Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death: The Year Without a Summer

BY RICHARD SMITH

Winters can be long and harsh in New England, but at least we have hope every year that, soon enough, spring and then summer will make their return. But what if warmer weather never returned? That’s exactly what happened in 1816, The Year Without a Summer.

A major snowstorm hit the Northeast on June 6, 1816, following a cold, rainy spring. Modern scientists agree that this weather anomaly was a “volcanic winter event” caused by the massive eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in 1815. The massive ash cloud spewed into the atmosphere headed west and traversed the earth; it adversely affected the weather, and the summer of 1816 became an agricultural disaster, especially in New England. Temperatures as far south as Connecticut dropped to as low as 40° in July and August.

The snowstorm on June 6 was just one in a winter-like series of events from May to October that year. Some New Englanders called it “The Poverty Year,” while others remembered it as “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.”

The freakish weather began in the spring and summer of 1816 when a persistent “dry fog” was observed in parts of the eastern United States. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, and neither wind nor rainfall could disperse it. It has since been characterized as a “stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil” caused by the volcanic ash from Mount Tambora.

The crater left behind from the explosion of Mount Tambora

commons.wikimedia.org

At the Church Family of Shakers near New Lebanon, New York, Community member Nicholas Bennet wrote in May 1816 that “all was froze” and the hills were “barren like winter.” Temperatures were below freezing almost every day in May. The ground froze on June 9, and on June 12 the Shakers had to replant the crops destroyed by the cold. On July 7, it was so cold that everything stopped growing. As one historian would later write:

“Severe frosts occurred every month; June 7th and 8th snow fell, and it was so cold that crops were cut down, even freezing the roots .... In the early Autumn when corn was in the milk it was so thoroughly frozen that it never ripened and was scarcely worth harvesting. Breadstuffs were scarce and prices high and the poorer class of people were often in straits for want of food.”

Shocked and surprised New Englanders commented on the phenomenon; Sarah Snell Bryant of Cummington, MA, wrote in her diary, “Weather backward,” while Thomas Robbins of East Windsor, Connecticut noted, “the vegetation does not seem to advance at all.”

The Year Without a Summer had a farreaching economic impact across the eastern states and New England; crop failures led to hoarding and huge price increases for agricultural commodities. To make matters worse, the crop failures were aggravated by an inadequate transportation network. America was still a predominantly rural nation, with an infrastructure still stuck in the eighteenth century; with bad roads and no navigable inland waterways (no canals existed yet and there were, of course, no railroads) it was expensive and laborious to get food to the hard-hit areas.

There were some warm days in the spring of 1816, but they were followed by unexpected and unseasonal cold snaps. In Salem, MA, for example, it was 74 degrees on April 24, but within 30 hours the temperature dropped to 21 degrees! On June 6, 1816, six inches of snow fell on New England. Clockmaker Chauncey Jerome wrote in his autobiography that he walked to work that day in Plymouth, Connecticut, wearing heavy woolen clothes, an overcoat, and mittens.

New Englanders heading west

Image courtesy of the New England Historical Society

There were snow flurries in Boston on June 8, the latest ever recorded, while the snow was 18 inches deep in Cabot, Vermont. On June 11, a temperature of 30.5 degrees was recorded in Williamstown, MA. Frozen birds dropped dead in the fields, and some Vermont farmers who had already shorn their sheep tried to tie their fleeces back onto the poor animals; many froze to death anyway. Indeed, livestock all across New England died from the cold in their fields.

On June 22, temperatures reached 101 degrees in Salem, MA, but July 4 was extremely cold. Chauncey Jerome wrote that it was hard to feel patriotic while watching men play quoits in their heavy overcoats.

In July and August, lake and river ice was seen as far south as northwestern Pennsylvania. Frost was reported as far south as Virginia on August 20 and 21. Rapid, dramatic temperature swings were common, with temperatures sometimes reverting from normal summer temperatures to near-freezing within hours. Thomas Jefferson, retired from public life and farming at his Monticello estate, sustained major crop failures that sent him into debt. On September 13, a Virginia newspaper reported that corn crops would be one-half to two-thirds short and lamented that “the cold as well as the drought has nipt the buds of hope”. A Norfolk, Virginia newspaper reported:

“It is now the middle of July, and we have not yet had what could properly be called summer. Easterly winds have prevailed for nearly three months past ... the sun during that time has generally been obscured and the sky overcast with clouds; the air has been damp and uncomfortable, and frequently so chilling as to render the fireside a desirable retreat.”

The Year Without a Summer was especially hard on the poor. The New Hampshire Patriot newspaper reported on October 22, 1816, that “Indian corn, on which a large proportion of the poor depend, is cut off” and Vermont farmers lost much of their livestock; impoverished Vermonters foraged for nettles, wild turnips, and other root vegetables for their food. We will never know the exact number of people who froze or starved to death: the mortality rate could very well have been in the thousands.

The ruined harvest caused an epidemic of “Ohio fever” among the hungry and financially strapped New Englanders. As Connecticut author and publisher Samuel Griswold Goodrich recalled, “Ohio—with its rich soil, its mild climate, its inviting prairies—was opened fully upon the alarmed and anxious vision. As was natural under the circumstances, a sort of stampede took place from cold, desolate, worn-out New England, to this land of promise.”

Farmers gave up trying to make a living in New England and started heading to Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, hoping for a better –and warmer – life. As a result, there was a dramatic population shift in the west, so much so that this influx of people would lead to Indiana becoming a state in 1816, with lllinois gaining statehood two years later.

It would take several years before the New England economy would fully recover from the disastrous summer of 1816. For many people it was a disastrous year and one they would never forget.

The cold, gray summer of 1816 would also affect northern Europe and, in the long run, have a lasting impact on world literature.

Mary Godwin, her fiancé Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John William Polidori were all staying at the Villa Diodati, overlooking Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The weather was bleak and gloomy during that whole summer and the group, stuck indoors and wanting to pass the time, had a competition to see who could write the most frightening horror story. As a result, Mary Godwin created a classic of Gothic literature, a story she called Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

First edition of Frankenstein, 1818

Richard Smith has worked as a public historian in Concord for 21 years, specializing in Henry David Thoreau, the transcendentalists, the anti-slavery movement, and the Civil War. He has written six books for Applewood Books.