NEW PORTLAND — When Peter Silver returned home after a long day at his job at Stratton Lumber, he found his wife, Sarah Cook, in their yard picking up chunks of ice.

Their Chevrolet Trailblazer had been struck 30 minutes earlier by huge hail, which cracked the windshield and severely dented the entire vehicle. Silver grabbed his camera to snap some photos of the damage and the hailstones his wife was picking up in the yard.

The hailstones made holes in the ground and strewed the lawn with leaves, branches and hail. The deck table had four holes in the top, and one chair looked as if someone had put a fist through it, Cook said.

“I really think some of the first ones were grapefruit-sized,” she said. “They were still apple-sized after lying on the ground for 30 minutes.”

Silver said he found hailstones everywhere, even in the woods behind the house.

Cook, a stay-at-home mother, said she and her son, Jacob, 8, heard thunder and saw lightning flashes all day.

“My sister called me to tell me about the hail coming our way from Rangeley, and I was standing on the breezeway when it got quiet and still around the house,” Cook said. “All the leaves were still, and I looked in the distance and saw a crazy swirling in the clouds.”

Suddenly, she said, she heard what sounded like a jet plane coming toward her house.

“I saw the first hail hit the ground in the backyard, and I pulled my son and Sam, our dog, inside the house,” she said.

The noise was deafening as the hail bounced off the house roof and the tin roof of the barn.

“It only lasted about a minute, but it seemed like forever,” she said. “I have never seen hail this big.”

Nearby in Kingfield, Heather Moody had put a pan of pork chops in the oven when hail and rain began to batter her home. The electricity went off, she said, but the weather show outside took her mind off the meal.

“I’ve never seen hail that big in my life,” she said. “They were about an inch to an inch and a half in diameter.”

Barry London, a teacher at Mt. Abram High School, said the torrential hail and rain at his home started and stopped several times during a 30-minute period in Carrabassett Valley.

“The hail was pretty big, maybe an inch or more in size,” he said.