<\/p>\n
More than. once on this program I have mentioned the notorious year of no summer, and on one occasion I gave numerous details of its ravages in Maine. It was the summer of 1816, when there were frosts in every month and snow in both July and September.<\/p>\n
What I have not previously done is to tell you how widely spread over the world has that phenomenon, nor have I said anything about its cause. While the cold was felt allover the United States, it has especially distressing in the northeast, and the three northern New England states were among those hardest hit. A man in Paris, Maine, who was 26 years old in 1816, wrote forty years later: “I well remember the 7 th of June, 1816. While I was on my way to work about a mile from home, dressed in thick woolen clothes and an overcoat, my hands got so cold that I had to lay down my tools and put on a pair of mittens I had in my pocket. It snowed about an hour that day. On June 10 my wife brought in some clothes from the line; they were frozen stiff. On the Fourth of July I saw men pitching horseshoes with thick overcoats on, and the sun shining bright at the time.”<\/p>\n
It wasn’t abnormally cold every day. When the breaks came, people thought more permanent relief was in sight. In Central Maine June 5 was warm and sultry. That night there was heat lightning, then by Thursday noon the temperature had dropped so low that fires were built in homes to keep warm. June 7 was even worse, as we have already shown. By three in the afternoon it was snowing hard.<\/p>\n
In the wake of the storm, good growing weather returned. From Connecticut all the way to Quebec, farmers plowed their barren fields and again planted the corn and beans that had been destroyed. But it was all in vain. Another cold wave struck in early July. On the holiday, ice formed in Maine, and four days later a killing frost hit the growing plants. Then it warmed up again until mid-August when came a succession of early frosts, each more severe than its predecessor. What little corn had come through was then mostly killed, and the bean crop was utterly ruined.<\/p>\n
Kathadin, Kineo and other Maine peaks were covered with snow before the beginning of September. The oldest people living avowed they had never seen such cold in August. The cold was felt far beyond New England – in the mid-west, on the Pacific coast and even in the south. In fact it was world wide. It hit all of Europe, and probably most of Asia, although at that time the rest of the world knew little about the great eastern continent. The Christian missionary movement that would penetrate China and Japan, and especially India and Burma, had just begun, and European and American traders seldom got inland beyond the seaports. But they did bring back stories of intense cold in Asia. The Lancashire plain of England had frosts in July, and the city of Geneva in Switzerland saw the lowest temperature in July and August that its records would show for the 207 years between 1753 and 1960. As far south as Italy, ice formed in rain puddles in Milan.<\/p>\n
What I have previously told you about the year of no summer has come largely from the newspapers of the time (which of course were few) and from old letters and diaries. The temperature accounts were from records kept by private individuals.<\/p>\n
Now, thanks to the diligent work of a husband and wife team of competent meteorologists,we can give you more accurate, scientific information. For many years that couple, Dr. and Mrs. Henry Stommel, has made a scientific study of the phenomenon, and recently published their findings in the Scientific American. It was the Stommels who studied the 207 year temperature record officially kept at Geneva. They found that the Philadelphia Society of the Advancement of Agriculture had collected data on the westward movement away from the eastern seaboard states and especially from New England, caused by the disastrous cold summer. The same Society had made a study of food prices caused by the disaster. The Stommels published in their article a few samples of replies from allover the east that came in response to the Society’s request for information.<\/p>\n
Emigration was very large from Maine and Vermont. A Vermont historian wrote that the number of people leaving the state between November 1816 and June 1817 was larger than the total number who otherwise left Vermont in the entire decade. The best record of New England temperature the investigators found at Yale University. As early as 1740, the President of Yale began keeping a daily record of temperature, that was meticulously followed by his successors, then continued by a Yale science department. It clearly showed the summer of 1816 as standing out with unusual cold.<\/p>\n
Personal accounts of remembered phenomena are widely exaggerated, and that may have been true of some of the unauthenticated stories about the year of no summer. But carefully kept meteorological records are more dependable, and there can be no doubt that it was the most severe summer known since official temperature records began to be kept.<\/p>\n
