p. 1 | The Weather of 1871 by D. T. Taylor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 28, 1872

The Weather of 1871.

By D. T. Taylor

The weather since our last report in The Journal of December 17, 1870, has fully maintained its reputation for inconstancy. We have summer in winter and winter in summer, and frequently, spring, summer, autumn and winter, all in a single day. Weather-wise people assert that the seasons are becoming gradually changed, owing to the earth’s falling behind in the race of the planets around the zodiac. Perhaps so. At any rate, November, usually bleak and dismal, was in 1870 transformed into September, and astonished everybody by its mildness. It was noted for sunny days and even temperature; of thirty-nine previous Novembers, only eight were generally warmer. In the Western States, it was the pleasantest in the memory of men. Since 1849, the month had not been so mild, and to its last day not a snow-flake had fallen at Chicago. December came, a real winter month. But what weather! It was superb. In Eastern Massachusetts the mercury fell to 30° only two nights down to the 12th of the month. On the 2d, cotton stalks were in bloom in Tennessee, a phenomenon declared unknown before for half a century. The same day, farmers plowed their lands in cold Minnesota. On to the second week, Illinois and all the West was balmy as May in atmospheric splendor. No snow had fallen. At the 13th day, the thermometer ranged from 32° to 63° above in Massachusetts, and from Pennsylvania to the Canada line could be seen lilacs and soft maples in bud or bloom, with millions of blades of grass as green as June. A Northampton editor wrote: “No man remembers an autumn with so little freezing as this.” But while everybody from Chicago to Boston was in admiration, not to say ecstasy, over blooming flowers and a glorious succession of cloudless days, and wondering whether it was “last summer or next spring,” suddenly the Polar King appeared on the scene, and with frosty fingers and snow-white beard breathed over the broad land. The 16th saw the continent locked tight in his grasp. It was never done quicker. Lake Champlain froze over, and remained so. Snow fell everywhere. Augusta, Ga., had a snow-storm on the 22d. Two days later, Virginia had ice four inches thick, and the mercury 6° below. On the 23d, in Northern Illinois, the thermometer showed 16°, 20° and 22° below zero. The Mississippi was crossed on the ice at St. Louis the 25th, while in New Mexico the mercury ran down to 28° below. The 24th was the coldest day in Washington since 1867, and the 30th the coldest day in New York known for ten years. The month that had come in like a lamb went out as a lion; winter had inaugurated his reign, and the cold snap was now all the talk. Meanwhile, at Naples it snowed heavily on the 4th, with cold north-east winds, and the islands and mountains were clad in white. But why a bitter winter term in sunny Italy and no such high temperature in New England in November and December for forty-six years previous, when it should naturally have been vice versa?

The icy monarch marched on. A dry summer and a rainless autumn brought a drought that was felt from New England to Nebraska. The Merrimac had not run so low since 1807 as on New Year’s day. Farming and mill interests everywhere suffered, and the aqueous famine gave birth to a mortal fear of fires. The 23d of January saw cold down to 31° below in Clinton County, N. Y., and snow on the Sierra Nevadas sixteen feet deep on a level.

To go back a little: On the 14th, while Portsmouth, N. H., was enjoying the mercury at 80° degrees above zero in the sun, and all New England was mild and warm, Northern Illinois had a snow-fall of three feet in depth, lasting two days. The next day an Episcopal bishop ordered prayers for rain, and the day following it fell over various portions of the Eastern and Middle States—a welcome thing where springs never before failing for forty years had utterly dried up. “A remarkable winter,” wrote the editor of the New York World, and on that very day (18th) a four days’ fog lifted from the great metropolis. Sioux City, Iowa, had mild weather, rain, sleet, bitter cold, furious wind, thunder and lightning in horrible order; water ran from the streams on Mount Washington; and Petaluma Valley, Cal., had a freeze that formed ice half an inch thick—a phenomenon never before heard of in that locality.

