The Docket's Archive section reconstructs past climate turning points through documented sources. Occasionally, when the historical record preserves the weather, the crop yields, the commodity prices, and the words people actually wrote in their diaries but not a single unbroken conversation, we do something different. We build a voice from the fragments.
Silas Trowbridge is not a real person. But the snow that fell on June 6, 1816, was real. The frozen corn was real. The wagons headed for Ohio were real. And the impossible decision he describes was made, that autumn, by thousands of people whose names we'll never know.
We are seated, let's say, on the porch of a farmhouse near Randolph, Vermont. It is late October 1816. The fields are bare. The mountains have already turned, though "turned" implies they were ever properly green.
You've been farming this land how long?
Silas: Thirty-seven years. My father cleared it. I was fourteen when I first put seed in this ground, and I have put seed in it every spring since, and every autumn I have taken something out.
Until this one.
Walk me through the year.
Silas: It started like a year. That's what I keep telling people. April was warm. Not warm like July, but warm enough you'd start thinking about planting. There were days in April you could stand in the sun and feel it on your face and think, all right. Then cold. Then warm again. Then June.
Tell me about June.
Silas: On the sixth of June, it snowed. Not a dusting. Snow like January. In Cabot they measured eighteen inches.1 Benjamin Harwood over in Bennington wrote it down in his diary. Called it "the most gloomy and extraordinary weather ever seen."2 Benjamin is not a man given to exaggeration.
Birds fell out of the sky. Frozen. Just dropped. Some of the men who'd already shorn their sheep tried to tie the fleeces back on.3 You can picture how well that worked. Imagine a sheep's opinion of the matter.
There was a man near here. I won't say his name, his wife is still living. Went out to find his sheep in the snow and never came back. They found him three days later.4
I'm sorry.
Silas: So am I.
After June, did you replant?
Silas: Of course we replanted. What else are you going to do, sit on this porch? The end of June came back warm. Ninety-nine degrees in Middlebury for three days running.5 You'd think the Lord was apologizing. So you replant. You put the corn back in.
Then July froze it again. The Shakers down in New Lebanon said everything just stopped growing.6
So you replant again. And August. Dr. Holyoke, the physician from Salem, was up in Franconia and wrote that by August the fields were "as empty and white as October."7 Well, now it is October. You can see the fields yourself.
How much of your corn survived?
Silas: A quarter, maybe. Half of that is moldy. Not fit for the animals, let alone bread.8 Hay failed too, so I've got cattle I can't feed through winter. I'll slaughter most of them before Christmas. Oats I can still get, but the price has gone from twelve cents a bushel to ninety-two.9 Ninety-two cents. For oats. I have lived in Vermont my entire life and I have never been robbed by a grain merchant before this year.
My neighbor Reuben Whitten, over in Ashland, grew wheat on his south-facing slope and he's sharing it around. God bless that man and his south-facing slope.10
Do you know why this happened?
Silas: [Long pause.] Everyone has theories. You can see the sunspots now. Look up at the sun through a smoked glass and there they are, plain as anything. Five, six, eight of them.11 Some people say those spots are blocking the sun's heat. Others say it's the forests. We've cut down so much timber that the earth's heat is escaping. The Brattleborough paper said no one living can remember anything like it.12
I'll tell you what I don't know. I don't know if it's one year or if it's the beginning of something.
[He stops. Starts again.]
That's the thing that sits on you. A bad year, you survive a bad year. You eat hedgehogs and boiled nettles if you have to, like some of the families up north are doing right now.13 But if next summer is the same? And the one after that?
The Essex Register over in Salem keeps printing that when we settle the year's account, it won't be the worst ever known.14 I'd like to know what account they're settling, because it isn't the same one I am.
Your son wants to go to Ohio.
Silas: [Quiet for a moment.] My son is twenty-two and he's been listening to every man who passes through here with a wagon headed west. Samuel Goodrich, the publisher in Hartford, calls it a "stampede from cold, desolate, worn-out New England."15 He's not wrong about the worn-out part. This soil was better when my father worked it. Every year it gives a little less. Ohio, they say the soil is black and rich and you can grow anything.
