A few weeks ago I saw a show about tornados. They said (if I recall correctly) that THAT day was the ONLY time a tornado was ever recorded to have been in Washington. They claimed that the twister threw the British into such disarray that they weren't able to regroup. (And interesting about the rain putting out the fires).
They also mentioned some little town (down south?) that had been hit 3 or 4 years in a row on the SAME day by devasting twisters.
I saw this story about the storm in a History Channel program about the War of 1812. I was very surprised that I had never heard about this before. It sounded like the storm was absolutely "Biblical" and I would have thought that such a storm would have become legendary as the years passed.