Still it was dry and snowless, generally. By the 23d, to clean the track of the Boston and Albany Railroad for a distance of 200 miles it had cost $90,000, while to the same date in 1866 it had cost $90,000, so drifted was the snow. “Such a winter as this for horse or steam railway was never known before,” said a journalist. Down to this time, the season on all the Atlantic had been so mild that the consumption of coal for weeks previously had fallen off thirty per cent. Then came an Arctic blast. The 23d was the coldest morning of the winter. In Canada, Maine, and Northern New York, the instrument exhibited 24° and 31° below zero. At New York the mercury was depressed 26° in a few hours, and reached 10° below. At Portsmouth, where on the 14th it had risen to 80°, it now fell to 12° below. Ice was more obstructing in the harbors of our great cities than for many years; a storm of unparalleled severity raged from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic, turning even the Gulf Stream into a “marine hell.” On Mount Washington the thermometer showed 45° below, and the wind 90 and 100 miles an hour. It was, said Prof. Hitchcock, a combination of wind and cold “unknown in meteorological records, even within the Arctic circle.” “It is doubtful,” he adds, “if a civilized being ever witnessed such a terrific gale.” And so winter came in spasms and streaks. It was “condensed winter,” said one.

South, January was so unusually cold as that in Florida, below lat. 30, the banana, lemon and orange crop was greatly injured by a general frost, a calamity known there previously only three times in a hundred years. In all Great Britain, both December and January were unusually cold, the coldest known for ten years. Blackbirds and other birds died of hunger and cold by thousands. In France, January was intensely cold, and thousands of people were frozen to death or frost-bitten. The contending armies suffered terribly. In Germany, the winter had not been so severe for many years. In Russia, snow lay twelve feet deep on a level over the railway lines, all traffic was stopped, and St. Petersburg was shut up four days without mail-bag, letter, or paper, from the outer world.

From the last week in December to February, extraordinary weather prevailed in Australia, and Christmas, which should there be of summer temperature, was, to the wonder of all, cold as winter.

February 2 witnessed thunder, lightnings, and snow-squalls in Southern Vermont; while violets purpled the borders in New Orleans, with hot weather in Georgia and Florida, and warm and dry in California. Then on the 4th and 5th a cold wave swept from the center of the continent to the Atlantic; the mercury at Norfolk, Va., went to 7° below; at Cheyenne it was 58° below; on Mount Washington, on the 4th, it was 40° below, and the next day 59° below, and the wind over a 100 miles an hour! Canada and New England had their coldest winter blasts, and Somerset River, in Massachusetts, froze over for the first time in many years. How can human nature endure such violent climatic changes? Then, while on the 12th and 14th a great snow fell all over the North, East River at New York was bridged with ice; Gothamites protested that it was the sixth snow-storm of the winter, and roundly declared that no such weather had been experienced in that metropolis for twenty-five years, fierce gales filling the air, and cold chilling the bones. At the same time, Wyoming Territory was having a most delightful winter, no snow, days bright and warm, sheep unfed in the fields, and Jacksonville, Flor., reveled in orange, plum and peach blossoms, with the mercury at 80° above—too high for a natural season. The 20th brought the most terrific thunder and lightning storm in California ever known in twenty years, and skating on ice at Huntsville, Ala. Two most unusual and astounding events were these. On that day, the Categat was free of ice. Two days later, there was frost in San Francisco, and robins singing in Massachusetts. On the 23d, there was thunder and lightning at Baxter Springs, Kansas, and three days later, butterflies flew about in New Hampshire. The month was mild in England. In Blackheath, it froze but five nights—a most remarkable fact.

