Carla OccasoVermonters know how cruel spring’s arrival can be after the official date of spring. Big snow storms seem to cover the bare ground each spring just when the geese start returning and crocuses start blooming. But one year summer never arrived. It was known as the “Year Without a Summer,” according to many historic accounts of the year 1816. Global temperatures decreased enough to cause “major food shortages in the Northern Hemisphere,” according to a 2016 article in the White River Valley Herald written by Martha Slater. Next year will be the 210th anniversary of this unforgettable year.
The event happened when an Indonesian volcano erupted, causing tons of dust and ash to block the sun around the world, according to an article by Blaise Siefer published in June 2022 in the Burlington Free Press.
“Something close to terror settled in,” said Howard Coffin, a Vermont historian, in an interview with Vermont Public Radio. “The skies went dark. The sun dimmed. You could look directly at the sun and see a halo around (it).” Coffin further reported in his Vermont Public story that there were hard frosts each month, so Vermonters could not grow crops and lost much of their livestock. Additionally, drifts of snow that were two and three feet deep kept happening, causing children and livestock to go missing. Also, without being able to grow and harvest food, Vermonters had to eat roots, hedgehogs, nettles, and clover tops. People traded stores of maple syrup for fish, according to the Vermont Historical Society’s Vermont History Explorer.
In early June, in Waterbury, snow started falling on a Friday, and continued throughout Saturday until it got very deep, according to a report in colonialsense.com. In Williamstown that day, snow reached 12 inches deep, and Cabot reported 18 inches. Also, on the morning of June 8, snow piled around Montpelier causing sheep to die and birds to fly inside houses to escape the weather. Additionally, the cold caused the leaves to die on Montpelier’s trees.
But the story that is my personal favorite of how this terrible year affected the world was how it led the author Mary Shelley to write “Frankenstein.” Shelley, then 18, was vacationing with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron in Switzerland. The dismal weather kept them cooped up inside talking and reading scary stories. This prompted them to challenge each other to write a terrifying tale, with Mary writing “Frankenstein,” according to Pan Macmillan publishers (panmacmillan.com).
