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When Spring Never Came

© Steven Haywood Yaskell

We expect seasons to look like their pictures might on calendars. A beautiful spring, summer, or fall is eagerly anticipated with each calendar flip. But nature can bring our best expectations to crashing halts. Those in whom we trust, as well, can sometimes bring about crashing halts to our expectations - and even to our well being.

Salem, Massachusetts in the spring of 1816 was a prosperous trading and banking town losing its edge to Boston. Everybody depended on local farms, banker and beggar alike. Freight shipping fresh winter produce from places like Imperial Valley, California lay 100 years in the future, and wasn´t common for another forty after that. People in 1816 were used to doing without fresh vegetables for months on end. A bounteous spring crop was vital. So expectation was always high. But something was funny about this spring. People just could not put their fingers on it. The local newspapers were the farmers' lifelines for news. This is what The Gazette had to say about May regarding the weather:

The present season is a backward one...if the cause is asked, we answer...we had a long, protracted winter, but the weather suddenly passed to the opposite extreme...The prospect at present is very flattering to farmers. ("The Season" in The Gazette, Salem, Tuesday morning, June 18th, 1816).

What was occurring, in Salem and across the Northern Hemisphere, was a spring blossoming forth in intense heat, jarringly interrupted by periods of cold so severe that it would kill and stunt crops and drive birds into frenzy so panicky, barns and even homes were broken into by them. A few days before The Gazette came out, prominent Salem doctor William Bentley wrote in his diary; "in few seasons have we heard more bitter complaints against the cold weather than since June has come in," and ended, "we shall soon hear complaints of heat." He wasn't being facetious. He actually meant that, after freezing to death for a few weeks, it would get extremely hot and hazy, as it had already been doing. The ups and downs in the weather were that sharp. And they were to continue being that way for the rest of the summer into winter, and in lesser severities over the following years. Some days were tepid warm, others, dryly fogged and dim.

Largely forgotten now in science's annals, it was surprising doctors did not understand what was occurring, even then. Ben Franklin -more than just a witty publishing magnate (for which he is universally admired in America) - had been a great scientist (for which he is shamefully not). He received richly deserved honorary degrees from Harvard and Oxford. He was the sole American member of the London Royal Society and the Paris Académie Royal des Sciences. (No mean feat for the sixteenth son of a Boston candlestick maker.) For all that he is considered a clever tinker who guessed right. (Wrong.) A penetrating atmospheric researcher, in 1784 he made connections between cold weather, dry fogs, dimness and - significantly - large volcanic eruptions. Tambora, nearly four miles high until blown in half by an eruption not seen on Earth in 10,000 years, erupted in April 1815. This bothered no one in particular except 80,000 nearby residents who perished and of course, those who later starved, there and elsewhere. It rang no bells for Dr, Edward Holyoke, Salem physician, machine-like weather recorder, and the first president of the American Philosophical Society.

The copyright of the article When Spring Never Came in Massachusetts is owned by Steven Haywood Yaskell. Permission to republish When Spring Never Came in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.