The Year Without Summer (9 page)

When the low-pressure center and its trailing cold front passed Lake Erie on June
5, several Royal Navy ships stationed there reported strong northwesterly gales as
the polar air rushed in. In New Brunswick, central Ontario, the noontime temperature
was only 30 degrees. Thunderstorms formed where the air moving behind the cold front
began to meet the air brought in by the warm front, bringing heavy rain to western
New York and southern Ontario. The low-pressure center continued to move east, while
the subpolar jet slipped ever farther south.

Late on the morning of June 6, the cold front and its powerful northwest wind suddenly
struck Quebec, turning rain to snow. For more than an hour, snow fell thickly on the
city streets. When the sky cleared in the afternoon, residents could see the mountaintops
to the north covered with snow, “the most distant apparently to the depth of a foot.”
Flocks of birds hitherto found only deep in the forest swarmed into the city in search
of warmth, “and were to be met with in every street,” reported the
Quebec
Gazette
, “and even among the shipping. Many of them dropped down dead in the streets, and
many were destroyed by thoughtless or cruel persons. The swallows entirely disappeared
for several days.” In the countryside, newly shorn sheep perished from the cold.

That night the ground around Quebec froze; the following day the thermometer never
rose above freezing, and more snow fell. With the summer solstice less than two weeks
away, “the roofs of the houses, the streets and squares of the town, were completely
covered with snow,” observed the
Quebec Gazette
. On the morning of June 8, “the whole of the surrounding country was in the same
state, having … the appearance of the middle of December.” More snow fell that day,
and more on June 9. An unfortunate traveler about a dozen miles outside of Quebec
struggled to plow through snowdrifts that rose up to the axletrees of his carriage.
Every night the ground froze, and the wind continued to blow strongly from the northwest,
“driving before it an immense mass of lowering clouds, which constantly concealed
the sun.” When the sun finally returned on June 10, the land west of the Chaudière
River was still covered with snow, in some places about a foot deep.

Montreal received less snow, but on June 7 “the frost was sharp, ice as thick as a
dollar [coin], which has injured tender as well as hardy plants.” Since wheat farmers
already had planted much of their supply of seeds, the
Montreal
Herald
advised its readers to share their dwindling supplies with their poorer neighbors—and
plant as many potatoes as possible, in case the wheat crop failed completely. “Early
this morning some snow fell,” the
Herald
noted on June 8, “and the frost was as severe as on yesterday morning.”

As the low-pressure system tracked across New England on June 6 and 7, the cold front
caused temperatures to drop by 30 degrees or more and the winds shifted from mild
southwesterlies to gale-force northwesterlies. With Quebec and Montreal already enveloped
in snow, a second band of precipitation—first rain, then snow—formed south of the
Saint Lawrence River and spread from west to east. In Danville, Vermont, a piercing,
cold wind made it seem like November. Snow and occasionally hail began around 10
A.M.
on June 6 and continued until evening. “Probably no one living in the country ever
witnessed such weather,” claimed the Danville
North
Star
, “especially of so long continuance.” A heavy snow fell in and around Waterbury,
about twenty miles north of Montpelier, but much of it melted as it hit the ground,
which was still near its normal summer temperature. In the hills outside of Middlebury,
however, the snow piled up three inches deep, and Rutland presented “a novel spectacle,
to see the ground covered with snow on the 6th of June, and the Green Mountains whitened
with the same for two or three successive days.” Some Vermont farmers who had recently
shorn their sheep reportedly attempted to tie the fleeces back on the unfortunate
animals, but many froze to death anyway. As in Quebec, wild birds flew into barns
and houses to flee the cold; “you could pick up numbed hummingbirds, yellow birds,
martins, and ‘scarlet sparrows’ in your hand,” recalled one writer, “and many were
found dead in the fields.”

At Bennington, a farmer named Benjamin Harwood noted in his diary that “it had rained
much during the night and this morning [June 6] the wind blew exceedingly high from
NE, raining copiously, chilling and sharp gusts.” It began to snow about 8
A.M.
, and continued desultorily until early afternoon until about an inch and a half lay
on the ground. By the time it was done, “the heads of all the mountains on every side
were crowned with snow,” and five of his family’s sheep had been lost in the storm.
It was, Harwood concluded, “the most gloomy and extraordinary weather ever seen.”

