It was around noon time that the pond gave way and the cascade of water made its way towards Lake Memphremagog. By late afternoon the rush of water had reached Coventry where it destroyed the bridge at the Day farm. The water approached near enough to Samuel Day's house to carry off his hog sty and its living contents and to give Mrs. Day a severe fright.
As tradition tells the story, she was a woman whose vocabulary was rich in invective, and that day she had been employing it to the exceeding discomfort of her family. The uproar of the approaching torrent, so terrific and so unlike anything she had ever known, suggested to her alarmed imagination that the day of judgement had come and that sentence against her evil works was to be expected speedily. The panic stricken woman rushed to her bed, buried herself under the clothes, and not so much as the tip of her nose did she show until the flood had subsided and she was fully assured that the world had not come to an end. (1,2)
At the bridge farther north, Mrs. Hannah Parker had a narrow escape. She had that day rode to Brownington on horseback alone. The road she travelled passed a distance of half a mile over the low land bordering Barton river, which terminated near Dr. Redfield's house in a bridge made of logs four feet high and more than thirty rods long over a marshy part of the way.
From Hale's Map of the New England states, 1849
