The Year Without Summer (28 page)

9.

HARVEST

“Sleighs have been going quite brisk today…”

S
UMMER ENDED MUCH
as it began in the Eastern United States. Frost struck the Mohawk Valley in central
New York State in the middle of September, ruining nearly all the corn still standing
in the fields. “The whole summer has also been so cold,” lamented the
Albany Gazette,
“that there will be no Indian corn in all this country.” More cold air swept into
the region on September 26. At sunrise that day in Hanover, New Hampshire, the temperature
dipped to 23 degrees. In Rochester, New York, ice formed a quarter of an inch thick.
“No prospect of crops,” wrote Reverend William Fogg of Kittery, Maine, in his diary.
“Crops cut short and a heavy load of taxes.”

On September 27, a widespread “black” frost—which freezes the water in the tissues
of plants—killed off virtually all the crops that remained north of Pennsylvania,
two weeks ahead of the average date for the first killing frost. The next three days
were equally cold, “the four greatest frosts known in New Hampshire at this season
by the oldest man living.” In Sutton, New Hampshire, apples froze on the branches,
and corn in the fields froze all the way through the cob. Plymouth, Massachusetts,
experienced the coldest September day in the town’s record books.

There would be no more harvest in New England in 1816. “These frosts have destroyed
all the corn, and the potatoes are much cut off by the drought and frost,” reported
the
Dartmouth Gazette
. “Frost killed almost all the corn in New England and not half of it fit to roast,”
wrote Enoch Little of Boscawen, New Hampshire. “On frosty ground the orchards were
barren, but on warm land there was a moderate crop of apples … The prospects as to
fodder are most alarming.” In Montreal and Quebec, where stocks of grain were dwindling,
the weather remained cold and very dry: “The ice on the ponds in this vicinity was
sufficiently strong … to bear a man.”

And the drought continued. “The oldest inhabitants say, that such a drowth [sic] has
never been experienced here since their remembrance,” wrote William Young, a teacher
in Plattsburgh, New York. “The ground has not been wetted two inches deep since the
month of June.” The creeks were dry, wells failed, and there was no grass for cattle.
Williamstown received only 1.1 inches of rain in September, less than a third of its
normal precipitation. Every week, the water level in New England’s rivers and Lake
Champlain sank lower.

Forest fires raged out of control. Many had been set deliberately. Farmers in new
settlements customarily burned woods and brush in the fall, relying upon the usual
autumn rains to keep the flames under control. But the drought left the woods too
dry, and the rains did not arrive to put out the flames. “The woods are every where
on fire,” noted Young, “and the smoke is so thick, that whilst I now write at 5 in
the afternoon, though there are no clouds, the sun is not to be seen.” At Williams
College, Professor Dewey reported thick smoke in the atmosphere from September 24
through the 30. On some Vermont highways, travelers could see no more than ten yards
in front of them. Turnpike fences burned to charcoal. Smoke carried to the coast and
beyond, impairing the visibility of ships at sea. Outside of Boston, winds blew cinders
onto vessels a considerable distance from shore, and the thick smoke reportedly caused
several shipwrecks.

In early October in New Hampshire, woods were burning in Alton, Gilmantown, Gildford,
Farmington, Rochester, Plymouth, Barnstead, Rumney, Warren, and Wentworth. The flames
burned houses, barns, and cattle. They consumed wood that farmers could have used
as fuel in the winter, and endangered those foolish enough to travel through the region.
“We have seen a gentleman who travelled the day before yesterday, in the vicinity
of one of the fires in New Hampshire,” noted a Boston newspaper, “and who for several
hours was near being suffocated with the smoke.” More fires burned in Maine: at Paris,
Bethel, Hebron, and Albany, in Oxford County and Kennebec County, and from the Kennebec
River to the New Hampshire border. Ferries on the Kennebec River needed compasses
to find their way through the dense smoke. In some areas, desperate residents dug
broad trenches in the earth to try to control the spread of flames.

