Wilbraham's Strange Summer of 1816

Imagine waking up on a June morning in New England, stepping outside your farmhouse, and finding snow on the ground.

For the people of 1816, this was not a story from some distant northern wilderness. It was happening throughout New England. Farmers were trying to plant their crops, fruit trees were beginning to blossom, and families were expecting the warmth of summer. Instead, winter seemed determined not to leave.

Modern-day picture of the Freeman Farm at Old Sturbridge Village. OSV

The year 1816 would become known as the “Year Without a Summer,” and some New Englanders remembered it more grimly as “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.”

The trouble had actually begun the previous year, thousands of miles away.

On April 10, 1815, the volcano Mount Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa in present-day Indonesia, erupted in one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history. The explosion sent enormous quantities of volcanic material high into the atmosphere. Fine particles and sulfur compounds spread around the globe, reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface and disrupting temperatures and weather patterns. The effects were felt during 1816, particularly across the northeastern United States and Europe.

New England's spring of 1816 began with some hope. Then the weather turned.

April brought alternating periods of warmth and bitter cold. In Massachusetts, a warm spell could quickly give way to freezing temperatures. By May, farmers were finding that spring was arriving painfully late. Frost damaged fruit blossoms and young plants, while ice formed on ponds and streams. The growing season that New England farmers depended upon was already in trouble.

Then came June.

On June 6, snow fell across parts of New England. Several inches accumulated in northern areas, while temperatures plunged. In Vermont, the snow became particularly remarkable. Eighteen inches was reported at Cabot on June 8. In western Massachusetts, the cold was severe enough that the thermometer at Williamstown fell to 30.5 degrees on June 11.

The sight must have been astonishing.

Farmers who had been preparing their fields for summer were suddenly dealing with conditions that looked more like January. Newly planted crops were threatened by frost, fruit blossoms were destroyed, and livestock suffered in the cold. Birds that normally belonged in the summer landscape were found weakened or dead from exposure. Some farmers who had already sheared their sheep struggled to protect them from the unseasonably cold weather.

Even people accustomed to New England's harsh weather were amazed.

In Connecticut, the young clockmaker Chauncey Jerome later recalled walking to work in June wearing heavy wool clothing and an overcoat. His hands became so cold that he had to stop working and put on mittens.

The cold did not simply disappear after the June snow.

Another killing frost arrived in July. Additional severe cold struck again in August. Farmers repeatedly planted crops only to watch frost destroy them. Grain and vegetables that survived the early cold faced further damage as the growing season continued to shrink.

The consequences reached far beyond the farm.

New England families depended heavily on what they could grow themselves. When crops failed, there was less food available, and prices rose. Hay became scarce, livestock became more difficult to feed, and families faced the prospect of entering another New England winter with inadequate supplies.

And this strange year was not confined to northern New England.

The Connecticut River Valley experienced the same extraordinary weather pattern. A compilation of historical weather observation records shows that Springfield received two or three inches of snow on September 11, 1816. For people living in Springfield and the surrounding countryside, including the communities that would become familiar to later generations as Wilbraham and Hampden, the idea of snow returning in September was anything but ordinary.

By then, farmers had endured months of cold, frost and crop failures.

The problem was not simply that one storm arrived at the wrong time. It was that the entire rhythm of the agricultural year had been disrupted. Spring had been delayed, summer had brought repeated frosts, and autumn arrived before many crops had a chance to mature.

There was little that an 1816 farmer could do about it.

There were no weather satellites, no long-range forecasts, and no understanding of what was happening in the atmosphere thousands of miles away. People could observe the strange conditions, but they could not explain them.

Some believed the unusual cold might be connected to ice in the Atlantic or other natural causes. Newspapers carried theories attempting to explain why summer seemed to have disappeared. The true explanation, the enormous volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora, was not understood at the time.

For New England farmers, however, the cause mattered less than the consequences. A farmer could not feed his family with a scientific explanation.

He needed corn. He needed hay. He needed his livestock to survive. He needed enough food to get through another winter.

For many families, 1816 became a year of difficult choices. Some farmers in New England eventually abandoned their farms and moved westward, where they hoped to find better agricultural opportunities. The unusual weather was one factor contributing to a larger migration toward western New York, Ohio, and beyond.

And then, eventually, the strange weather passed.

The following years brought more normal conditions, but people did not quickly forget 1816. For those who lived through it, the memory of snow in June, killing frosts in summer, and winter-like temperatures during the growing season remained extraordinary.

Today, we know that a volcano halfway around the world had helped alter the climate of New England.

In 1816, the people of Wilbraham and the surrounding Connecticut River Valley could not have known that.

They simply knew that something was terribly wrong with the weather.

Summer had arrived on the calendar.

But for much of New England, summer never really came.