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have been an ordeal unto itself. But worse lay in store. This strange, cold June day grew pro-
gressively colder , contrary to all the norms of summer in the Northeast. The temperature in
the schoolhouse—none too comfortable at the best of times—had become intolerable. Then,
like something out of a bad dream, it began to snow. Big, wet flakes. As snow accumulated
under darkening skies, the mood of discomfort in the schoolroom turned to fear. The teach-
er dismissed the students, directing them to find refuge immediately at the nearest house on
their way. The barefoot students ran through the snow to a house they could see only a few
hundred yards distant. But it was locked, and no one answered their hammering and cries.
Drenched in the whirling snow, the four children felt the first gusts of panic. By this time, the
schoolhouse was deserted, too. So, no going back.
With their survival now at stake, the nine-year-old boy, leader of the group, devised a
complicated plan. Each of them would take a turn on his back with their feet in his jacket
pockets while the others ran as far ahead as they could, stopping only when the cold of the
snow became unbearable. He told them to rub each other's feet while they waited for him.
And so they rotated, a hundred or so yards at a time, over the course of two miles of rocky,
icy road, with snow rising up to their knees. At last in hailing distance of the first house,
the girls were rescued by their startled father, leaping like a deer across the snowdrifts. The
young hero of the story survived a while longer in the storm before he too found a place at
the open fire in the cabin. Sitting too close, the pain of his thawing body overwhelmed his
senses, and he fell unconscious. His feet had been torn to ribbons on the icy sticks and pebbles
of his frozen march, and he could not walk for days.
So goes one of the innumerable tales of common suffering arising from the summer of
1816, the year Americans came to call “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death.” In a season
marked by bizarre fluctuations of temperature, June 6—the day the Annsville schoolchildren
found themselves caught in a snowstorm—stands as its surreal, wintry apex, an iconic day
in the history of American weather. This unheard-of June snow, followed by other severe
frosts through the summer, laid waste to staple crops and fruit stocks throughout the Atlantic
states from Maine south even to the Carolinas. The cascading short- and medium-term im-
pacts of this disaster—on food production, demography, and ultimately the entire U.S. eco-
nomy—mark the 1816 summer as the most destructive extreme weather event of the nine-
teenth century.
The first signs of Tambora's doom-filled arrival on American shores came in early May.
Newspapers in Washington, D.C., reported the sudden appearance of choking dust clouds over
the capital: “the whole atmosphere is filled with a thick haze, the inconvenience of which
is not diminished by the clouds of impalpable dust which float in the air.” 4 The insinuating
presence of Tambora's aerosol cloud dimmed the sun across the entire North Atlantic region,
wreaking havoc on the evolution of seasonally benign weather systems. The rogue snowstorm
that almost killed the schoolchildren in upstate New York originated with an intense, station-
ary high-pressure system of the east coast of Greenland in late May. This effectively blocked
the eastward trajectory of North American weather, funneling Arctic air southward—a system
characteristic of deep winter. As this cold air encountered the warmer atmosphere to the
south through the week of May 28-June 4, it brought wildly unstable conditions to New Eng-
land and Canada. An exaggerated temperature gradient across the mid-Atlantic latitudes in-
tensified the overall energy of the emerging system. 5
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