On October 21, 1878, a hurricane crossed the island of Cuba and headed east of Key West, Florida. On the evening of October 22, it made landfall north of Cape Lookout, North Carolina, as a low Category 2 hurricane with winds around 100 mph. The storm picked up speed after landfall and moved northward at a rate of greater than 40 mph and maintained tropical storm force wind speeds of greater than 60 mph with gusts much higher. On the morning of October 23, it passed up the west side of the Chesapeake Bay near the cities of Baltimore and Annapolis, Maryland, Wilmington, Delaware, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. By the late afternoon it had reached Albany, New York, and turned eastward and passed out to sea north of Boston, Massachusetts, on the morning of October 24.
The shaded relief image on the left was created using 30-meter resolution Digital Elevation Models (DEMs). The DEMs were developed by John Mackenzie, University of Delaware College of Agriculture and Natural Resources Spatial Analysis Laboratory, from rasterized 1992-93 United States Geological Survey (USGS) Digital Line Graph (DLG) hypsography data. He also combined these data with zero-elevation contours extracted from 1989 Landsat TM Band 7 satellite imagery for coastal quadrangles. The image was digitally enhanced using a false sun angle of 45 degrees shining from the northwest to exaggerate the geomorphic features. In reality the Delaware Coastal Plain is not "mountainous," as it looks in this enhanced image. The hydrology layer was created using USGS 30 x 60 minute and 7.5 minute series DLG data. Municipal boundaries were created using the Delaware Municipal Boundary Framework Layer. Both maps are projected in Universal Transverse Mercator, Zone 18 (UTM 18) on the North American Datum 1983 (NAD83).