My wife says we don't know that. We don't know anyone who's been there and come back to tell us. We know people who've gone. That's different.
What would you need to know to decide?
Silas: Whether next summer is coming back.
And no one can tell you that.
Silas: No one can tell me that. Reverend Robbins down in East Windsor wrote that he presumes "no person living has known so poor a crop of corn in New England."16 No person living. That means there's no one to ask. There's no old man on a porch who can say, "Oh, I remember when this happened before, and here's what came after." It has never happened before. Or if it has, it was before anyone now alive, and they didn't write it down.
So how do you decide?
Silas: [He looks out at the fields for a long time.]
I don't know yet. I keep thinking I'll know by the first snow. But the first snow already came in June, and I didn't know then either.
I'll tell you this. Seventy percent of the men in Congress are about to lose their seats, if what I'm hearing is right.17 People are angry. They feel abandoned. Maybe new men in Washington will do something, maybe they won't, but at least people are doing the one thing they can do, which is throw the bastards out.
Going to Ohio is the same instinct, I think. You can't fix the weather. You can't argue with a frost in August. But you can hitch a wagon. You can move. Even if you don't know what you're moving toward, at least you're not sitting still in a field that won't grow corn.
Will you go?
Silas: Ask me in April.
Between 1816 and 1817, Vermont lost between 10,000 and 15,000 residents. Seven years of population growth erased in months.18 Indiana became a state in December 1816; Illinois followed two years later. The historian John D. Post would later call the Year Without a Summer "the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world."19
The cause, the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815, the largest volcanic event in recorded history, would not be scientifically connected to the weather of 1816 until the twentieth century. Silas Trowbridge never knew why his summer disappeared. He only knew that it did, and that he had to decide what came next without understanding what had happened or whether it would happen again.
Today we know exactly why the climate is changing. We have sophisticated models projecting what comes next. But the part Silas couldn't solve on his porch is the part that hasn't moved an inch: you're standing in a place that used to work, and you have to decide whether to stay or go, and the answer depends on next year, and next year hasn't happened yet.
Footnotes
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Snow depth in Cabot, VT documented by Mark Breen, senior meteorologist, Fairbanks Museum. https://www.northstarmonthly.com/columns/1816-the-year-without-a-summer/ ↩
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Benjamin Harwood diary, June 11, 1816. https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/1816-year-without-a-summer/ ↩
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Sheep fleece detail documented across multiple sources. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/1816-the-year-without-summer.htm ↩
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Farmer death near Randolph, VT. https://www.northstarmonthly.com/columns/1816-the-year-without-a-summer/ ↩
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Middlebury temperature. https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/1816-year-without-a-summer/ ↩
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Nicholas Bennet, Shaker community, New Lebanon, NY. https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/1816-year-without-a-summer/ ↩
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Dr. Edward Holyoke, August 21, 1816. https://www.discoverconcordma.com/articles/291-eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death-the-year-without-a-summer ↩
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Corn crop loss documented at approximately three-quarters across New England. https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/1816-year-without-a-summer/ ↩
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Oat price spike. https://historicipswich.net/2025/06/25/1816-the-year-without-summer/ ↩
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Reuben Whitten, Ashland, NH. His neighbors later erected a monument reading: "Cold season of 1816 raised 40 bushils of wheat on this land whitch kept his family and his neighbours from starving." https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/1816-year-without-a-summer/ ↩
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Sunspots visible to the naked eye, June 1816 — five on June 10, six on June 12, eight on June 16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer ↩
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The Reporter, Brattleborough, VT, July 17, 1816. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer ↩
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Foraging in Vermont. https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/1816-year-without-a-summer/ ↩
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The Essex Register, Salem, MA. https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/1816-year-without-a-summer/ ↩
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Samuel Griswold Goodrich memoir. https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/1816-year-without-a-summer/ ↩
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Rev. Thomas Robbins diary, September 5, 1816. https://connecticuthistory.org/eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death-1816-the-year-without-a-summer/ ↩
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Congressional turnover in November 1816 elections. https://historicipswich.net/2025/06/25/1816-the-year-without-summer/ ↩
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L. D. Stillwell population estimates for Vermont. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer ↩
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John D. Post, The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World (1977). ↩