Now what about prices? Those Philadephia findings, made immediately after the disaster, tell us a lot. Newspapers of the time regularly published the wholesale prices of corn, wheat, and flour. Those publications showed that prices went up, not only because of scarcity of grain in this country, but also because of widespread crop failures in Europe. From Maryland northward, the corn crop, the major dependence of rural people for meal, was almost a complete failure. In 1817 it cost $2 a bushel, more than twice the customary 80 cents. In 1813 the price of wheat was $1. 30 a bushel, and it reached only $1.40 in 1815. In 1817, after that wretched summer, the price was $2.50. A year later, with bumper crops, it had fallen to $1.05 a bushel. Hay reached the unheard of price of $180 a ton. Butter selling at 15 cents a pound in 1815, was hard to get at 35 cents in 1817. Potatoes, usually sold for 40 cents a bushel, reached $1.25. Flour reached $15 a barrel, up from its former $5.<\/p>\n
In an old book, “Historic Stories of ‘New England,” appears this comment on the summer of 1816. “There was great destitution among the people throughout the following winter and spring. Many farmers were reduced to the last extremity, as thousands of cattle died. The poor had no money to buy what little corn was available at the exorbitant prices. One man in Chester, N. H. sold a pair of steers for $40. There were instances where destitute farmers hanged themselves.”<\/p>\n
Long ago on this program I told you of a praiseworthy local instance of the way people helped each other in that desperate time. Henry Simpson, one of the early settlers of Winslow was fortunate enough to have a small quantity of seed corn in the spring of 1817. He willingly shared it with his less fortunate neighbors instead of hoarding it all for himself.<\/p>\n
One possible effect of the cold summer I had never heard of until the Stommel’s article. That was the spread of cholera. The investigators admit that it cannot be proved that the cold summer was the cause, but lies true that it was followed by one of the worst cholera epidemics our nation ever knew. Before 1817 cholera, at least in epidemic proportions had been largely limited to India and China. In 1817, from Bengal, it was spread by the British Army into Nepal and Afghanistan. Reaching the shores of the Caspian Sea it then followed the trade routes west and through the Mohammedian lands, as it spread was enhanced by the Mecca pilgrims. Finally it crossed the Atlantic, first hitting New York. Soon the deaths there from cholera were reaching 20 a day. Added to the cholera, famine hit many parts of Asia and Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n
What caused this unusual cold of that summer of 1816? At the time there were various explanations. Some scientists said it was sunspots. Others blamed a concentration of Arctic ice in the North Atlantic. One individual was certain that the lightning rod, invented by Benjamin Franklin had upset the natural flow of heat from the interior of the earth. No one at the time attributed the cause to what is now accepted as certain, a great volcanic eruption.<\/p>\n
In 1815 an immense volcanic eruption occurred at Mount Tambora in the East Indies. That active volcano on the island of Tambora sent out such a vast amount of lava and ash that the resulting dust spread allover the earth. The commander of British forces on Java wrote at the time: “The greatest eruptions of Vesuvius pale beside what has happened here. The eruption caused damage as far away as 1000 miles. On Java, 300 miles from Tambora, it was awesomely present. The sky was overcast for days, even at noon time, with clouds of ashes. The sun was invisible. Showers of ashes covered the houses, streets, and fields several inches deep, and the sound of explosions could be heard over several days, like distant thunder.<\/p>\n
The eruption took 4200 feet off the top of Mount Tambora and sent 25 cubic miles of lava and rocks into the air. Ships at sea encountered large masses of the floating pumice as long as four years after the explosion. For centuries dust in the air had been associated with cold weather. It had been given as explanation of the extremely cold winter of 1783. As the dust from Tambora spread, it gradually cast its shadow over the higher latitudes of the earth. It hit New England in mid-May, after an ordinary early spring, and brought repeated cold spells all summer.<\/p>\n
Because the explosion occurred in a sparsely inhabited part of the world, it did not cause any great destruction of life or civilization. But a bursting volcano 3000 years earlier had done just that. The smoldering decline of the ancient advanced civilization of Crete and Nycenae had long been a mystery. We now know that they were destroyed by the immense tidal waves caused by a gigantic eruption of a volcano on the island of Thera in the Aegean Sea. Now we can add to that information the fact that a volcano explosion in the East Indies caused the notorious year of no summer in 1816.<\/p>\n
Year :1979<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #1209, Broadcast on September 23, 1979<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[803,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9905"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9905\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}