It has been a dry summer — parts of York County are in the grips of what weather experts are describing as a severe drought. But, so far, it all pales in comparison to what took place 200 years ago.
1816 — the extraordinary Year Without a Summer — was a horrific year for farmers across the Northern Hemisphere, with snow and hard frosts all through what should have been the hottest months of summer.
Imagine the middle of summer. The air should be hot and humid, beans should be halfway up the pole by now and the corn should be knee high. But in 1816, New Englanders instead woke up to an unprecedented pall of white frost blanketing their already stunted seedlings.
“I mean, in some cases there was a half a foot of snow on the ground. Places like Fryeburg, in the middle of August,” says longtime MPBN meteorologist Lou McNally. “It was very serious because anything they planted was killed.”
McNally researched the weather of 1816 as part of his doctoral studies. He says the year started out OK — downright sultry in May — but by June, winter snows had returned with a vengeance.
Not a single month went by in 1816 without a hard, killing frost. Horses were being fed birch twigs and people resorted to slaughtering their farm animals. By mid-July, the landscape looked like November and there was fear of widespread famine.
“People actually did go hungry,” McNally says. “There’s all kinds of diary reports about people having root stew and anything they could dig out of the barn boards.”
At the time, no one really understood what was causing the bad weather. Some chalked it up to an act of God. Scientists thought maybe the sun had dimmed in its output and that was causing the cold temperatures.
But a year earlier, in April 1815, Mount Tambora in present day Indonesia had blown its top. It was one of the most powerful volcanic blasts the world has ever experienced.
“The eruption put enough material in the atmosphere and into the stratosphere that it was sufficient to produce a global cooling that lasted for several years,” says Sean Birkel, a scientist with the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine. “Considering feedbacks in the system, probably, the Tambora impact probably took several decades to completely wear off.”
Four hundred cubic miles of ash and debris managed to disrupt the climate for a couple of decades, and led to hardships all across the globe, especially in the Northern Hemisphere.
There were also social effects — Birkel says about 10 percent of Maine’s population pulled up stakes and moved.
“A lot of people thought, ‘We need to get out of New England, because the agriculture is not reliable, the weather’s not reliable,’” Birkel says. “People thought, ‘Well, this might be the new normal.’“
In a scene right out of “The Grapes of Wrath,” newspaper reports described 15-20 wagons of disillusioned farmers leaving the region every day to seek their fortunes out west. At the time, that meant getting as far as Ohio.
The migration itself was dubbed “Ohio Fever,” and there has been debate about the role it played politically here at home.
McNally has uncovered a theory that climate disruption led to Maine’s statehood. Coastal merchants, he says, were desperate to separate from Massachusetts, but in previous years had been outnumbered by farmers whose crops were sold in Boston. By 1819, he says the population appears to have shifted and so did support for independence.
“We still might be part of Massachusetts if that hadn’t happened,” he says. “Think about that — oh my goodness.”
Other historians say there’s evidence that statehood was viewed as a possible way to stop the outward migration from Maine. State historian Earle Shettleworth says an article in a Portland broadsheet makes the assertion that independence would give people a new reason to remain.
“If Maine is its own state then it will be more attractive for people to stay here, if we’re governing ourselves,” he says.
Now, two centuries years later, people are still struggling to understand climate and its effects. Volcanic activity continues to play a role. Remember the harsh winter of 2015? Birkel says you can thank two volcanoes in Iceland for that.
But the world hasn’t seen an event anywhere close to what happened in 1816.
“If there was another Tambora-sized eruption to go off in the next few years, there would be a big impact,” he says.
But Birkel says it wouldn’t create the same effects as what happened 200 years ago, because of global warming.
