The Sun Had Spots on It and Nobody Could Say Why

The Docket's Archive section does not, as a rule, interview the dead. Our subjects are turning points, not people, and our evidence is documentary: diaries, deeds, grain ledgers, gravestones. But the research for an upcoming feature on the Year Without a Summer kept returning us to a gap in the record. Benjamin Harwood of Bennington kept a diary. Adino Brackett of Lancaster kept a journal. Governors issued proclamations. The New Hampshire Patriot published crop reports. What we couldn't find was the interior of the person who left no document. The young hill-town farmer who inherited a lot he couldn't yet prove he deserved, watched his corn blacken in August, and stood in October trying to decide whether to follow his neighbor west or stay and bet his family's life on a cellar full of potatoes.

So we did something we've never done. We built Ephraim Goss from the documentary record — the crops, the prices, the weather observations, the community details, the providential theology that was the only explanatory framework available — and asked him what October looked like from the inside. He is not real. His situation is.¹

We found him, or assembled him, on a hill lot above the White River valley in late October 1816. Twenty-seven years old. Wife Hannah, infant son. His father died two years prior. His neighbor Silas packed an ox cart for Ohio the previous week.

You've been farming this lot for two years on your own. What did you plant last spring?

Ephraim: Same as my father put in. Corn on the lower field, rye on the upper, potatoes in the garden plot, oats for the horse and the ox. Some flax. Hannah keeps a kitchen garden. Turnips, cabbage, carrots. We had the apple trees, of course. Everybody has apple trees.

And what came up?

Ephraim: Everything went in the ground on time. That's what I keep coming back to. I did it right. The rye went in, the corn went in, the potatoes went in. I did everything the way he showed me.

Then June came and it snowed.

In June.

Ephraim: I know how that sounds. But it snowed. Up in Cabot they got eighteen inches on the eighth of June.² We didn't see that much down here but we got enough. I'd already shorn the sheep. You know Hoskins, up the ridge? He tried to tie the fleeces back on his flock. I'd have laughed if half of them hadn't frozen anyway.

And the birds. I walked out that morning and there were birds on the ground, frozen where they dropped. A man doesn't know what to make of that.

What did you make of it?

Ephraim: I thought it would pass. That's the thing. It did pass. End of June it turned hot, genuinely hot. I thought, well, that was a strange spell, but here's summer now. The corn was coming. Then July brought frost again. Not as bad. The wheat held on. But everything was slow, like the ground itself was reluctant.

Then August thirteenth. I'll remember that date until I'm in the ground myself. Woke up and the corn was black. Every stalk. Black and done.

What does that feel like? Walking out and seeing that?

Ephraim: You don't feel it right away. You stand there and your mind works on it like a sum that won't come out right. Because you know what corn looks like in August, and this isn't that, and for a minute your mind just refuses it.

Then it catches up.

There was also a drought, alongside the cold?

Ephraim: That's the part nobody will believe later. It was cold and dry. The woods caught fire. You could smell smoke for weeks. The sun was wrong all summer. Red and dim, like looking at it through a dirty window. Some days you could stare straight at it with your bare eyes and see spots on it, dark spots.³ I asked the minister about it. He said it was a sign.

A sign of what?

Ephraim: Of what do you think? That we've displeased God. Governor Plumer up in New Hampshire said as much. Called for a day of prayer, said we need to humble ourselves for our transgressions.⁴ And I'm not saying he's wrong. I don't know what else to call it. The Almanac didn't warn us. Nobody warned us. Summer just didn't come. What do you call that if not judgment?

But then I think: judgment for what? I've been in this ground two years. I've worked it honest. My father worked it honest before me. What did we do?

You mentioned your neighbor Silas left for Ohio.

Ephraim: Last week. Packed what he could on the cart, sold the rest for nothing. Who's buying? He said the land out there is flat and black and you can grow anything. He said a man told him corn stands eight feet tall in Ohio.

Do you believe that?

Are yours?

Ephraim: Not yet. The rye came in, not all of it, but some. The potatoes held. We have potatoes. We have some rye. We have the apples, what didn't freeze on the branch in September.⁵

So you'll make it through winter?

