HARD TIMES AT MONTICELLO - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 114

CHAPTER NINE
HARD TIMES AT MONTICELLO
From Indonesia to India, from China to the Alps, from the Arctic wastes to the villages of
Ireland, our Tambora story has contained multitudes. We have sailed hemispheres and cris-
scrossed domains of earth, sea, and sky. Now finally we turn to North America, where the
folk memory of the Year without a Summer has, arguably, endured longer than anywhere else.
Writing in 1924, meteorological historian Willis Milham could nominate the disastrous grow-
ing season of 1816 as the most “famous … written about” weather event in American history:
“If all the statements in climatologies, in topics on the weather, in biographies, in histories,
and in the periodical literature were collected, they would form a sizable volume.” 1 Even at the
the end of the twentieth century, 1816 continued “to be a topic of great popular interest,” par-
ticularly in the newspapers and journals of New England. 2 Fascination with the lost summer of
1816 has, for two hundred years, been shared between meteorologists and popular historians,
with a shelf-load of commentary to show for it.
The conspicuous gap that remains—and which this chapter aims to fill—is to rewrite the
fabled Year without a Summer as a nationwide teleconnected narrative of weather disasters,
demographic upheaval, and economic boom-and-bust that helped shape a full decade of the
social history of antebellum America. The Tamboran deep freeze also signaled an end of the
early republican era of strident climate optimism, embodied in the patriotic figure of Thomas
Jefferson. Approaching the bicentenary of Tambora's world-altering eruption, it is time to res-
cue the Year without a Summer from the dusty back pages of American folklore: to reimagine
the late 1810s in the United States as a multiyear period of extreme weather with cascading
social and political effects—and hence marked relevance to the twenty-first century. In this
chapter, the old weather legends revive again to haunt us, this time as premonitory images of
our own emerging climate dystopia.
EIGHTEEN-HUNDRED-AND-FROZE-TO-DEATH
Residents of the isolated community of Annsville, New York, placed a high value on formal
education, a scarce resource in rural America in the early nineteenth century. A schoolteacher's
arrival was like “an angel's visit,” a rare and precious event. 3 In the summer term of 1816,
Annsville had been blessed by just such a visit, and the children of the scattered settlement in
Oneida County dutifully set out each morning for the long walk to the schoolhouse. The unusu-
ally bitter, frosty mornings of early June did not dull the enthusiasm of two outlying Annsville
households for educating their offspring. Nor did the fact their four children had one pair of
shoes between them for the three-mile walk, and no stockings. What happened to this unlucky
group of schoolchildren in the Year without a Summer became the stuff of fireside legend for
generations of upstate New Yorkers.
On the morning of June 6, the four classmates, aged six to nine, set out as usual and arrived
punctually at the schoolhouse. For a six-year-old to walk three miles barefoot in a frost must