The climate of the United States and its endemic influences. Based chiefly on the records of the Medical Department and Adjutant General's Office, United States Army / By Samuel Forry.
- Samuel Forry
- Date:
- 1842
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The climate of the United States and its endemic influences. Based chiefly on the records of the Medical Department and Adjutant General's Office, United States Army / By Samuel Forry. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![“ Nortuern Division. (Its Extremes of Temperature.) 47 month of January was remarkably mild and pleasant, the ground dry and free from snow, and the Mississippi unusually low and unfrozen. February was extremely cold, the weather clear and dry, and the thermometer ranging during the month from the freezing point'to 23° below zero. From the Ist to the 16th, the mercury stood every morning, with the exception of three, (the 6th, 7th, and 8th,) between ~4° and —23°, and did not rise above 20° above zero during these days. On the 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th, the mercury at sun-rise stood respectively at 14°, 16°, 4°, 16°, 23°, 18° 20°, 18°, 10°, 6°, and 4° below 0; and on the 9th and 11th, it continued under —8° during the 24 hours. During the month the prevailing winds were northerly and dry, and the proportion of fair and cloudy weather was—clear twenty-two days, cloudy three, variable one, and snowy two. The mean depth of snow was about six inches. The month of March has been unusually cold and dry, with one or two light falls of snow, which, with the previous coat, has just been dissolved by the warmth of the solar rays without any rain. The ice on the Mississippi, on broke yesterday, per 30th,] is now moving off en masse.’ In the winter of 1779-80, the temperature at the art of New York was so low that cavalry and artillery were transported over the ice in the harbor to Staten Island. In the interior of the State, the cold was correspondingly intense. All streams were so completely locked up that no grain could be ground in grist-mills, and the inhabitants were obliged to bruise it in mortars; the snow was so deep that no efforts were made for weeks to reclaim the roads; in narrow ravines it became so drifted as to cover the tops of the highest trees; even many habitations were so buried that their inmates were obliged to tunnel their way to the light of heaven; and lastly, for the period of forty days, no water dropped from the eaves of houses. So say not only the chronicles of the day, but witnesses are yet living to testify to these facts. Inthe absence of the precise knowledge derived from thermometrical observations, we can at least infer that it was, even on our coast, a truly Russian winter ;.and the imagination is left to figure to itself the condition of things at the present sites of Forts Snelling, Howard, and Crawford. in this winter, as well as 1742, Long Island Sound was frozen over. Scarcely does a winter elapse that the Hudson River is not frozen over even in the vicinity of the city of New York ;* whilst Philadel- * During the last winter, (1840-1,) the river, at the distance of 100 miles above](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b33288379_0053.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