Ephraim: That depends on what I do with the animals. I have the horse, the ox, the cow, and four sheep. I don't have enough hay to carry them all. Not close. Oats are ninety-two cents a bushel now.⁶ Last year it was twelve. I don't have that money. Nobody has that money.

So the question is which ones I kill now and salt, and which ones I gamble on keeping alive. If I kill the cow, the baby has no milk. If I keep the cow, I need fodder I can't afford. If I kill the ox, I can't plow come spring. If there is a spring.

That's what I want to ask you about. Do you think spring will come?

Ephraim: (silence)

I don't know. A man near Randolph went out to tend his sheep in June and they found him dead in the snow three days later.⁷ In June. If June can kill a man, what's January going to look like?

I've lived in Vermont my whole life. I know cold. Cold has a logic to it. You know when it's coming and when it's going. This year the logic broke. I don't know if it broke for one year or forever.

Hannah wants to go to Ohio?

Ephraim: Hannah wants the baby to live through winter. She doesn't much care about the name of the place where that happens.

And you?

Ephraim: My father cleared this lot with his own hands. Pulled the stumps himself. Built the house. Built the barn. Silas helped him raise it, actually. Silas who's now halfway to New York with everything he owns on a cart.

I keep thinking, if I leave, what was it for? All of it. His whole life. My mother's buried up on the ridge. You don't walk away from that because of one bad year.

But if it's not one bad year. If the sun stays like that. If June keeps snowing.

I'm going to keep the cow and the ox. Kill the sheep. Salt what I can. Put the potatoes in the cellar and the rye in the bin and see if it's enough. And if spring comes and the ground thaws and the sun looks right again, I'll put the corn in and the rye in and do it all again.

And if it doesn't.

If it doesn't?

Ephraim: Then I'll know something I don't know yet. And I'll decide then.

Ephraim Goss is a composite character constructed from documented conditions in Vermont hill towns during 1816. Whether he stayed or went to Ohio, we cannot say, because he didn't exist. But between 10,000 and 15,000 Vermonters made one version of his choice in 1816 and 1817, enough to erase seven years of population growth from the state.⁹ The cause of the Year Without a Summer — the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815, which injected sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere and suppressed global temperatures — would not be understood for decades. Ephraim's sun, red and spotted, was the visible edge of a planetary event he had no language for and no way to understand.

He had potatoes, four sheep, and a decision. That's what adaptation looks like before anyone calls it adaptation.

Footnotes

1. The documentary record of the Year Without a Summer in Vermont is drawn primarily from Benjamin Harwood's diary (Bennington, Vt.), Adino Brackett's Lancaster journal, and the reporting of the New Hampshire Patriot. See the New England Historical Society's compiled account: https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/1816-year-without-a-summer/ ↩

2. Snow depth in Cabot, Vt., June 8, 1816, documented in Mark Breen, "1816: The Year Without a Summer," North Star Monthly: https://www.northstarmonthly.com/columns/1816-the-year-without-a-summer/article_fa6e56b0-83fb-11e6-a24d-33f077c70506.html ↩

3. The "dry fog" that dimmed and reddened sunlight, making sunspots visible to the naked eye, is documented across multiple sources. See: https://allthatsinteresting.com/year-without-a-summer ↩

4. New Hampshire Governor William Plumer's proclamation attributing the weather to divine judgment is documented in the New England Historical Society account: https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/1816-year-without-a-summer/ ↩

5. A killing frost on September 26 froze crops and apples on the branch. Temperature at sunrise in Hanover, N.H., was 26°F. See Breen, North Star Monthly. ↩

6. Oat prices rose from 12¢/bushel in 1815 to 92¢/bushel in 1816. Documented in: https://vermonthistory.org/eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death ↩

7. The farmer near Randolph, Vt., who died of exposure while tending sheep in June 1816 is documented in the New England Historical Society account. ↩

8. Vermont History Explorer notes that farmers relied on the Farmer's Almanac for planting guidance, but 1816 broke every pattern it offered: https://vermonthistoryexplorer.org/year-without-a-summer ↩

9. Population figures from historian L.D. Stillwell, cited in multiple secondary sources. Howard Russell's A Long Deep Furrow documents the westward migration from Vermont to Ohio. ↩