The Night The Stars Fell - November 13, 1833

The 1833 Meteor Shower as Depicted by Adolf  Vollmy

In the Miltonian's Historical events, listed on November 13 1833:
 "Marvelous shooting stars, many feared the world was coming to an end."

"On the night of November 12-13, 1833, a tempest of falling stars broke over the Earth... The sky was scored in every direction with shining tracks and illuminated with majestic fireballs. At Boston, the frequency of meteors was estimated to be about half that of flakes of snow in an average snowstorm. Their numbers... were quite beyond counting; but as it waned, a reckoning was attempted, from which it was computed, on the basis of that much-diminished rate, that 240,000 must have been visible during the nine hours they continued to fall." - Agnes Clerke's, Victorian Astronomy Writer

The Leonid meteor shower is one of the biggest of the year, and every 33 years it becomes even more intense, as the comet makes it's closest approach to the earth and sun. 1833 was not only unusually prolific, but the viewing conditions were especially idea.  Long before the invention of electric street lights, the moon had set early in the evening, leaving a clear, dark, sky.

“The stars showered down so thickly and fast that it looked as though every star in the heavens was falling. When they touched the ground, they burst and drifted away. Stars were still falling when the Sun arose the next morning. Never before had there been such a sight witnessed, nor has there been since the greatest meteoric display of our age.” Bruna McGuire

 Frederick Douglass recounted his memory of the meteor storm in his 1881 autobiography. 
  “…was also the year of that strange phenomenon when the heavens seemed about to part with their starry train. I witnessed this gorgeous spectacle, and was awe-struck. The air seemed filled with bright descending messengers from the sky. It was about daybreak when I saw this sublime scene..” – Life and Times of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass , page 127.

So heavy was the concentration of meteors that to those gazing skyward it was visually obvious that they were fanning out from a spot within the star pattern known as the Sickle in the constellation of Leo, the Lion.

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The source of the Leonid meteors is the comet 55P/Temple-Tuttle, which sheds relatively large amounts of debris as it approaches the Sun once every 33.2 years. Since the comet’s orbital plane around the Sun is relatively close to that of Earth, we pass through dense (relatively speaking) parts of the comet’s debris trail once every year, and usually between the 17th and 20th of November.

The astronomer, Denison Olmsted, was awakened by neighbors on November 13, 1833, and walked into the cold November night to see a sky filled with shooting stars, 72,000 or more per hour. It was the November meteor shower we now call the Leonids, but at the time, no one knew what caused the display or where meteors came from. But because of the number of shooting stars filling the heavens—20 a second—Olmsted saw clearly a pattern that had escaped other astronomers.

“Olmsted realized for the first time that they came from one point, one he first called the radiant,” Littmann says. Astronomers today still use the radiant to name meteor showers: The Leonids take their name from their seeming origin in the constellation Leo, the Lion. And the Perseids seen in early August every summer take their name from their origin in the constellation Perseus.
https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2014/08/30/1833-meteor-storm-started-citizen-science