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Figure 9.2. This graph, based on a fifty-year average, shows the impact of Tambora's Frankenstein weath-
er on the New England growing season in 1816—for (a) southern Maine, (b) southern New Hampshire,
and (c) eastern Massachusetts, respectively. The notorious conditions of the “Year without a Summer” cut
the growing season by half or more. Abbreviated summer seasons across the volcanic decade of the 1810s
are particularly evident here for Maine and New Hampshire. (C. R. Harington, ed., The Year without a Sum-
mer? World Climate in 1816 [Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Nature, 1992], 133; Courtesy of the Canadian
Museum of Nature.)
The year 1816 was not the coldest in the annals of the eastern United States in terms of
average temperatures, but it is the only year to record frosts in each of the summer growing
months, June, July, and August. Extreme dry conditions also prevailed. Newspapers repor-
ted the melancholy sight of “fields burned from drought.” This deadly combination of frost
and drought ensured the summer of 1816's notoriety as the shortest growing season in his-
tory—fewer than 70 days in New Haven, for example, as opposed to an average 126 days.
Lack of hay meant feeding starving cattle with corn, reducing the overall supply. Adding to
the misery, poor forest management since colonial times had resulted in dwindling reserves
of first-growth timber throughout the Northeast and a shortage of firewood. Talk of an ap-
proaching famine intensified when a late September frost ended hopes of salvaging even a
vestigial New England corn crop, while down south, planters in Georgia and South Carolina
contemplated the loss of half their cotton harvest. 8
For the retired third president of the United States, the disastrous summer of 1816 in the
Atlantic states raised the specter of the drought of 1755, when scores of Virginians had died
of outright starvation. In September, Jefferson reported to Albert Gallatin in Paris that “we
have had the most extraordinary year of drought and cold ever known in the history of Amer-
ica.” 9 Sparked by acute drought conditions, forest fires raged up and down the Atlantic states.
As a winter wheat farmer, Jefferson felt the impact of the cold, dry summer most acutely the
following year. In August 1817 he reported that for a second successive season “a great part
of my own crop has not yielded seed,” while his neighbors had taken to releasing their cattle
onto the ruined wheat fields to make what they could of feeding on the stunted remains. Even
three years later, the trend had not fully reversed. In 1820, Jefferson lamented to his steward
that the successful planting of staple crops—wheat, tobacco, oats, corn—“seems [to] become
more and more difficult every year.” 10
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