Passing over the valley of Meeting-house brook, it continued through the woods and re-appeared on Forest street. While its general course was eastward, trees were blown in other and varying directions within the width of its track, and all sorts of freaks were later observed. A little shed or hen-house escaped, while large, strongly-built houses and barns were demolished. Others were unroofed, while chimney tops, windows, blinds and fences went like chaff before or with it.
A freight car on the railroad siding was rolled along ten rods, then lifted from the track and landed sixty feet away, where now is Playstead road.
Gleason's Pictorial of Boston, September 6, 1851, presented its artist's view, saying:
The locality is at the east of the West Medford station. The dismantled house on the right was that occupied by Mr. Costello. The next across the road, the dwelling of Mr. Sanford, the depot master, which was moved twenty feet, crushing beneath it his son, a young man of 19 years, who was obliged to suffer amputation of both legs. The two-story house next to it was occupied by Mr. Nye, a carpenter. It was completely unroofed. In the second story Mrs. Nye and newly-born infant, injured by the wreck. In the extreme left is Captain Wyatt's house which was completely riddled.
In one house there was pasted on the wall a variety of pictures and portraits. That of (then) President Fillmore was stripped off without fracture or injury and borne by the gale into a garden a half-mile away. Its finder restored it to the owner who replaced it. Of it, Rev. Mr. Brooks remarked, ‘Political prophets may tell us what this foreshadows.’ But President Fillmore did not succeed himself in the White House.
Mrs. Caldwell (of Irving street) took a journey on the wings of the wind and was safely set down one hundred and fifty feet away. Less fortunate was one of the workmen at Mystic street (who in 1902 visited the writer and told of his experience) on the fateful day. Living at Cambridge, he was on his way home, when he was taken up and hurled into a pile of debris from which on recovering