Snow commenced in Bangor between two and three o’clock in the afternoon. It fell “in
beautiful large flakes,” by one account, “some of which as they struck the ground
covered spots two inches [in] diameter,” continuing for an hour and a half. The oversized
flakes were likely due to the very moist, summertime air that the low-pressure system
had pulled up from the Gulf of Mexico. From Jackson, Maine, came a report that June
6 brought “a violent and heavy storm from the west North West, blowing very hard,
accompanied with heavy cold rain and snow.” If the precipitation had consisted entirely
of rain, it might have totaled six inches or more.

A group of men in Sanbornton, New Hampshire, began the day by assembling timber to
build a new schoolhouse. As the cold front passed through, they blew on their hands
to keep warm, then stamped their feet and flapped their arms against their sides,
and finally cursed the cold as a band of snow forced them back indoors. Eighty miles
to the north, bricklayers in the town of Bath quit working on a brick house because
their mortar froze. In Waterford, Maine, one elderly gentleman spent the day chopping
wood with a heavy coat on, the snow flying in squalls around him.

At Concord, New Hampshire, recently elected Governor William Plumer delivered his
inaugural address on the afternoon of June 6 at the local meetinghouse. “The wind
blew a gale, with an occasional shower of snowflakes,” recalled one member of the
audience. During the ceremonies, “our teeth fairly chattered in our heads, and our
feet and hands were benumbed.” As the guests departed town that evening, gusts of
wind threatened to overturn their carriages as they crossed Concord Bridge, and when
they reached their hotel “we shivered round a rousing fire, complaining of the cold
room.”

Throughout New York State, towns at higher elevations reported heavy snow and freezing
temperatures on June 6. In Elizabethtown, about 130 miles north of Albany, the rain
changed to snow around seven thirty in the morning and continued for three hours,
followed by flurries on a strong westerly wind. “The severity of the cold was such
as to freeze the ground,” read one report, “and destroy most of the garden vegetables.”
Travelers who made it into Albany from the west that day reported a storm “as severe
from half an hour to an hour.” At Geneva, “a considerable quantity of snow fell,”
and the Catskill Mountains in the southeastern part of the state were covered in snow.

At Williamstown, where it snowed on and off on June 6, Professor Dewey saw that “on
the mountain to the west … the ground was white with snow—travelers complained of
the severity of the N.W. wind and snowstorm.” Residents of the Berkshires found enough
snow to go sledding. Waltham also received snow, strong wind, and rain. In Boston,
the mercury dropped forty degrees in less than a day, and snow flurries swirled through
the city.

When residents of Waterbury, New York, arose on the morning of June 7, they found
ice everywhere. “The situation here, as in other parts of the country, has been uncommonly
cold,” noted one correspondent. “But this morning, at 6 o’clock, the thermometer was
at 30. Ice three-eighths of an inch thick—and at this moment, 12 o’clock (at noon)
ice still in the shade.”

Temperatures hovered around freezing across most of New England on June 7. Towns across
Vermont reported ice between half-an-inch and one-inch thick on shallow ponds. “The
surface of the ground was stiff with frost,” reported Harwood. “The leaves of the
trees blackened … snow remained on Sandgate and Manchester Mountain past noon or as
late as that. Wind extremely high night & day and the cold abated but little in the
P.M.… Mended fences with greatcoat and mittens on.”

In the Hudson Valley, vegetables were entirely destroyed by frost; in Middlebury,
the cold and wind wreaked severe damage on fruit trees. “I well remember the 7th of
June,” wrote Chauncey Jerome, a clockmaker in Plymouth, Connecticut, years later.
“While on my way to work, about a mile from home, dressed throughout with thick woolen
clothes and an overcoat on, my hands got so cold that I was obliged to lay down my
tools and put on a pair of mittens which I had in my pocket.” Maine farmers who chose
to contribute their labor maintaining county roads in lieu of paying local taxes also
found it necessary to don overcoats and mittens.

A severe frost destroyed nearly all the corn planted in Jackson, Maine, about fifty
miles north of Augusta. “In the evening,” wrote a correspondent, “the atmosphere [was]
so intensely cold, that the small birds, our annual visitors from the southward, sought
for shelter in people’s homes and barns, many of them, with the Swallows have been
found starved and frozen to death.” The frozen ground also helped kill recently sheared
sheep who could find no forage—“the fields as bare of herbage, as usually in the month
of November, and the verdure of the forest has the appearance of Fall instead of Summer.”

