The Ash Wednesday Storm of Nineteen Sixty Two
Near Chincoteague, Virginia
In early March of nineteen sixty two, a nor'easter parked itself off the mid Atlantic coast and would not leave. Because it lingered through five straight high tides, and because the moon happened to be pulling an unusually strong spring tide, the storm surge just kept climbing. It is remembered as the Ash Wednesday Storm, and it was one of the worst coastal disasters the East Coast has ever seen.
Along the shoreline it killed about forty people, injured over a thousand, and destroyed or damaged more than eighteen thousand homes. Here on Chincoteague, the sea simply took the island. Water rose about six feet deep along Main Street.
Homes flooded, boats were flung inland, and the thriving poultry farms were wiped out. The wild ponies of Assateague were caught in the open, and the fire company lost a portion of the herd to the drowning tides. In one story islanders still tell, the famous mare Misty, then pregnant, was sheltered inside a family's kitchen to ride out the flood.
She survived, and weeks later she gave birth to a foal that Marguerite Henry named Stormy, after the disaster. The storm reshaped the island and the barrier beach beyond it, a reminder that on a strip of sand between the bay and the open Atlantic, the ocean always has the final say.
