Historical Climates of the Northeastern United States

Abstract

Native New Englanders have long prided themselves in their ability to earn a livelihood in a harsh, often changeable environment. The leading industries of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries—fishing, shipping, lumbering, manufacturing, and farming—all required direct confrontation with the natural elements. One of the most important of these elements was the weather, and its fickleness is best reflected in the adage, “If you don’pt like the weather, just wait a minute.” Early New England history is peppered with accounts of distressing droughts that withered crops and halted water-driven machinery, fierce snowstorms that cut off the countryside from the towns and cities, powerful floods that swept all before them, and raging storms that battered harbors and destroyed shipping. Upon studying the history of New England’s principal crop, hay, and learning of its vulnerability to the caprice of the weather, one wonders how the region’s farmers survived and even sometimes prospered. The out-migrations of the nineteenth century are evidence that some failed “to make a go of it.”