September 6, 1667: The Dreadful Hurricane of 1667
First sighted off the Lesser Antilles on September 1, 1667, the “Dreadful Hurricane of 1667” remains one of the most devastating storms in Virginia’s history. The hurricane moved through the Outer Banks of North Carolina on September 6th, and made landfall just outside of the Jamestown Colony. The massive storm lashed at the colony for twenty-four hours, and violent winds ripped through the settler’s homes, farms, and livestock. Unfortunately for the colony, this was only the first stage of their disaster.
Colonial Secretary Thomas Ludwell wrote to Virginia Governor Lord William Berkeley stating, “It was accompanied with a most violent rain but no thunder. The night of it was the most dismal time I ever knew or heard of, for the wind and rain raised so confused a noise, mixed with the continued cracks of failing houses…..The waves were impetuously beaten against the shores and by that violence forced and as it was crowded into all creeks, rivers and bays to that prodigious height that it hazarded the drowning of many people who lived not in sight of the rivers, yet were then forced to climb to the top of their houses to keep themselves above water.” The secretary estimated the storm destroyed 10,000 homes, and the crops, the lifeblood of the colony, sustained severe damage.
Coupling the battered the colony’s woes was the rain that followed. The hurricane passed, but heavy rains continued for another twelve days and nights. Scholars suspect a second hurricane, stalled near the coastline, deluged the colony in the aftermath of the first storm, and Secretary Ludwell wrote that the colony was “reduced to a very miserable condition.”
The sustained, intense, rainfall devastated the colony’s remaining crops, and records show that Jamestown produced less than one-quarter of the previous year’s harvest.