75 Years Later: The New England Hurricane of 1938 in Photos

By Ronald DeRosa

News outlets and historians are remembering this week the 75th anniversary of the great New England Hurricane, a devastating natural disaster that claimed as many as 700 lives after it hit the region on Sept. 21, 1938.

The New Haven Register has published a series of historic photos taken following the aftermath of the storm, with captions to explain where each shot was taken. 

There are some notable landmarks that are still recognizable in the gallery, such as an aerial shot of the then-new Arrigoni Bridge in Middletown and an overhead shot a destroyed New London waterfront.

The hurricane, which battered Southeastern Connecticut and other parts of the state, made landfall as a Category 3 storm and would prove to be the single-worst natural disaster in the state's history, Patch history columnist Phil Devlin wrote in a column this week.

The Associated press reported that wind gusts reaching as high as 186 mph, the storm dwarfed land wind speeds recorded during Tropical Storm Irene and Hurricane Sandy.