That’s the claim made by -=- strange to say – my Farmer’s Almanac Desk Calendar.
Peculiar Prediction
Legend says that a July forecast of “rain, hail, and snow” mistakenly appeared in The 1816 Old Farmer’s Almanac . Robert B. Thomas, the Almanac’s founder, recalled the books and had new ones printed, but news of that forecast had gotten out. He became the subject of much ridicule – until July brought rain, hail, and snow throughout New England!
Great story. If true. 1816 was famously “THe Year Without a Summer”, when it actually did snow in places, and the weather was generally cold , rainy, and lousy. It was due to the eruption of Mt. Tambora in the Pacific, which sent much material into the atmosphere, cooling things down and affecting weather patterns. Beyond the immediate effects, it ruined the summer vacation of Percy Shelly, Lord Byron, and others on Lake Geneva, forcing them to stay indoors reading sub-par ghost stories, to which they responded by writing their own. This produced Frankenstein and The Vampyr (which became the first English-language vampire story). Both were the nuclei of countless stage productions about vampires and created monsters. The bad weather also forced the Smith family out of their Vermont home to upstate New York, where young Joseph claimed he had a vision about the angel Moroni and golden plates – the start of the Mormon religion.
Doesn’t look like it. This is from the Almanac’s own website:
Predicting Snow for the Summer of 1816
1
The dust from the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) caused a worldwide lowering of temperatures during the summer of 1816, when the Almanac, legend has it, inadvertently but correctly predicted snow for July.
To date, all I’ve found is “Now expect good hay weather,” “A storm is not far distant,” or “Sultry with thundershowers.” It’s so disappointing.
Elusive Edition
However, I remain hopeful that a few copies still exist that do indeed predict “The Cold Summer of 1816,” as that summer is known in history book.
There’s no question it did snow in New England and Canada during July and August of 1816. An 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the East Indies had left volcanic dust circling the globe, lowering temperatures as much as several degrees.
But did the Almanac predict the snow that summer?
Certainly the story that it did is an integral part of Almanac lore.
If the story is true, it is one of the earliest and best examples of a subtle skill my uncle always referred to as “almanacsmanship.”
Snopes is a bit less kindl;y, and observes that the original story seems to have concerned not the 1816 edition, but an earlier one:
http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=11616
It’s one of those “good” stories that got refined in the telling, and passed along by respectable sources, giving it an aura of authenticity (The Snopes message board page claims the story was quoted in Al Gore’s book).
But Until I see an 1816 edition with the prediction, I ain’t buying it.
Here’s the long version of the story:
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/weather/long-range-weather-forecast-colorado-may-see-snowier-fall-but-it-wont-get-us-out-of-drought
DENVER - There are two almanacs that compete on the national stage. The Farmer’s Almanac and The Old Farmer’s Almanac. Both are soft cover publications that have been around for about 200 years.
In colonial and pioneer times, there were dozens of almanacs that were used to help farmers and ranchers with their planting and harvesting schedules.
Long before modern weather forecasts, these almanacs provided solar and lunar tables and tidal information that was vital for hunting, fishing and agriculture. Poor Richard’s Almanac was produced by no one less than Benjamin Franklin!
One of my favorite stories is in regard to the survival and success of the Old Farmer’s Almanac. Back in 1815, there was a lot of almanac competition. Robert B. Thomas, the editor of the Old Farmer’s Almanac was sick in bed with the flu. His publisher was anxious to get the updated weather outlook and was banging on Thomas’ front door.
Mr. Thomas, not up to the task, yelled through the door, “snow in June, frost in July”, hoping that such an outlandish forecast would send his publisher away for a while.
Unknown to Robert Thomas, the publisher went ahead and started printing! A few days later, when Thomas was back to feeling better, he realized in horror what had happened!
Thinking that he would be the laughing stock of New England, Thomas scurried about trying to buy up any of these almanacs that had already gone out to the public. Sadly, it was too late.
Also unknown to Thomas, a massive volcano called Tambora was blowing it’s top in Indonesia. One of the largest eruptions in history was sending nearly 40 cubic miles of ash into the atmosphere.
The eruption put so much dust into the sky that it blocked out sunlight around the world, causing a temporary global cooling event.
The year 1816 is known as the “Year Without A Summer”. The cooling was so intense that snow did fall on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire in June and much of New England had frost and crop failures in July.
Suddenly, there was Robert B. Thomas standing on the corner with his almanac in hand, proclaiming that only he had “called it all along!”
Today, the Old Farmer’s Almanac and the Farmer’s Almanac still do their annual dual of the long-range forecasts.
Here are links to both:
Long Range Weather Forecast - Farmers' Almanac
Weather Forecasts, Predictions, History | The Old Farmer's Almanac
Cool story, bro.
