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.”
Farther south, visitors to Salem, Massachusetts, found ice in the well at the toll house on the turnpike on the morning of June 9, and frost again in the evening. Fearing the worst for his congregation in South Windsor, Connecticut—and for his own crops—the Reverend Thomas Robbins decided to preach a sermon that morning on the parable of the Barren Fig Tree (Luke 13: 6–9): “A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came seeking fruit on it, and found none.” Two days later, Robbins concluded that the corn in his fields had been “killed to the ground.”
“Another frost, cold day,” noted Benjamin Harwood in his diary on June 10, “indeed obliged to thrash our hands while hoeing.” Harwood’s corn, which had emerged less than a week earlier, was “badly killed—difficult to see it—gloomy weather.” Professor Dewey, too, recorded a severe frost on June 10: “Indian corn, beans, cucumbers, and the like, cut down.” The morning temperature in Malone, New York, dipped to 24 degrees, the coldest temperature recorded during the entire storm. Even towns along the New England coast reported below-freezing temperatures for eight of the first twelve nights in June, and the snow flurries that swirled into Boston on June 7–8 were the latest recorded seasonal instance of snowfall in the city’s history.
David Thomas was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when the cold front arrived on June 6. “For three days we had brisk gales from the north-west, of unusual severity for summer,” he wrote in his journal. “The surface of the rivers was rolled into foam, and each night was attended by considerable frost.” As Thomas made his way through the farmlands of Washington County the following week, he encountered extensive orchards of apple and peach trees, “but the fruit has been chiefly destroyed by the late frosts”—the only year it had failed in the past decade. The orchards in southeastern Ohio fared no better; the frosts of June 6–10 left them nearly barren of fruit. “We saw neither peaches nor apples till we approached this [Little Miami] river; and, indeed even here, these fruits are scarce. Dead leaves, in tufts, are hanging on the papaw, and on most other trees—the first growth of this spring having been entirely destroyed. This remark will apply to much of the state where we travelled.”
When warmer weather finally returned late on June 11 (following another frost in the morning), farmers took stock of the cold wave’s cost. “The trees on the sides of the hills, whose young leaves were killed by the frost, presented for miles the appearance of having been burned or scorched,” wrote Chester Dewey. “The same appearance was visible through the cou
ntry—in parts, at least, of Connecticut—and also, on many parts of Long Island, as I was told by a gentleman of undoubted veracity, who had visited the island.” From Dutchess County in the Hudson Valley came a warning that “the crops of wheat and rye, in this county, which are usually so abundant are almost entirely destroyed.” In Albany, the editor of the Daily Advertiser feared that “great damage has been done by the frosts, which have been so severe as to make ice of considerable thickness.… The prospect to the farmer, as far as we have heard in the country, is, at present, very gloomy.”
Maine farmers reported corn crops “totally destroyed … and even of the sheep that had been shorn, many perished,” even though they had been sheltered in barns. In Portland, the Eastern Argus reported that “a check is given to all vegetation, and we fear the frost has been so powerful as to destroy a great portion of the young fruit that is put forth.” Central Maine suffered significant damage to fruit blossoms, and “in some instances the corn is totally destroyed, the plant being frozen to the seed; in most places it has been cut off to the surface of the ground,” although residents hoped it could still sprout again.
“What is to become of this country, it is impossible to divine—distressing beyond description,” wrote a correspondent from Jackson. “Farms that usually cut from Thirty to Forty tons of Hay, by their present appearance will not cut Five, and to all appearance, this part of the Union is going to suffer for bread and everything else.” In Worcester, Massachusetts, “expectations have in a measure been blasted … and the frost has cut down and destroyed many very valuable fruits of the earth.… A destruction of the crops of grain as also of every species of fruit is fearfully anticipated.” The Brattleboro Reporter agreed that “the most gloomy apprehensions of scarcity are entertained by those who witnessed the phenomena.”
The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History Page 7
