Recalling the Summer less Year 1816

There are winters here in Cheshire that we still talk about by the hearth fire years later. But try telling your neighbors you saw snow falling thick in June—not just a passing flurry, but enough to cover the very fields where your corn should be knee-high.

If you didn’t live through the year of 1816, you’d think a man had lost his mind. But for those of us trying to scratch a living out of the dirt back then, it was the bitter truth. We called it "Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death," or the "Poverty Year," and it nearly broke us.

Back in those days, Cheshire wasn't a place of bustling neighborhoods or paved roads. We didn't have grocery stores down on what you call Route 10, and no trucks were coming from out of state to rescue us. If the crops in your soil failed, your family didn't eat. It was as simple, and as terrifying, as that.

The Ominous Spring and the Dimmed Sun

The trouble actually began a year earlier, though none of us knew it at the time. We later found out that a massive volcano called Mount Tambora had erupted halfway across the world in Indonesia. It threw up so much ash and smoke that it spread like a dark shroud across the sky, dimming the sun.

By the spring of 1816, the air just felt wrong. There was a persistent, dry fog that hung over the Connecticut river valley and our Cheshire hills. No matter how hard the wind blew or the rain came, that hazy, brown-tinted sky wouldn't clear. The sun looked weak, and when it set, it was an eerie, fiery red.

We broke the ground and sowed our corn, wheat, and squash, praying for the summer warmth to break through. It never did.

The Summer Blizzards

On the morning of June 6, I stepped outside and couldn't believe my eyes. A full-blown winter snowstorm was sweeping across Connecticut. Over in Plymouth, Connecticut clockmaker Chauncey Jerome had to bundle up in his heaviest winter overcoat and mittens just to trudge out to his workshop.

The next morning, the thermometer over in New Haven plummeted to a bone-chilling 35°F.

We were horrified. The ground froze hard right in the middle of June. If you look at the old newspapers from that time, like the Hartford Courant 1816, the reports matched the despair we felt in our bones. The mountains to the north were buried under a foot of snow. My neighbors and I had to hurry our newly shorn sheep into the barns to keep them from freezing to death, and we were forced to light our parlor stoves just to stay warm in a month that should have been swimming in sunshine. Even the birds were dropping dead in the middle of the roads from the sudden, bitter cold.

We tried to replant what we could, coaxing the tiny shoots of corn and beans back out of the cold mud. But July gave us no mercy. On the night of July 9, a brutal overnight freeze struck, sending temperatures deep into the 20s. It completely wiped out the summer squash and remaining corn.

By September, the little corn that had managed to survive turned moldy and rotted right in the damp, sunless dirt. Reverend Thomas Robbins over in East Windsor wrote what we were all thinking in his diary that harvest season: "I presume no person living has known so poor a crop of corn in New England, at this season, as now."

Starvation and Panic

By the time winter truly set in, panic took hold of the town. Without healthy corn or hay, we had no provender to feed our livestock. Everyone came to the same desperate realization at once: we had to sell off our cattle and pigs before they starved to death. Because everyone was trying to sell at the same time, livestock prices completely crashed, ruining what little income we had left.

Meanwhile, the price of basic food exploded. Grain, flour, and oats became painfully expensive overnight—oats alone saw a massive 660% price jump. We stretched our meals with whatever root vegetables managed to survive underground. Survival became the only thing that mattered.

Catching the "Ohio Fever"

That impossible summer broke the spirits of many good, multi-generational Cheshire families. We had spent years clearing the rocks from our fields, only to watch our children's food freeze in July.

Right around then, dispatches started traveling back from the west. In the papers, like the Hartford Courant 1817, we read letters from places like Columbus, Ohio. While we were shivering, they were enjoying an incredibly mild winter—describing it as a pleasant "Indian summer" where people were actively plowing their gardens in January.

To a starving Cheshire farmer, Ohio sounded like Canaan.

An epidemic we called "Ohio Fever" swept through our congregation. Entire families packed up their wooden wagons, turned their backs on their ancestral homesteads, and headed west for the fertile soils of the Western Reserve. The local papers tried to scare us into staying, printing warnings about frontier dangers and swamp sicknesses, but the threat of starving in New England was far more real. Connecticut's population barely grew at all over that decade, while Ohio's population exploded by over 150% as our neighbors chased a fresh start.

The Memory That Lingers

By late 1818, the volcanic ash finally cleared from the atmosphere, the weather normalized, and the soil recovered. But Cheshire was fundamentally changed. Many of our old friends never returned, and their farms lay abandoned. Those of us who stayed rebuilt our town with fewer hands and a newfound respect for the fragile whims of the sky.

If you want to look at the actual diaries and weather logs of the folks who lived through those dark days with me, you can find them preserved in the archives at the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History (which used to be the Connecticut Historical Society) or digitized in the Connecticut State Library.

It’s strange to think that people now drive their modern cars down Route 10 past shopping centers and schools, completely unaware that two centuries ago, we were battling blizzards in June and frozen fields in July, praying we'd live to see another spring.