Killer Snowstorms Leaves
New England Drained
(1717) Following heavy snows, warm, pleasant weather prevailed through most of
February, lulling New Englanders into believing the worst was over. From February 27
through March 7, four snowstorms blanketed the region with three to five feet of snow, and
wind whipped it into drifts ten to twenty-five feet high.
People found themselves imprisoned in their homes by what became known as the Great Snow.
For two successive Sundays in Boston, members of the Reverend Cotton Mather's congregation
couldn't make it to the meetinghouse for worship services. Snow kept postal riders from
traveling their routes. In New London on March 18, diarist Joshua Hempstead recorded that
men traveling by snowshoes were at last able to place in his grave a man named George Way,
who had been dead "10 or 12 days."
Wild deer were almost wiped out. Unable to run in the deep snow, they fell prey to bears
and wolves. Livestock perished in large numbers. On Fishers Island, off the northeastern
tip of Long Island, John Winthrop reported that more than 1,100 sheep and an uncounted
number of cattle and horses had been lost. Astonishingly, four weeks after the storm,
inhabitants of Fishers Island who were digging 100 frozen sheep out of a sixteen-foot
drift found two still alive.
The Reverend Mather reported that two hogs emerged from a snowbank twenty-seven days after
the storm, having nourished themselves on some tansy at the bottom of their icy tomb.
"The Poultry as unaccountably survived as these," continued his report.
"Hens were found alive after seven days; Turkeys were found alive after five and
twenty days, buried in ye Snow, and at a distance from ye ground, and altogether destitute
of any thing to feed them. The number of creatures that kept a Rigid Fast, shutt up in
Snow for divers weeks together, & were found alive after all, have yielded surprizing
stories unto us."
No early thaw arrived to help New Englanders out of their predicament, and the deep snow
remained into early April. The memory of it lasted far longer; a children's history book
published in 1827 by John Warner Barber in New Haven, Connecticut, still referred to it as
"the greatest snow ever known in this country or perhaps in any other." The snow
was so deep that "the people stepped out of their chamber [second-floor] windows on
snow shoes," he reported.
The winter of 1740-41 staged an early arrival, with October "as cold as ordinarily
November is," wrote Bolton, Connecticut, town clerk John Bissell, and a substantial
snowfall in mid-November. Two solid weeks of rain in early December resulted in the worst
floods on the Connecticut River in half a century, damaging "bridges, fences,
hay" and ruining "the Indian corn chambers, cribs . . ."
"Extreme cold" followed, then late December brought "a prodigious storm of
snow out of the north and north west, which was full knee deep, attended in said storm
with violent cold weather," continued Bissell. "Travelling was almost wholly
suspended by reason of the extreme cold and deep snow, and God had sealed up the hand of
every man. We had a very sensible consideration of . . . Who can stand before His
cold?" Ludlum reports that by January "Drifting snow soon brought an end to
regular travel by highway over New England and the Middle Colonies, and the continuance of
penetrating cold soon closed all the rivers and inland waterways with solid ice. Many salt
water bays and channels, seldom before frozen, congealed solidly, and even the ocean shore
along southern and eastern New England became ringed with an unusual icy surface."
Boston Harbor became an expanse of ice so thick that sleighs carried worshipers across it
from Dorchester to Sabbath services every week from December 25 until April 1. One man
made a 200-mile trip by sleigh over the ice from Cape Cod to New York City. The extreme
cold was not confined to the Northeast; that year the York River in Virginia froze hard
enough to cross.
A January thaw was followed by bouts of more "violent cold" and repeated
snowfalls through early March. "The weather continued cold and the snow wasted but
slowly, so that there was considerable quantity of snow the middle of April," wrote
Bissell. The Connecticut River was still frozen solid enough to be crossed on foot on the
first of April. On April 10 snow still lay two and a half feet deep on the ground on the
Massachusetts-New Hampshire border.
Like the Great Snow of 1717, this phenomenal season produced a story of remarkable
survival. "At Guilford [Connecticut], a Sheep was in the winter buried in a storm of
snow and lay there ten weeks and three days and came out alive," reported Bissell.
The severe weather affected life in New England long beyond the end of winter. "The
spring came on very slowly; the beginning of March about half the people of the government
had spent all their hay, and subsisted them by . . . giving out their Indian corn, and by
reason of which scarcity a great number of cattle and horses died, and near half the
sheep, and about two thirds of the goats," Bissell wrote. "Exceeding scarcity
followed, partly by reason of abundance of Indian corn being ruined by the long rains in
December, and partly by people giving their corn to their creatures to save their lives.
We suppose the ensuing summer was the greatest scarcity as ever the English felt since
the first settlement of this government. Indian corn rose in the price from ten to twenty
shillings, and what was commonly sold for twenty shillings, till at last all buying and
selling utterly ceased, viz. of corn. Money was no temptation, and men of good estates who
had money were forced to put themselves into the quality of beggars, and beg sometimes two
quarts at a place, to relieve the distresses of their poor families."
(Courtesy, Internet, unknown)
