First recorded U.S. meteorite blazes back for bicentennial

Connecticut towns celebrate a 'thunder stone' of significance.

from the December 13, 2007 edition

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"I can't stop thinking about Chicken Little," says Judy Albin, a trustee of the Weston Historical Society and co-chair of the meteorite committee. "The sky was falling; it must have been an absolutely amazing, incredible, frightening thing."

Certainly Mrs. Gardner of Wrentham, Mass. was concerned over the Weston Fall. Heeding Benjamin Franklin's advice, she rose before sun-up to log her daily weather observation. Peering out her window, she saw a fiery orb race through the sky. The sphere, which looked about half the size of the full moon to her, was traveling south between 40,000 and 50,000 m.p.h. before it entered the atmosphere. She wondered, according to her account in a local newspaper, "Where was the moon going to?"

The Weston Fall faded from local historic markers as well as the national conscience. But it has staying power in the scientific community, which continues to study the meteorite, a 26-pound chunk of which sits on a lighted pedestal at Yale's Peabody Museum. (Scattered magnetized shards of it remain in the backyards of local residents.)

"The grains, the seeds, of the solar system are inside meteorites," says Dr. Karl Turekian, a Peabody curator and professor of geology and geophysics at Yale. "Weston retains some of these seeds and so that's important. If we didn't have meteorites we wouldn't know what the Earth was made of or how old it is."

While the meteorite's importance wasn't fully understood in 1807, certainly many divined a significance in the event and the debris it left.

When farmer Elijah Seeley went to check on his cattle he found them in a neighboring pasture. The terrified bovines had jumped a wall. Seeley called his wife, and they began carting away pieces of the still warm meteorite. These black-crusted stones differed from the usual crop of rocks otherwise known as New England potatoes.

Upon reaching Weston that cold morning, Bronson sent word to Yale about the otherworldly event. The university dispatched Benjamin Silliman and James Kingsley to interview witnesses. When they interviewed Wheeler they decided that because he wasn't "influenced by fear or imagination" his word could be trusted.

But when they visited the home of William Prince, they were just plain disgusted. Clearly the Prince family (no relation to this reporter) didn't believe the early bird caught the worm. They barely noticed the explosions, according to Silliman's 1807 report published in The Connecticut Herald. "Not even a fresh hole made through the turf ... about twenty-five feet from the house, led to any conception of the cause, or induce any other enquiry than why a new post hole should have been dug where there was no use for it," according to Silliman's.

When the Princes finally checked the hole, they found a "noble specimen," wrote Silliman.

Aside from interviews, Silliman collected as many stones as possible to study. And a tug of war erupted between locals and the Yale professors for pieces of the meteorite.

But today Yale, Weston, and Easton are cooperating quite nicely – without the help of a planetary Dr. Phil to celebrate this little big bang.

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