Local Historian And Scientists Celebrate 200th Anniversary Of Weston Meteorite

By Nancy K. Crevier

At 6 am on December 14, 1807, dawn had just begun to pull back the night sky, the jagged edge of light revealing what would be a mostly gray and cloudy morning. Farmers and shopkeepers in Newtown were just beginning to stir, their breath leaving white puffs in the air as they trudged from house to barn or shop. The few birds left to populate the early winter New England landscape would not yet have begun to chirp, and anyone up so early would have noticed that only a few tenacious oak leaves still clung to the trees, defiantly refusing to fall to the frosted ground.

The fireball that appeared in the sky just then would have startled anyone who looked up that morning, the bright flare illuminating the gray clouds as it flashed southward toward the earth. What would have been more startling, though, would have been the three thunderous crashes that followed, heard 50 miles away.

It was a tremendous sound that woke up not only those who lived in Stepney, Easton, then part of Weston, or any of the surrounding villages, but woke up the entire scientific community, as well.

The Weston Meteorite, the dramatic fireball that left local residents two centuries ago confused and apprehensive, and that rained debris over an area ten miles long by four miles wide, was a significant event among the scientific community, said Newtown historian Dan Cruson. He will join Monty Robeson of the New Milford Observatory, Dr Jim Greenwood of Wesleyan University, Dr Karl Turekian, curator of Peabody Museum at Yale University, and Dr Richard Binzel, head of planetary sciences at MIT, on the 200th anniversary of the Weston Meteorite strike, December 14, at 7:30 pm, in the Weston High School Auditorium to discuss the astronomical event.

“I’m excited enough about this to believe it is a regional phenomenon of interest,” said Mr Cruson. “It was mused upon and talked about by people in the area then, just like they are still doing so today.”

It was probably dismissed initially by those who first saw the meteor as it streamed across the dim morning sky as a lightning strike, said Mr Cruson. “This would be the first recorded meteorite strike in the United States,” he said. Remember, too, said Mr Cruson, the year 1807 was on the cusp of time between the first settlement of the American Colonies and present day. “People were still somewhat superstitious then, and needed some logical way to explain the flash and repercussion of the [meteorological] strike. Rocks just didn’t rain from the sky.” Even though there was not a sign of rain in the air, nor was it a logical time of year for a lightning storm, residents of the region were inclined to grasp at the idea of a violent lightning strike for lack of a better explanation, and to quell their anxieties.

As the day passed, however, Newtown residents would have heard strange stories of chunks of stone augered into fields and cows so unnerved that they leaped their fences into adjacent barnyards.

 

First Strike

Not everyone two centuries ago held on to superstition, however. Noted Yale mineralogist Benjamin Silliman and fellow professor James Kingsley came to Easton within days of hearing about the event. In his essay “The Weston Meteor: Which Fell In Easton,” written for the Newtown Historical Society’s Rooster’s Crow, Mr Cruson wrote that the men gathered eyewitness accounts and pieces of the stones in order to “make the first scientific examination of a meteor strike in the New World.”

Through his investigations, Mr Cruson went on to write, Mr Silliman “was able to discover seven fall sites grouped into three localities.”

The first strike, on the property of Merwin Burr, was originally thought to have been in southern Newtown on Botsford Hill. Research by Mr Robeson has disclosed, however, that the Burr home was actually in Huntington, today the town of Monroe.

The second explosion left rock fragments in the area of William Prince’s house on North Park Avenue in Easton, according to Mr Robeson’s research. A large hole in the barnyard there sheltered a 35-pound shard buried two feet in the ground. Other pieces were found days later about a half mile northwest of the Prince homestead, where a large chunk had smashed into a boulder, shattering into tiny bits.

Elijah Seeley of Hoyden Hill in Easton found the debris of the third explosion, according to Silliman’s account, verified by Mr Robeson. In Mr Seeley’s “well-turfed” pasture, wrote Mr Cruson in The Rooster’s Crow essay, “he found a mass of strange stone fragments. The falling rock had struck a sloping ridge of Micaceous Shist, the local bedrock, with such force that the glancing blow forced the rock into the ground to a depth of three feet….” Silliman estimated that the last stone weighed in the vicinity of 200 pounds.

Recovering the rock pieces from curious residents and collectors who were swiftly becoming certain that the heavy stones were of value was done by Mr Silliman and Mr Kingsley with “cajolery and purchase,” Mr Cruson said, and just enough stones were recovered for the two scientists to begin the process of determining the composition of the meteor. Stones made up of the same composition as the Weston Meteorite, 51.1 percent silex, 38 percent iron, 13 percent magnesia, 1.3 percent nickel, and 1 percent sulphur, had been identified in other strikes around the world, but “no stones have been found among the productions of this globe,” declared Mr Silliman and Mr Kingsley in their report.

Those conclusions that Mr Silliman determined from his analysis are what made this meteor strike 200 years ago important in the science world, said Mr Cruson. “First, he determined that the bodies did not originate from this earth, and second, that they came from a common, but unknown source.” Both of these thoughts were considered revolutionary at the time.

 

A Curious President

The conclusions, published as articles in the New Haven Herald and the Connecticut Courant and in his report in 1809 in Transactions of the American Philosophy Society became known to scientists all over the western world, including the scientifically curious president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, although he was a bit skeptical of the findings.

So phenomenal was this event, said Mr Cruson, that Nathaniel Bowditch, a famous mathematician and astronomer of the day, traveled by buggy to tour the area and gather his own information for publication in an 1809 American Academy of Arts and Sciences journal. “This was a huge undertaking,” explained Mr Cruson. “In 1807 most people still traveled by horseback and the roads were very undeveloped. Traveling by buggy was quite uncomfortable and would only have been undertaken for something very important.”

The findings of Mr Bowditch essentially corroborated those of Mr Silliman and Mr Kingsley and strengthened those conclusions that the rocks that fell from the heavens on December 14, 1807, in Weston, Conn., were of an unearthly origin.

“With the coming of [the Weston Meteorite’s] 200th anniversary,” said Mr Cruson, “attention is again focused on it because of its unique place in local history and the effect that it had on the population of this area. The meteor literally put Weston on the map, somewhat to the disgust of Easton, in which it actually fell.”