled trees and destroyed buildings — and that was in the days before chainsaws and excavators.
Searsport in the 1920s was already experiencing big changes, and a natural disaster only hastened it. Throughout the 19th century, the town was renowned worldwide for the masted ships that were produced by its shipyards, and the generations of Searsport-bred sea captains that helmed ships across the globe.
However, by the early 20th century the age of sail had come to an end, as steam-powered cargo ships had become the main means of transporting goods across the ocean. With that, Searsport’s prominence in the global maritime industry mostly ended, and tall ships haven’t sailed from Searsport in more than a century — though the Penobscot Marine Museum has kept that history alive since it was founded in Searsport in 1936.
The tornado wasn’t the only destruction that my house has seen in its long history. In 1998, during the ice storm, a tree branch fell on a power line leading to our house, causing a short that caused an electrical fire in our basement. Firefighters put it out in short order, but the smoke smell lingered for months. The psychological damage took even longer to repair.
Last year, as the town was set to celebrate the 175th anniversary of its founding, the festivities were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 has killed 21 people in Waldo County since March 2020, and sickened nearly 1,000. The anniversary celebration has been rescheduled for this summer.
The exact year might not be right, but there’s much more worth celebrating than just a date on a calendar.
Not long after I’d headed off to college after graduating from Searsport District High School in 2000, my parents did some renovations, including hiring contractors to jack up the foundation so it would finally lay flat. Our house is no longer crooked. Only memories, photos and old newspaper stories of what happened 100 years ago remain.
Somehow, after more than two centuries, my house is still standing. And somehow, after one of the scariest years most of us have ever known, most of us are still standing — or rebuilding, if we got knocked down. It’s going to take a lot more than a tornado, a fire or a pandemic to keep us down.
