I had thought that no-one had gone out to Lovecraft’s beloved Seekonk with a camera in the great storm of 1938, but here’s the university boathouse half submerged…

The same boathouse earlier in the same year…

The great storm also downed old elm trees on College St., which had stood in front of the fraternity house that Lovecraft could see the back of from his study window at No. 66. The reporting of this news revealed a snippet of the street’s lore that Lovecraft probably knew of. The trees on the street were thought to have been brought from England in the clipper ship era. The storm probably weakened them and they were naturally failing anyway after so long, and thus in the late 1940s the Brown alumni began a robust programme of revivification and replanting of the elms.