On the morning of May 19, 1780, parts of southern Connecticut fell
into complete darkness. The day before, the sun and the moon turned a bright
red. By mid-morning on the 19, the sky turned yellow, animals ran for shelter.
By noon, it was dark everywhere, not only in the Birmingham area
but across all of New England and parts of Canada as well.
Up in Hartford on that day, the legislature was meeting when
darkness fell across the
Old State House. Instead of adjourning, Abraham Davenport of Stamford, the House speaker, said, “Bring the candles” kept the
legislature working throughout the day to assure the general population that it
was not the end of the world.
To this day, no one is sure what caused the strange event but
science has more or less concluded that it was probably due to a volcanic
eruption, fire, or a meteor strike.
What has been ruled out is that it was not due to a solar
eclipse since there is an accurate record of when these occurred in the US and
most last for only a matter of minutes.
And recently the volcanic eruption theory has been tossed out of
the fold because there is no record of volcanic activity in 1780 nor have
modern scientists been able to find any evidence of one happening.
It is more than likely that the darkness was caused by a massive
forest fire somewhere in the middle of New England which was unseen since the
vast majority of New England’s population still lived along the shoreline. Soot
was spotted in the rivers. And Jeremy Belknap of Boston wrote in a letter that
the air had the "smell of a malt-house or a coal-kiln".
Since that time, William Corliss, the physicist and chronicler
of unexplained events, found 46 accounts of dark days around the world between
1091 and 1971 including one in 1950 that was definitely caused by forest fires
in Alberta, Canada causing parts of New England to go dark.