Measured by proportion to population, Middletown was hit harder by this flood than any other city in Connecticut. Some of the city’s poorest residents refused to leave their quarters despite the disaster. Instead, like many of the impoverished residents of New Orleans in the 2005 Katrina flood, they chose to carry their belongings to the rooftops, where they remained until policemen rowing canoes insisted they leave with them.
—”Middletown’s Barons and the End of the WASP Ascendancy,” an unpublished essay by Ron Schatz
Olin Library’s Special Collections and Archives owns photographs that give a sense of the destruction. The one below has been posted at:
http://sca.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2008/01/18/middletown-flood-1936/
