The Setup

The Perfect Conditions for Catastrophe

September 21 was the autumnal equinox. On that date each year, the gravitational pull of both the sun and the moon align to produce some of the highest tides of the year. The hurricane was set to arrive at almost exactly astronomical high tide — a catastrophic coincidence that would dramatically amplify the storm surge for every community on the South Shore.

It had also rained heavily for the four preceding days across Long Island. The ground was saturated. The trees, their root systems already loosened by waterlogged soil, would have far less resistance to the wind than they normally would. The stage, as one meteorologist later noted, could not have been set more perfectly for disaster.

At 1:00 PM, the storm was still east of Atlantic City, where it tore up part of the Boardwalk. At 2:30 PM — less than ninety minutes later — it made landfall on Long Island.

The Afternoon

Bohemia Under Siege

While coastal towns to the south battled a storm surge that would reach fifteen feet and carve twelve new inlets into the South Shore, Bohemia battled the wind.

The roar was described by survivors throughout the region as sounding like a freight train that would not pass — not the rumble of a single train but the sustained, unbroken thunder of a hundred trains, for an hour, then two. Telephone and power lines went down almost immediately. Roads were blocked within minutes. Bohemia was cut off from the outside world.

The massive oak and black locust trees lining Bohemia Road and Ocean Avenue — many of them standing since the community’s Czech founders planted them in the 1850s and 1860s — were uprooted or snapped. Trees that had been landmarks for three generations, that had shaded the back porches of Czech-American families for eighty years, were gone in minutes.

For the children inside the Ocean Avenue Schoolhouse, it was a terrifying afternoon. Teachers worked to keep students calm as the building shuddered. Outside, roads became impassable tunnels of fallen debris, trapping residents in their homes and delaying any attempt to retrieve children from school.

Farmers suffered particularly. Poultry coops were destroyed. Accounts from across the South Shore describe hens simply vanishing into the gale — roofs peeled off in an instant, livestock gone in a deafening swirl of debris. The late-season harvest, one of the few sources of cash income during the Depression, was damaged or destroyed. Salt-laden winds added insult to injury, burning the potato fields as surely as any blight.

The Cleanup

The Year of the Saw

When the sun rose on September 22, Bohemia was unrecognizable. The property lines that had been defined for generations by specific trees — “the big oak at the corner of Sokol Road,” “the three locusts at the fence” — were gone. Landmarks used to navigate the village had vanished overnight.

The ground of the entire Northeast was covered in fallen timber on a scale almost impossible to comprehend. Across New England and Long Island, an estimated 275 million trees had been knocked down — roughly five times the region’s entire annual timber harvest, brought down in a single five-hour window. Fire danger was extreme; a single spark in the debris fields could ignite a catastrophe.

President Franklin Roosevelt acted quickly. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were mobilized within days. Fifty CCC camps and approximately 15,000 WPA workers were deployed across the region to strip downed trees of branches and reduce the fire danger. To create a market for the suddenly enormous surplus of timber, the federal government established the Northeastern Timber Salvage Administration (NETSA), backed by a $15 million loan and operational by November 14, 1938.

NETSA purchased logs from more than 13,000 landowners, set up 246 wet storage sites (ponds and lakes where logs could be preserved from rot and insects), and worked to sell the lumber into a Depression-era market that had little appetite for it. In an ironic blessing, the cleanup effort provided months of paid work at a time when jobs were scarce. The standard wage of $2 per day, modest as it was, helped families throughout the South Shore survive the winter of 1938–39. By the summer of 1939, much of what the hurricane had destroyed had already been rebuilt.

In Bohemia, farmers discovered an unexpected resource in the storm’s wreckage. The community’s abundant Black Locust trees — prized since the 19th century for their rot resistance and planted throughout the village — had been felled in great numbers. Black Locust is one of the densest hardwoods in North America, nearly indestructible when used for fence posts. The sawyers who moved through Bohemia in 1938 and 1939 processed this timber into posts, rails, and lumber. Some of those fence posts likely still stand in local backyards today — a silent, eighty-year-old testament to the wildest afternoon in Long Island history.

The Community

Bohemia’s Czech Community in the Storm’s Wake

In 1938, Bohemia was still a tight-knit Czech-American community — smaller and quieter than it had been in the cigar-making heyday of the 1900s and 1910s, but deeply rooted. The CSPS Hall (Czech-Slovak Protective Society) on Bohemia Road was still the social center of the village. Families with names like Cerny, Cervenka, Stepan, and Kouba had lived here for two and three generations.

The storm struck at a moment of dual anxiety: the Depression was easing but not over, and news from Europe was growing darker by the week. The Munich Agreement, signed just days after the hurricane, would give Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Nazi Germany — a wound felt deeply in a community that had named itself after the old country. September 1938 was, in every sense, a month of upheaval.

Yet the community’s response to the hurricane was, by all accounts, what it had always been: neighbors helping neighbors. Trees were cleared together. Roofs were repaired. The schoolchildren who had sheltered in the Ocean Avenue schoolhouse went home to parents who had spent the afternoon watching their trees fall and worrying whether their children were safe. By nightfall, most families knew their children were fine. The storm, for all its fury, had not taken anyone in Bohemia.

The village had been built by people who had crossed an ocean to start over. A hurricane, even a historic one, was not going to stop them.

Sources: PBS American Experience, National Weather Service, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Forest History Society, National Archives, Smithsonian Magazine, New England Historical Society, Long Island History Project. Historical details about Bohemia’s community draw on BHS archival records and the broader history of Islip Town during the Depression era.