About Connections: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history think it irrelevant; many who love history think it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest road map to how we got here: America in the 21st century.
Our weather is nothing if not varied. From the drifting snow reported on last week to a most peculiar spring, New England is unpredictable.
After church in Hancock, a Shaker, Nicholas Bennet, sat down and wrote, “all was froze … [the hills] barren like winter.” It was May 1816.
Temperatures went below freezing almost every day in May. On June 6, 1816, snow fell. The ground froze on June 9. On June 12, the Shakers had to replant crops destroyed by the cold. Some fruits and vegetables survived, but corn was utterly destroyed not even fit for animal feed. In late June, frost was reported for five consecutive nights.
The frost spread from Massachusetts to New York, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The damage to crops in New York and New England was devastating. Crop failures spread from New England to Canada. Prices rose sharply, and hunger followed. It promoted migration, and the first new Englanders headed west.
On July 7, it was so cold everything stopped growing. In Cummington, Sarah Snell Bryant wrote in her diary, “Weather backwards.”
Seventy years later, in Cummington, historian William G. Aikens wrote, “Severe frosts occurred every month; on June 7th and 8th snow fell, and it was so cold that crops were cut down, even freezing the roots … There was frost in August … In the early Autumn corn was so thoroughly frozen that it never ripened and was scarcely worth harvesting. Breadstuffs were scarce and prices high and the poorer class of people were often in straits for want of food. It must be remembered that the granaries of the great west had not then been opened to us by railroad communication [in 1816], and people were obliged to rely upon their own resources or upon others in their immediate locality.”
In July and August, there was ice on lakes and even on rivers. There was frost in Virginia in August. Temperature swings from 90–35 occurred in a single day in Virginia. At Monticello, the crops failed and Thomas Jefferson was forced further into debt.
On September 9, 1816, the American Beacon, a Virginia newspaper, reported, “the cold as well as the drought has nipt [nipped] the buds of hope.”
A few days later, The Beacon wrote, “…we have not yet had what could properly be called summer. Easterly winds have prevailed for nearly three months past … the sun during that time has generally been obscured and the sky overcast with clouds; the air has been damp and uncomfortable, and frequently so chilling as to render the fireside a desirable retreat.”
Henceforth it was called “the year without summer.” Instead of blossoms, ripening fruit, and sunshine, there was brown, bluish, and yellow snowfall. What was going on?
In a sentence: over 9,800 miles away from Massachusetts, Mount Tambora erupted. All the peculiar and decidedly unpleasant weather was caused by a volcano. The discolored snow was snow mixed with volcanic ash. In the spring and summer of 1816, a persistent “dry fog” was observed in parts of the eastern United States. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight. Sunspots were visible with the naked eye. Nothing dispersed the fog.
The volcano erupted in April 1815. It continued spewing for six months. The detritus circled the globe, affecting weather until the true winter of 1816/17. Sixty-three years later, the year of too much summer arrived in the county.
At 2 p.m. on July 16, 1879, a gentle spattering of rain began. It followed days of oppressive heat, and it was welcome. No one sheltered; folks went about their business unaware of what was moving toward them.
Without warning, the rain mixed with ice pellets and the world exploded into light and sound: the pinging of the hail interspersed with the flashes of lightning and claps of thunder.
When it appeared, the tornado was full blown and angry. An observer in the Berkshire Life Building estimated the height of the funnel cloud at 900 feet. In 1874, the Berkshire Life Building was in the center of Pittsfield, on the corner of West Street and Park Square. The observer was looking west.
He saw it come as if the Taconic Range had birthed the tornado. It cut a path about 1,000 feet wide and travelled east. He watched as it veered south just before Park Square, thus missing him and the building in which he stood. The center of Pittsfield was spared, but that was the last of Pittsfield’s good luck.
Mills on Housatonic Street were destroyed. A worker at the Pomeroy Mill, Michael Collins, was killed.
People ran for cover, but many did not run fast enough. Driving on South Street, possibly trying to reach her home in Lenox, Mrs. Beckwith was killed by a falling tree. On the other hand, Judge Rockwell, traveling the same route to his home in Lenox, was able to perceive the danger in time. He left his rig and found shelter in a farmhouse.
Not all houses were safe havens. One eyewitness saw: “a house moved some fifteen feet from its foundation by the tornado.” Another witness watched as the tornado stripped the roof from a house and tossed it into the air “as if it were wood shavings.”
It is hard to imagine the swirling mess as the tornado flung trees and barns into the air and dumped bridges into the river.
One of the oddest occurrences was that the home of dentist George M. Wentworth, on South Street, was lifted, completely turned on its foundation, and then set down. The house was in one piece, but stood back to front on its foundation.
Some estimated the tornado moved so swiftly that it lingered in any one spot just 40 seconds. For those 40 seconds, everything in its path was ripped from its moorings and flung aside. The air was thick with destruction, and then, the tornado smacked into Washington Mountain and was gone.
In the minutes it was on the ground, the tornado did extensive damage. Giant elms were bent almost to the ground and stripped of leaves. Barns and other outbuildings were reduced to matchsticks. Debris was thick on the ground. An iron bridge was lifted into the air like a child’s toy and set sailing through the air. It was dumped across a stretch of river half a mile away.
People were lifted out of carriages and off the ground. They, too, flew through the air and were deposited far from where they meant to be. There were only two deaths reported, but many were badly injured.
According to the Pittsfield Sun, almost immediately after the storm passed, “the people of Pittsfield set to work to remove the ruins and repair the damage.” According to the paper, “all marks of the storm would soon be gone.”
They felt certain another storm of this magnitude was unlikely to visit the Berkshires. Many remember the tornado of 1995.
