The winters of the early 19th century — the last decades of the “Little Ice Age” that chilled North America and Europe for over five centuries (1300-1850) — were among the coldest in Connecticut’s recorded history. Salt-water harbors froze over months at a time, and blizzards regularly dumped several feet of snow on the state. It was the bitterly cold summertime weather of 1816, however, that made national headlines.
Alternating periods of overnight frosts and extended droughts lasting from May through October caused residents all across New England to refer to 1816 as “the year without a summer” or, more ominously, “the poverty year,” as the wildly oscillating temperatures caused widespread crop failure.
On July 9th, overnight temperatures in Connecticut plummeted well below freezing (into the 20s, by some accounts!), generating a heavy frost that killed the few summer crops that had managed to survive the preceding frosts of May and June. As a result, prices for flour, wheat, and other food staples rose dramatically the rest of the year. Families struggled to acquire sufficient provender, not just for themselves but for their livestock, too. Ultimately, the agricultural hardships of 1816 accelerated the already fast-paced outmigration of thousands of New Englanders to western states and territories such as Ohio and the soon-to-be states of Illinois and Indiana.
Today, scientists pin most of the blame for 1816’s freakish summer weather on volcanic ash originating from the eruption of Mount Tambora in modern-day Indonesia — the largest and most explosive volcanic eruption ever recorded. Mount Tambora had erupted in April 1815, but it took a year for the massive amounts of volcanic ash to travel 10,000 miles in the Earth’s atmosphere and begin affecting the weather of the northeastern United States. Combined with the already chilling effects of the Little Ice Age, it created a year of wild weather that Connecticans would never forget.
Shirley T. Wajda, “Eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death: 1816, The Year Without a Summer,” connecticuthistory.org
Robert Evans, “Blast from the Past,” Smithsonian Magazine