If the weather had been freaky and spasmodic in other months, March, usually cold and boisterous, now became frantic with fever. All features of the weather were unseasonable. Violent electrical disturbance, with thunder and lightning in Chicago and Cincinnati on the 2d, the Hudson River free of ice on the 3d, wild geese and robins migrating northward on the 6th opened the ball for the St. Louis tornado on the 8th that seemed to utterly break the winter’s back; for the next day the peach trees put forth blossoms near Boston, and frogs came out and sang at Blue Hill, Massachusetts, the season being warm as April. At Lat. 45°, the ice failed for crossing Lake Champlain during the first week, and on the 9th a large butterfly flitted through the sunny air across the door-yard of the writer, a phenomenon never witnessed there before. The mercury was 60° above—an extraordinary day. On the 11th, ice left the Kennebec, in Maine, and its navigation was resumed, this being the earliest on record since the settlement of the State. The 12th was actually a hot day in Boston, and windows and doors were opened freely as in May. The whole of the rivers of the Eastern States were clear of ice to-day, and farmers plowed their fields.

Ice left the Mississippi at Winona the 13th, and the next day was a spring day in the Atlantic States, with green grass and swelling buds all about. On the 14th, the great lakes and Canada and New England rivers were navigated, and peach trees were in full bloom at Little Rock, Ark., with the thermometer exhibiting 78°, the willows budded in Connecticut, boys chased the butterflies through Central Park, New York, and, as if nature had reversed all its order, a grasshopper’s nest, with young ones, was picked up in the field in Maine! On the 16th, ice all left Champlain at its north end, and two days later, sloops sailed on the lake, and the North River steamers began their summer trips between New York and Albany. All along the parallel of Connecticut to the West, willows, poplars, hazel and maple were in bursting bud, and on the 21st, “May-flowers” were plucked over the fields of Maine. Even as far north as Jacksonville, N. B., butterflies were flying about out-doors. The whole first half of March was the warmest first half known for a period of 47 years. At the middle of the month, roads were dry and dusty, and in the cities, water-carts were used. The Baltic was open for navigation on the 25th; they had dandelions, spring flowers, and a spice of snow at New York on the 26th; tree-toads sang in Connecticut on the 27th, and fruit-trees bloomed in South Illinois on the 29th. Was it March? The almanac said so, but people shook their heads and wondered. What did it mean? In both Great Britain and the United States, the temperature all the month was of singular mildness. With butterflies born in the open air and sailing about the fields in December, February, and March, what would April bring?

It brought open water and free navigation at Buffalo, and Champlain free of ice from end to end at its opening, frogs on the 1st, and swallows on the 7th, with lilacs on the 10th, at latitude 45°, the season being a month earlier than usual. A burst of heat of unparalleled intensity fell on the land on the 8th. The mercury soared to heights before unheard of in all this latitude in April. Cherry and pear trees, whose blooming is allotted to May, burst into full blossom. It was “August in April,” said a writer. At New York, the thermometer recorded 81°. At Albany, it went up to 100° in the shade! New York had a fatal case of sun-stroke, “the earliest case ever recorded in this city.” The electricity could not preserve its equanimity. It thundered and lightened all over the country. The 9th brought no respite to the heat—70° in Canada, 81° at Philadelphia, 84° in New York, 86° at Poughkeepsie, 88° at Springfield, Mass., was the thermometrical record. Omaha had it 90° for several days in succession. Buffalo reported 100° in the shade. We seemed to have passed into midsummer at a single bound. The inhabitants of the Atlantic States sweltered and broiled under a torrid sun. Then the lightnings flashed again, rainbursts poured, tornadoes swept the earth, and vivid auroras illuminated the midnight sky. All was convulsion.

Presto! what a change! Suddenly a wave of cold nipped every green thing. A furious norther moved down the California coast. Frost invaded all the valley of the Mississippi clear down to Memphis. At Albany, the mercury in the glass sunk 20° in one hour. At Portsmouth, N. H., “such changes in temperature never were known.” The thermometer, which on Friday said 29° at sunrise and 78° at noon, and on Saturday, 40° at sunrise and 88° at noon (a rise of 50° in a few hours), now fell to the freezing point, as it did everywhere else. So cold was it at Omaha, where it had stood

among the nineties, that on the 10th two persons in the vicinity were reported frozen to death! These extraordinary thermometrical ranges in America are a subject of wonder and inquiry to the people of England. Are they not also a mystery to us? Who can explain them? We have known the mercury to fall sixty degrees in ten hours in Northern New York. There was on those memorable April days some general elemental disturbance which men do not understand. It was phenomenal. In Scotland, the first half of April was cold and frosty, and on the 19th, snow fell all over that country. Thus passed the month. The guesses of some who predicted it would freeze all summer were not wide of the mark.

