This winter, this is nothing. Over nine days in 1717, the Northeast endured what was ever after known as “the great snow.” At the end of February came what first looked to be beastly (“a great storm”) but what, after what followed, appeared no more than a measly, beggarly storm (“stiddy rain & snow”). The real dumping started a few days later. “4 foot deep in ye woods on a Level,” one farmer reported from New London. Another and still more fearsome storm arrived the next day. In a letter to a friend, Cotton Mather called this one “an horrid snow”: “People, for some hours, could not pass from one side of a street unto another.” In his diary, Mather enthused that about “as mighty a snow as perhaps has been known in memory of man.” In Connecticut, the drifts got as high as sixteen feet. On Long Island, eleven hundred sheep were buried beneath a blanket of white. Some cows, blinded by snow and ice, wandered into the ocean and drowned; more died in fields and, weeks later, when the snow finally melted, they were found, “standing dead on their legs, as if they had been alive.” In New Hampshire, you had to climb out of your house from a second-story window. “Not fit for man nor beast.” No horse could brave it. Nor any ships. “No vessels are arrived this week,” the Boston News-Letter reported. Rivers were frozen in Philadelphia. You could try snowshoes. In Boston, people walked around on stilts. From Rhode Island came this word: “Such a violent storm of deep snow as has been here of late, was never known before, by the Oldest Livers.”
Had enough? No. “Another snow coming on,” Samuel Sewall wrote in his diary, wearily. Stilts? “Another snow came on which almost buried ye Memory of ye former,” Mather wrote, of the storm that came at the beginning of March. On what would turn out to be the final day of the storm, a pastor named Eliphalet Adams preached a sermon called, “A Discourse Occasioned by the Late Distressing Storm.” He took as his text the first chapter of Nahum: “The LORD hath his Way in the Whirlwind, and in the Storm, and the Clouds are the Dust of His Feet.” A storm, Adams preached, is God’s wrath. “He giveth Ice like morsels.”
At last, the snow stopped. The Boston News-Letter apologized for having printed so little news: “The extremity of the weather has hindered all the three Posts from coming in; neither can they be expected.” One beleaguered snowbound Puritan reported from the wilds of Piscataqua, nearly two weeks after the bad weather began, “The deep Snow hinder’d our Posts coming in till Yesterday.” Put that on your snow-day auto-reply. And then sign off, with Cotton Mather:
“Yours, with an affection that knows no Winter.”
Photograph: Doug Ducap, Flickr CC.
