Mud Season Speaker Series - Thirty-Eight: The Hurricane That Transformed New England

Presented by Stephen Long
In partnership and taking place at the Brooks Memorial Library
Free Event

BEEC and the Brooks Memorial Library invite you to a series of programs based on the Vermont Reads 2025-26 selection, The Light Pirate. The themes of the book and our program series are climate resilience through community and the unstoppable power of the natural world.

A hurricane will never surprise us again. But that’s what happened to the people of New England on September 21, 1938. Without any warning, the most destructive weather event ever to hit the Northeast pummeled the coast and blasted its way to Vermont and New Hampshire with torrential rain, flooding, and sustained winds over 100 miles per hour.

Stephen Long tells the story of New England’s Katrina, focusing on the devastation to the region’s forests and the daunting challenge facing New Englanders still in the throes of the Great Depression. His presentation is richly illustrated with archival photos of storm damage and the unprecedented recovery operation, making the storm and its aftermath come alive. A journalist and co-founder of Northern Woodlands magazine, Stephen Long is the author of Thirty-Eight: The Hurricane that Transformed New England.

For more than 30 years, Stephen Long has been exploring and writing about New England’s forests. Learning from experts in various forest-relatedBlack and white headshot of Stephen Long wearing a black sweater and white collared shirt. disciplines, he jumped into forest stewardship with the zeal of the newly converted. Before long, he was so taken with the world of forestry, conservation, and wildlife that he and a forester friend started a magazine called Northern Woodlands. Spending time with loggers, birders, other landowners, foresters, hunters, and botanists, he saw the common vision shared by all: this forest has tremendous value, both economic and ecological, and we should do everything we can to keep it intact.

After 17 years at the helm of Northern Woodlands, he was longing to bring his full attention back to his own writing. After leaving the magazine he founded, Long was awarded a Bullard Fellowship at Harvard Forest in 2011. In his fellowship year, he began research on the 1938 hurricane, New England’s most devastating weather event. His own forest in Corinth had been blown down in 1938, a fate shared by Harvard Forest and by 30,000 families. His book, Thirty-Eight, tells the story of how the people and forests recovered from this cataclysmic event. As with all of his work, Thirty-Eight attempts to shed further light on the age-old theme of man’s place in nature.