Observers worried that the fires and smoke would aggravate the dryness of the air,
and send temperatures dropping even lower. “I fear that the smoke which they produce,
accumulating in the atmosphere, must intercept the rays of the sun,” wrote William
Young, “and deprive us of some of that genial heat of which the earth seems every
where so much in want.” (Smoke, like volcanic ash, does indeed reflect sunlight. Lacking
a volcano’s explosive power, however, the fires could send smoke only into the troposphere,
where it would be removed by rain within weeks. Fires will only intensify drought
if the burnt area is large enough to start the cycle of drier soils, reduced evaporation,
and less rainfall.) In Britain, the
Gentleman’s Magazine
attempted to explain the magnitude of the conflagrations in the North American forests
to its readers: “Europeans can have little idea of extensive districts being on fire,
carrying destruction for 20 and 30 miles.”

From Windsor, Vermont, the editor of the
Vermont Journal
proclaimed the summer an unmitigated disaster. “Never before in this vicinity [had
the weather] appeared more gloomy and cheerless than at present,” he wrote. “It is
extremely cold for the time of year, and the drougth [sic] was never before so severe.
We have had several frosts in this county, and we believe in every county in the state,
in every month during the last fourteen ones.”

Contemporary records support the anecdotal evidence about the frigidity of the summer.
Based on the most accurate measurements available, temperatures in New England generally
ranged between two to seven degrees Fahrenheit below normal from May through September.
More to the point, the sharpest declines from the norm occurred during the critical
growing months of June and July.

With its stocks of grain already depleted by the two preceding poor harvests, Quebec
faced the most immediate crisis. September’s killing frost left the province with
a minimal wheat harvest and an even smaller supply of oats. “Many parishes in Quebec
must inevitably be in a state of famine before winter sets in,” predicted one report.
Several inches of snow fell on Quebec City on October 5–6; Kamouraska, to the north,
received nearly a foot of snow, accompanied by temperatures cold enough to freeze
the water on roadways hard enough to bear the weight of a horse. It seemed a fitting
conclusion to the worst summer in memory. “A fall of snow on the 8th of June, and
another on the 6th of October,” declared a correspondent to the
Daily National Intelligencer
, “are incidents probably without example since the recollection of the oldest inhabitant
of the Province.”

Maine’s corn harvest was virtually nonexistent. For the state’s subsistence farmers,
the dearth of corn was a disaster, both for their families and the livestock that
depended on it for fodder; as one historian of Maine put it, “self-sufficiency and
survival was a delicate balance between people & the plants and animals they raised.”
With no new stores from the 1816 harvest, farmers faced painful decisions on whether
to consume their remaining reserves of corn, or save it as seed for next year’s crop.
Some towns were fortunate enough to have a few farmers who managed to harvest a small
amount and shared it with (or sold it to) their neighbors. Others traveled to the
nearest port to purchase a limited quantity—the price already had risen from the usual
eighty or ninety cents per bushel to nearly $1.50 by the beginning of October. In
Waterford, where seed corn had been scarce since the 1814 harvest and “people were
in great straits for food,” one farmer went to Portland and bought a bushel of corn,
bringing it back on horseback. But with many roads little more than rutted trails,
isolated inland towns remained very much on their own.

Vermont fared only slightly better. Much of the state’s farmland was on hillsides
and rocky fields that barely provided sufficient returns in good years; hence even
a minor shift in climate could have catastrophic effects. Between the late September
frosts and the prolonged drought, every crop except wheat was a resounding failure
in 1816. As in Maine, the shortage of corn portended calamity in the coming months.
“It is not probable that enough will get ripe for seed for next year,” wrote the editor
of the
Journal
. “There is not sufficient hay to winter the cattle upon, and nothing with which to
fatten them this fall.” In some Vermont towns, including Newbury and Peacham, desperate
farmers bid the price of corn up to two or three dollars a bushel in October. Even
the moderate wheat harvest proved of dubious value, since the drought dried up the
rivers that powered the state’s flour mills. “In short,” the
Journal
concluded, “we are something like the soldier, who had no allowance, and no kettle
to cook it in.”

