Bring in the Candles

The Dark Day

On May 19, 1780, the sky over New England went dark in the middle of the day. By noon it was black enough to need candles indoors, and many were sure the Day of Judgment had come. In the Connecticut Council, as members moved to adjourn and go home to meet the end, Abraham Davenport of Stamford refused. By Timothy Dwight's account, he said the Day of Judgment was either coming or it was not; if not, there was no reason to adjourn, and if so, he would rather be found doing his duty. He asked only that candles be brought. They were, and the Council worked on until the darkness lifted.

Nearly a century later, John Greenleaf Whittier set the moment into verse as "Abraham Davenport," first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1866. You can read it in full on the Stamford Historical Society's page.

Shedding Light on the Dark Day

My dad loved this story, and for most of my growing up he said the darkness had been an eclipse, so every time an eclipse came around he found his way back to Abraham and the candles. It became one of his dependable jokes, the kind you see coming a mile off and laugh at anyway.

The eclipse is the one explanation that does not hold up. By 1780 astronomers could predict eclipses years ahead, down to the hour, so an eclipse would have been expected rather than mistaken for Judgment. An eclipse is also brief and happens only at a new moon, while the Dark Day's gloom lasted from late morning into the next night, when the moon rose red. The likeliest cause, confirmed much later by tree-ring research, was smoke from enormous forest fires to the northwest, thickened by fog and low cloud.

A Modern Take

It stopped being only history for me in high school at Trinity Episcopal School in Richmond, when we lost a stretch of days to bad weather and power outages. My dad, never one to waste a parallel, emailed my advisor, conveniently, a family friend fluent in his humor, with a link about Abraham Davenport suggesting we should all just whip out our candles, like Abraham, and get back to learning. My advisor wrote back laughing that this was surely a fire hazard and most definitely not something the school would approve in 2008. Picture being the one student whose father is lobbying against the snow day while everyone else is already mentally sledding. He was undeterred, because the point was never popularity. The point was that the work was still there to be done, candles or no candles.

What Martha Saw

My grandmother, Martha (Orr) Davenport, was no stranger to hard work herself. She met my grandfather, Warwick, at UVA in the 1930s, he in law school and she earning a master's in English literature, decades before the University admitted women as undergraduates. So when she said the thing she noticed in the Davenports was a plain, steady willingness to keep working, she was speaking as someone who knew the work firsthand. She remarked that she was impressed that Abraham’s legacy of hard work and an eagerness to meaningfully contribute to society was still in full force.

Dark Day (1934), a mural by Stamford artist Delos Palmer depicting Abraham Davenport before Governor Jonathan Trumbull during the Dark Day of May 19, 1780. Commissioned through the W.P.A. federal art program and painted for the courtroom of the Old Town Hall on Atlantic Street, Stamford, Connecticut. Photograph by Steve Castagneto, Academy of Information Technology, Stamford. Courtesy of the Stamford Historical Society.