The Winter of 1804-1805

From the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi Valley, the United States experienced extreme winter weather beginning in mid-December 1804. Ice began to block shipping in rivers and harbors by the third week of that month. On 7 January 1805, Jefferson wrote to his daughter Martha to say that even at Washington, D.C., “the rivers are all solid.” In his weather record, in addition to noting the readings from his own thermometer, Jefferson wrote down some of the cold temperatures reported from elsewhere, including -16° Fahrenheit at Hartford, Connecticut, -17° at Poughkeepsie, New York, and even subzero temperatures at Lexington, Kentucky.

The cold was accompanied by a succession of snowstorms with no thaws, resulting in a continuing accumulation of snow on the ground. Some 60 inches fell on New York City during December and January. In January, 57 inches were measured in Hamden, Connecticut, and 43 inches in New Haven.

The consequences for individuals and families were enormous. Uninsulated dwellings provided only limited protection against such prolonged extreme cold. Many laborers, unable to work, had no income. With shipping by water and on land blocked, commerce and business came to a halt and essential commodities such as food, fuel, and clothing could not reach the people who needed them. It is not possible to know how many people died from the cold or in shipwrecks caused by the winter’s storms.

The scarcity of fuel for heat was a particular hardship in populated areas. John Lithgow, a writer who had collected information about manufacturing and the economy, reminded Jefferson that there were no longer abundant sources of firewood close to cities, and wood was still the primary fuel for household cooking and heating in the United States. The deep snows and dangerous temperatures impeded the transportation of wood into urban centers, resulting in short supplies and escalating prices. According to Lithgow, in Philadelphia and the vicinity, “the fuel for one fire for one week must be purchased with two days labour.” The situation was even worse in New York City, where, Lithgow wrote, “this winter it has cost four days labour” to obtain that fuel for a week. (Lithgow, unknowingly foreshadowing things to come, stated that in the manufacturing areas of Britain where coal had become an abundant and cheap source of heat, a worker could earn enough to pay for a fire for one week “in an hour or two at most.”)

Although Washington was not a large city, there was hardship around the national capital, too, for anyone who lacked resources to obtain food, adequate shelter, and heat. William Thomson, a Georgetown laborer disabled by an injury, wrote to Jefferson that he was “not able to maintain my famyly & times being very hard provision and wood being so very dear we are in a state of surfering at the present.”

In the northern states, a final dramatic event of the winter came in late January, when a storm dropped snow on New York City for 48 hours continuously, and then moved on to do the same through southern New England. The weather began to moderate in February, when warmer temperatures and rain broke the sustained cold and started to work away at the snow on the ground. Not until early March did ports thaw and transportation by water really start moving again.

Writing to a friend in France, Jefferson deemed it “the severest winter, we have known for 20. years.” Noah Webster, in New Haven, called it the worst since 1780. In some locations newspapers declared it the hardest winter in memory.

No artist seems to have made a picture depicting that winter. The oil painting shown below, Winter Scene in Brooklyn by the American artist Francis Guy, is from about 15 years later. Although the winter in Guy’s painting was milder than the one of 1804-1805, the piles of wood and, significantly, coal in the foreground of his painting illustrate the vital importance of fuel for survival.

References:

Charles Willson Peale to Jefferson, 18 December 1804; Jefferson to William Lambert, 22 December 1804; Benjamin H. Latrobe to Jefferson, 5 January 1805; Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph, 7 January 1805; William Thomson to Jefferson, 5 January 1805; Thomas T. Davis to Jefferson, 20 February 1805; John Lithgow to Jefferson, 4 March 1805, all in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 45 (in press):197, 224-5, 300-3, 306, 314, 547, 675-8.

Jefferson to Madame de Tessé, 10 March 1805.

David M. Ludlum, Early American Winters, 1604-1820 (Boston, 1966), 170-4.