Crops in Massachusetts also suffered damage. Professor Dewey reported that the ground
in Williamstown remained frozen. “Moist earth was frozen half inch thick, and could
be raised from round Indian corn [maize], the corn slipping through and standing unhurt.
Had not the wind made the vegetables very dry, it is not improbable that they would
have been frozen also.”

Cold and frost extended all the way down to New York City. “This morning, the 7th
of June, we are told there was ice on this island,” declared a Manhattan newspaper.
“Yesterday and to-day our thermometer stood at 50 within doors, the wind is gale and
air much colder without; and in the garden we found the vegetables changed in their
appearance, and we fear much injured.”

As darkness fell on June 7, another storm brought more snow. This time Vermont sustained
a direct hit. Accompanied by bitterly cold winds, snow and sleet began falling Friday
night and continued until noon. The town of Cabot received between a foot and eighteen
inches of snow, and nearby Montpelier nearly a foot. Drifts outside of Danville piled
up to twenty inches. “The awful scene continued,” wrote Benjamin Harwood grimly. “Sweeping
blasts from north all the forepart of the day, with light snow squalls.”

On the morning of June 8, temperatures at or just below freezing combined with wind
speeds near 30 miles per hour to produce wind chills of 10 degrees. “Still uncomfortably
cold, squally, and blustering,” read one Vermont news report. “Winter fires, and winter
groups around them.” Farmers donned mittens to work in the fields; others found that
the ground was frozen too solid to work at all. One farmer built a fire near his field
of corn and enlisted help in keeping it going every night, to keep his crop from freezing.
“6th, snowed in considerable quantities,” wrote Adino Brackett, a New Hampshire farmer
and teacher, in his diary. “7th also snow. 8th snow. This is beyond anything of the
kind I have ever known.”

Snow was reported on the hills outside Amherst, Massachusetts, in the town of Salem,
and on the high ground around East Windsor, Connecticut. A traveler who came through
western Massachusetts saw “large icicles pending, and the foliage of the forests was
blasted by the frost.” A Boston newspaper announced that “snow fell in this town on
Saturday [June 8]; and at Wiscasset, and other places, it snowed for several hours
in succession. The occurrence is uncommon…”

“I can find no person who has ever before seen snow on the earth in June,” claimed
a correspondent in Waterbury, Vermont. “This part of the country I assure you presents
a most dreary aspect; great-coats and mittens are almost as generally worn as in January;
and fire is indispensible.” The Danville
North Star
agreed. “The weather was more severe [on June 8] than it generally is during the
storms of winter. It was indeed a gloomy and tedious period.”

As the low-pressure system finally began to move out to sea, the subpolar high became
entrenched across New England and southern Quebec and Ontario. The high drove Arctic
air deep into the valleys, from which it would not be easily extracted. Across Maine,
it snowed for three hours on the morning of June 8. The following day temperatures
rose slightly, “but still frost and ice—the wind still blowing from N.N.W. and remarkably
cold for the season.” Anyone traveling even a short distance needed greatcoats and
mittens. Another “most severe frost” struck Maine on the morning of June 10, “that
destroyed the blossoms and even leaves of the apple trees in certain directions, accompanied
with ice … thicker in proportion, than any night last winter.” As he began to plant
his corn that day (considerably later than usual), Joshua Whitman, a farmer in central
Maine, noticed numerous birds dead in the fields from the cold. “It has frozen very
hard for four nights past,” he wrote. “The ground freezes and is raised by the frost.”

In Middlebury, Vermont, the morning of Sunday, June 9 was “severely cold and … the
mountains, not more than two miles east of this village, were completely covered with
snow.” News accounts reported icicles nearly a foot long. Moved by the extraordinary
weather to an excess of poetic sentiment, the
Vermont
Mirror
claimed that “the very face of nature still appears to be shrouded in a death like
gloom, and as she weeps, which well she may, for the barrenness of her fields and
for the chilling blasts that whistle through her locks from an unpropicious [sic]
clime, her tears freeze fast to her cheeks as they are seen to flow.”