In 1816, global cooling may have spurred moves to Mo.

In New England and other parts of North America, birds froze in their nests in June. Crops planted by hopeful farmers failed to germinate. In Vermont on July 4, the ground was covered with 10 inches of snow. In Europe, which was trying to recover from the Napoleonic Wars, thousands starved.

The Farmer's Almanac recounted the growing season this way: "Snows, heavy rains and cold winds prevailed incessantly, and during the entire season the sun arose each morning as though in a cloud of smoke, red and rayless, shedding little light or warmth and setting at night as behind a thick cloud of vapor, leaving hardly a trace of its having passed over the face of the earth."

1816 is known as the year without a summer.

In 2007, global warming is a concern. Though nobody understood at the time, in 1816 people were dealing with temporary global cooling.

What happened? In 1815, more than 3,500 feet of mountain blew off the top of an Indonesian volcano called Tamboro. A 400-million-ton cloud of gas deflected the sun's rays away from the earth.

The eruption was the largest in recorded history, 10 times bigger than Krakatoa, and it dwarfed Vesuvius and Mount St. Helens. Tamboro erupted only a few years after eruptions in the Caribbean in 1812 and at Mayon in the Philippines in 1814, all adding to the amount of dust aloft.

1816 began mildly, but May frosts were reported much further south than normal.

Cold wave after cold wave swept through New England, alternating with warm days that gave people hope.

On June 6, snow fell on Elizabethtown, N.Y. for three hours. On the 7th, some locales in Vermont recorded 5 to 6 inches of snow.

Temperatures normalized in the fall, so much so that 1816 is not the coldest year on record.

The horrid weather and widespread crop failures spurred migration from New England.

"There was significant movement into Missouri," said Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History. Many people moved from Vermont and New Hampshire. Nickell speculates that Simon Legree, Harriet Beecher Stowe's villain in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," could have been made a Vermonter transplanted to Louisiana for that reason.

He also cites Conevery Bolton Valencius's 2004 history "The Health of the Country."

"She talks about people coming into Missouri in the first part of the 19th century and trying to get away from New England and the weather," he said.

She writes about the effect of disease and pneumonia in those days and the search for good soil and good water. "In the age before antibacterial drugs, if you got sick you did what you had to do," Nickell said. "You moved and tried to find better water."

How the dramatic cooling in New England, Canada and Europe may have affected crops in Southeast Missouri is not in local records, but settlement did grow considerably during this period.

The Cape Girardeau District had 259 taxpayers in 1814.

No tax records were kept for 1815 and 1816, but records show the number of taxpayers had more than doubled to 520 by 1817.

The bizarre weather of 1816 is rare but not unheard of.

The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines dropped global temperatures half a degree the following year. The following two years, the ozone hole over Antarctica increased to its largest size on record.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 137