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" (See pages 234-246.)
Whittier has commemorated it in the poem, "Abraham Davenport:"
"'Twas on a May day of the far old year
Seventeen hundred eighty, that there fell
Over the bloom and sweet life of the spring,
Over the fresh earth and the heaven of noon,
A horror of great darkness....
"Birds ceased to sing, and all the barnyard fowls
Roosted; the cattle at the pasture bars
Lowed, and looked homeward; bats on leathern wings
Flitted abroad; the sounds of labor died;
Men prayed, and women wept; all ears grew sharp
To hear the doom blast of the trumpet shatter
The black sky."
The words of the poet are substantiated by the plain prose of the
dictionary maker. In the department explanatory of "Noted Names,"
Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (edition 1883) says:
"_The Dark Day_, May 19, 1780--so called on account of a
remarkable darkness on that day extending over all New
England.... The obscuration began about ten o'clock in the
morning, and continued till the middle of the next night, but
with difference of degree and duration in different places.


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