Jill Lepore: “An Horrid Snow”
[Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University where she is also chair of the History and Literature Program. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale in 1995.]
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.”...
Read entire article at New Yorker
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.”...