In New England, 1816 became known as the “year without a summer” or “eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death.” In mid-June it was so cold in central Vermont that foot-long icicles dripped from the eaves. “The very face of nature,” opined the Vermont Mirror, “appears to be shrouded in a death-like gloom.” On July 8, there was frost as far south as Richmond, Virginia.
Chester Dewey, a professor at Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, recorded a freeze on August 22 that killed the cucumber crop. A harder freeze on August 29 killed most of the corn.