New Hampshire shared Vermont’s plight. “Indian corn on which a large proportion of
the poor depend is cut off,” remarked the
New Hampshire Patriot
on October 22. “It is believed that through New England scarcely a tenth part of
the usual crop of sound corn will be gathered.” To the south, Connecticut officials
estimated that farmers in their state harvested only about 25 percent of the corn
they had sown, and half of their hay crop. To help alleviate the shortage, two enterprising
merchants from Hartford imported thirteen hundred bushels of corn “of excellent quality”
from Santo Domingo at a bargain price of seventy-five cents per bushel.

In New York, a Columbia College professor of natural history declared that “there
will not be half a crop of maize on Long Island, and in the southern district of this
state. Further northward there will be less. The buckwheat is so scanty, that a few
days ago I paid four dollars for a half bushel of the meal, for the use of my family.”
Most of the fruit in that region, however, appeared to have prospered (except for
peaches) from the cooler weather, and in New York City, the frigid summer blessed
residents with fewer mosquitoes and fleas than usual. Local populations of wild birds,
unfortunately, also had declined.

As the magnitude of the harvest failure became clear, American newspapers called for
farmers and merchants to display their patriotism—and make a tidy profit—by refraining
from exporting any of their crops to Europe. “It would be well, in order to prevent
distress here,” declared the
National Register
, “to suggest to the farmers and planters the propriety of retaining their grain for
the consumption of their own countrymen, from whom it is probable they will be able
to get as good a price as they can any where else, and at the same time, do a service
to their country.” Perhaps, but American merchants already were busy selling flour
to the French West Indies. By September, the failure of the harvest in France persuaded
the French government—which had long reserved the grain market in its Caribbean colonies
for its own exports—that it could not hope to supply the needs of Martinique or Guadeloupe,
and so it opened up the trade to American shippers.

Governor Jonas Galusha of Vermont tried a more direct approach. When the state legislature
convened in Montpelier on October 10, Galusha proposed a statewide campaign to encourage
conservation of the existing stores of grain. “The uncommon failure of some of the
most important articles of produce, on which the sustenance of man and beast depends,
is so alarming,” Galusha told the legislators, “that I take the liberty to recommend
to you, and through you, to the people of this State, the most rigid economy in the
early expenditure of those articles of provision most deficient, that by peculiar
precaution we may avoid, as far as possible, the foreboded evil of this unparalleled
season [i.e., famine].” Governor William Jones of Rhode Island preferred to rely on
appeals for divine intervention. Citing the “coldness and dryness of the seasons,
and … the alarming sickness with which many parts of our country have been afflicted,”
Jones proclaimed “a day of public Prayer, Praise, and Thanksgiving” throughout the
state.

Like most of the state governors in 1816, New Jersey governor Mahlon Dickerson was
a devout Jeffersonian who opposed direct government aid to individuals, and so he
refused to recommend specific remedies to help his state’s farmers. Nevertheless,
the recently reelected Dickerson did express his pious hope that the scarcity of crops
would discourage local distillers from producing their usual “poison” from corn or
grain that was “intended by the bounty of Heaven to man for his nourishment.” Dickerson
was not the only proponent of temperance to use the shortage of grain to advance the
cause. In October, a group of reform-minded citizens in Otsego County, New York, urged
the state legislature to “cause such restrictions to be laid on the distilleries—as
in their wisdom shall be calculated to prevent an undue monopoly of that valuable
and necessary commodity.” At a time when the United States supported 15,000 distilleries,
and the average American consumed the equivalent of 4.5 gallons of pure grain alcohol
per year, even a slight decline in the production of liquor could have paid significant
dividends.

As grain prices rose, beef and pork prices dropped. During the summer, when beef prices
typically spiked, farmers who foresaw shortages of fodder sent their livestock to
market months ahead of their customary schedule. That pace quickened as the magnitude
of the harvest disaster became clear, and more farmers realized they would never be
able to feed their cattle through the winter. By October, the unusually plentiful
supply sent the price of beef sharply lower, followed by a similar decline in pork
prices.