The weather this spring in part recalls the extraordinary summer of 1816.
According to the best records, January and February were warm and spring like. March was cold and stormy. Vegetation had gotten well along in April, when real winter set in. Sleet and snow fell on seventeen different days in May. In June there was either frost or snow every night but three. The snow was five inches deep for several days in succession in the interior of New York, and from ten inches to three feet in Vermont and Maine. July was cold and frosty, ice formed as thick as windowpanes in every one of the New England states. August was still worse. Ice formed nearly an inch in thickness and killed nearly everything green in the United States and in Europe. In the spring of 1817, corn, which had been kept over from the crops of 1815, sold for from $5 to $10 a bushel, the buyers purchasing it for seed. On May 10, 1835, snow fell to the depth of a foot in Jamestown, Virginia, and was piled up in huge drifts in most of the northern states. There was snow in many parts of Iowa and Illinois on May 11, 1878, and again as late as May 22, 1883. So……… a little bit of rain isn't all that bad.
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