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Ice Water Shower
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The Year of No Summer
By: Francis X. Sculley
April brought the usual snow squalls and rain to all of New England; followed by a month-long drought and the accompanying grass fires. The news that twenty two inches of snow had fallen in western Pennsylvania did not reach New Hampshire until the Granite State was having a few problems of its own. The blizzard of May 17, 1816, is well chronicled in Keystone State histories.
On the beautiful early afternoon of June 7, with the temperature hovering in the eighties, farmers sweltered in the fields in all of northern New England. Immense black clouds, sans thunderheads, billowed across the horizon as the temperature plummeted. A fierce wind began to blow shortly before darkness; and it started to snow shortly after the evening meal. Continuing fiercely through the night, all of the northeast was covered with a blanket of white by daylight. The depth varied with the locale. Northern Connecticut had two feet; Cabot, Vermont, was buried under 18 inches; and Williamsville, Vermont, has a mere twelve. Hopkinton, New Hampshire, had five inches; but writers wryly commented that it was insufficient for “good sleighing.”
Near the village of Peacham, Vermont, an aged man lost his way in the woods; and when he was found the next day, both of his feet were frozen. Needless to say, he hardly expected a blizzard in June.
Snow remained on the ground for two days; and beneath the fruit trees, the ground was littered with the bodies of some of the more fragile songbirds, such as the oriole and thrush. Newborn lambs perished on the hillside; and newly sworn ewes suffered greatly from the mid-winter cold. There would be no peas for Independence Day dinner, and corn would have to be replanted, if there was to be any at all.
While snow fell intermittently throughout the month, there was a heat wave late in the month, which gave hope that there might at least be one good crop of hay. Alas, this was to prove true only in southern New England, and then in scattered locales.
July brought frosts, and upon occasion, freezing rain and an occasional snowfall. It was as bleak and raw as early March. Now and then the temperature would soar into the nineties, only to drop to freezing again. A low of 45 was recorded in Savannah, Georgia. Freezing weather occurred almost on a nightly basis. Workmen laboring in the field all wore greatcoats and mittens.
August brought more of the same. A week of killing frosts removed any hope that any crop that grew above the ground would survive- be it domestic or wild. Even the chestnut crop was a complete failure- a bountiful wild staple, at that period in New Hampshire history.
By September, snow remained on all of the high mountains every day, and another week of freezing weather provided the knockout blow. Root cellars were barren of everything except Jerusalem artichokes (sunflower tubers), potatoes, or turnips. Cattle were in an emaciated condition; and winter was yet to come. And come it did- in October, with a tremendous snowfall that buried New Hampshire until April of 1817.
As the winds howled around the cabins of the northeast, hard bitten Yankees vowed that, with the coming of “Spring”, they would leave an area where it snowed continuously. Pooling their remaining horses and oxen, and sharing wagon space, immense caravans headed toward the setting sun. Most settled in the northern wilderness counties of Pennsylvania; while others continued on to the Northwest Territory of Michigan and Wisconsin. A few even headed for the tiny islands in Lake Erie. These descendants still make up the hard-core of the area’s population. Many of the early pioneers wrote of the frightful “Year of No Summer”, and even touched upon a few of the hardships they endured in their new homes.
It was deduced many years later that a volcanic eruption in the East Indies threw up an immense cloud of dust, which created a screen between the earth and the sun. As the earth revolved on its axis, it produced winter weather in midsummer in all of the northeastern United States and Western Europe.
Nothing except ice on the roadside puddles and intermittent snow has ever occurred again since the summer of 1816- BUT, it could! In 1859, a vicious killing frost and a heavy snowfall entombed western New York’s fruit belt, causing enormous destruction. On June 11, in 1843, Irasburg, Vermont, had eleven inches of snow. Five inches of the white stuff was reported a top Mt. Mansfield in neighboring Vermont on the thirteenth of June, in 1965. On the tenth of June, in 1972, it was sixteen degrees above zero in Cherry Springs Park, in Potter County, Pennsylvania. There were many radiators frozen hat morning for those who had drained their anti-freeze.
Like the appearance of a tornado in New Hampshire, snow in June is rare- but both have happened- and can- and doubtless will, again.
- Francis X. Sculley