The unusual features of May are quickly sketched. Ripe cherries, with heat and drought in California, with snow drifts on Mount Washington, New Hampshire, twenty feet in depth on the 1st; a sudden cold in Maine, forming icicles on the fences during a shower on the 10th; six inches of snow fell at Randolph, N. H., on the 11th; ice formed on the north shores of Lake Champlain on the 15th; cold in England and Scotland, with snow on the 17th; and a remarkably cold day at Paris on the 18th. Then came intense heat on Sunday, the 21st, the last week bringing terrible rain-pours, after weeks and months of drought, with fearful convulsions of the elements, and a temperature of from 95° to 99° in the shade.

The month of roses came—not all roses. The 3d, 4th, and 5th, very hot, with thunder all around the skies. Is the contagion of crime in the air? Crime and violence increased with the heat. The weekly arrests in the city of New York, averaging 1300 or 1400 in mid-winter, now ran up to over 2000, and the mortality bill of London, June 4-11 showed 58 deaths by violence in a single week. On the 17th, there was seen the remarkable phenomenon of snow in Valparaiso, S. A., while on the 22d, snow, to a depth of six or eight inches fell in the Jura: “Such an event,” said Galignani, “hardly a fortnight before the summer solstice, has only happened once before since the commencement of the present century.” The same week California suffered with intense heat. On the 26th, Shields, in Scotland, had a smart snow storm, while the 30th brought a killing frost in Northern Vermont! June 3 (as also May 18) was a remarkably cold day at Paris, so much so as to call the attention of the secretary of the Academy of Science, who invited communications respecting the extraordinary degree of coldness, and its cause. But in Iceland, June was warmer, and the thermometer 12° higher than the mean, for the four preceding Junes. The average temperature ran up to 59°, and with winds that blew continually from the south-west, the heat of the valleys was termed “insupportable.” Variety enough for June.

July was freaky, in horrible heat and exceeding cold. The middle of the month, Paris boiled under a tropical sun. It was little less hot in the United States. At Denver City, the thermometer went up to 105° in the shade, “the hottest ever known,” said the telegraph. During the week, between the 9th and 16th, the heat killed, by the diseases it engendered, 310 under two years of age out of the 857 souls that died in New York city, while so full of electricity was the air that a thunder-bolt from a clear sky struck dead an Ohio farmer in his field. This was followed by a cold streak, the thermometer falling marvelously. On the 20th, it showed 16° above the freezing point, in West Virginia. The next day, snow fell in Chautauqua County, N. Y., to a depth of six inches, so that at Forestville, the boys in the streets vigorously snow-balled each other for a quarter of an hour! The same day, South New York and North Pennsylvania had hail so deep that sleighs were run upon it through the streets. On the 22d, a white frost fell at White Sulphur Spa, Va., while the two following nights witnessed a hard frost at Royalston, Mass., and in Northern Ohio, with a corresponding coolness, everywhere on the same line of latitude. July actually went out with sleighing on hail stones, that fell deep and destructive at Albion, Wis.

Equally remarkable was the following month for sudden changes of temperature, with unwonted cold. The whole month was so cold in Yorkshire and other parts of England that good coal fires were needed for comfort, while, at the same time, there was thunder and lightning, almost continually, sometimes there occurring three thunder storms a day. The 16th, in this country, was the hottest day of the season; but, while on the 19th, at San Bernardino, Cal., the mercury went up to the frightful figure of 112° in the shade, a cold wave of air streamed over the Eastern United States, frost appeared, the mercury on Mount Washington fell to 37° above, with frost, and Salem, N. H., had its regular monthly freeze, having experienced frost in every summer month during the season. Of thunder and lightning, the month brought an alarming outburst. More storms of this kind fell upon New York city, and its environs, from the 20th to the 27th, than for many years past. The lightning this summer exploded powder magazines, exploded nitro-glycerine, drove asunder the hills of Asia, and fired off loaded cannon in Scotland, while we record no less than four instances where the subtle fluid struck whole masses of people assembled in crowds, destroying or prostrating hundreds. “Some derangement has crept into the forces of nature,” exclaimed a thoughtful writer, who contemplated these and similar convulsions of the elements. It was the driest, hottest summer ever known in Arizona since its settlement by the whites, and droughts of unexampled severity prevailed in both hemispheres, in some cases, as exemplified in China, Bengal, Hungary, Peru, etc., followed by torrents of rain, that covered the parched regions as with a second deluge.

Two words describe the fall season, viz: Cold and dry. The 8th and 14th of September brought killing frosts in Maine and New Hampshire; on the 20th, the cold settled to 17° above zero on Mount Washington, the next day winter seemed to begin in East Prussia, where a severe snow storm raged, to the astonishment of all good Germans. This was the hottest month of the season in California; the Sacramento river ran a foot lower than ever known before. In the Atlantic States, the weather was unusually cold, and during the last week, frosts, snows, and ice, lay over the Grampian Hills of Scotland. Lake Cochituate was never so low, the valley of Champlain had but one third of its usual rainfall, while in all the valley of the Upper Mississippi and its tributaries, the drought exceeded anything ever known for a quarter of a century. Italy complained of droughts. “Water! water!” was the cry of the burning West. Then when rain came it would pour down like a cataract. This phenomenon of sudden rain-bursts was witnessed in an extraordinary degree in Yorkshire, England, on the 6th, where rain equal to a ton and a half of water to each square rod of surface, fell in a single thunder storm of short duration. We put on record another similar instance: At Rouse’s Point, N. Y., June 21, 1871, during an electrical manifestation—of such extraordinary quantity and violence as was never previously seen in the present century, rain fell to the depth of six inches in forty-five minutes, which is equal to sixteen feet in twenty-four hours!

While all the month of October continued hot and dry in California, and the Western World surged with heated air and devouring flames, New Mexico and Wyoming had, on the 16th, four feet of snow. The same date, the first snow fell in Canada. But raspberries were plucked at Arlington, Mass., on the 18th, and violets bloomed on the hillsides at Woodford, Vt., on the 26th, while the month in England was warmer than September. Nevertheless, winter was early on hand and vengeful with rigor.

And thus we have experienced summer weather in winter, and winter weather in summer, with the four seasons turned topsy-turvy and end for end, mixed up in inextricable confusion, and ofttimes the distinctive features of each and all crowded into a day. As usual, the astronomers said the cold spring and summer were owing to the spots on the sun. Very likely old Sol is to blame. A very convenient pack-horse is this mysterious luminary, on which to load the fidgety, freakish, inexplicable weather of our planet, so unexplainable to the world of science.

It cannot be denied that 1871 had many striking, alarming, and unaccountable features in its meteorological aspect. There were storms of rain, storms of sleet, storms of snow, storms of hail, and sometimes all these in an hour. And there were storms of meat, storms of sand, storms of stones, siroccos, and storms of electrical fire. Tornadoes took on strange shapes and colors and odors. Meteors flashed and burned with blue, purple, and red flames, the latter color being strikingly prominent in the auroras, which at times have flamed out on the midnight sky with an appearance of an immense conflagration. The scientist witnessed a new thing—a mighty explosion in the sun Sept. 7th, a phenomenon of wide and unbounded interest. In our records, as gleaned from two first class American dailies and an excellent British weekly, we have counted up four terrific typhoons, eight furious cyclones, forty horrible hurricanes, thirty-four terrible tornadoes, with eleven great and destructive volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, all occurring during the memorable year of our Lord 1871.—D. T. TAYLOR, in Boston Journal.