Another version:
Perhaps the most famous incident of all in the 218-year history of the Old Farmer’s Almanac was in the fall of the year 1815 when editor Thomas was sick in bed with the flu but had prepared the publication beforehand. It’s been suggested that the printer or copy boy, as a prank, indicated that it would snow on July 13th the following summer (1816). Thomas discovered the trickery and had all, or almost all, copies destroyed. He then ordered a new publishing run.
Some of the original copies apparently got out, however, and Thomas took a lot of heat as a result. But when the year 1816, later known as the “the year without a summer” arrived, snow and cold did, in fact, occur sporadically in New England (and elsewhere) throughout the summer, including July 13th, as the printer said it would. See my story “A Year Without a Summer?” of last year.
As you might expect, Thomas, who was originally ridiculed for the prediction, now tried to claim credit for the error, saying that this was what he expected all along.
Judson Hale says that he occasionally runs across an 1816 issue of the Almanac but, to date, has never found one of the missing 1816 “snow” copies. (4) I suspect that if one were to be found, it would be quite valuable.
I suspect it would be, too. But I suspect even more that it’s nonexistant.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2010/10/its_old_farmers_almanac_time.html
Pics or it didn’t happen.
Another claim that they predicted it, but still no evidence:
The Year We Predicted Snow for July and August
And it turned out there was lots of it that summer!
Not everyone is aware that the people, including me, who publish Yankee Magazine also publish the oldest continuously published periodical in America known as The Old Farmers’ Almanac. Our 2015 edition of the Almanac has been out for about a month now and people are, as always, anxious to know the winter weather forecast. Well, I usually say it’ll be “wintry…followed by spring”. That hopefully results in a laugh before I launch into what we really are forecasting which, this year is really wintry. (Let’s just hope it’s followed by spring!)
But the most famous weather forecast the Almanac ever made (or maybe didn’t make) was for the summer of 1816 when we predicted snow for July and August. We still receive questions about it and for the past fifty-six years (I began with Yankee and the Almanac in 1958) I’ve kept my eye out for copies of that 1816 edition. Actually, I’ve found several copies—but none had a snow prediction for that summer. To date all I’ve found is “Now expect good hay weather,” or “Sultry with thundershowers.” It’s so disappointing.
However, I remain hopeful that a few copies still exist that do, indeed, predict “The Cold Summer of 1816,” as that summer is known in history books. There’s no question it did snow in New England and Canada during July and August of 1816. An 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in what was then the Dutch East Indies had left volcanic dust circling the globe, lowering temperatures as much as several degrees resulting in snow. But did the Almanac predict that?
Some say the printer inserted the snow prediction as a joke while Almanac founder, Robert B. Thomas, was sick in bed with the flu. The way I’ve always understood it, when Thomas discovered the “error” he destroyed all – or maybe most of – the “snow” copies and reprinted the 1816 edition with the more conventional forecast. It’s said the word got out anyway and during the early months of that year, Thomas was repeatedly called upon to deny making such a ridiculous forecast for the following summer. Then, when it really did snow in July, he changed his tune and took full credit. “Told you so!” he allegedly said. If the story is true, it is one of the best examples of a subtle skill my uncle, Robb Sagendorph, our Almanac’s 11th editor (I eventually became the 12th and today, our own Janice Stillman is the 13th), always referred to as “almanacsmanship.”
Welcome to the October 2014 edition of “Jud’s New England Journal,” the rather curious monthly musings of Judson Hale, the Editor-in-Chief of Yankee
Est. reading time: 2 minutes
From a 1983 book review in the NY Times:
VOLCANO WEATHER The Story of 1816, the Year Without a Summer. By Henry Stommel and Elizabeth Stommel. Illustrated. 177 pp. Newport, R.I.: Seven Seas Press. $15.
…
Before approaching the difficult question of just how volcanoes alter the weather, the authors - a former professor of oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his wife - take care to sort out just what happened in the summer of '16. In the process they scotch many a fable, among them the time-honored tale that the Old Farmer’s Almanac miraculously predicted the freak snowstorms of that July. The story had it that the almanac’s publisher, informed by his printer that he had neglected to include a weather forecast for the first week of July, irritably told the printer to put in anything that fit and the printer got even by inserting the words ‘‘snow and ice.’’ Alas, the almanac pages, reproduced in ‘‘Volcano Weather,’’ turn out to be innocent of snow and ice.
John V. H. Dippel’s book The Year of Eighteen Hundred and FRoze to Death (2015), p. 13, agrees that the almanac story is apocryphal
Almost 200 years ago the Northeast endured a dramatic, devastating series of cold spells, destroying crops, forcing thousand to migrate west, and causing many to wonder if their assumptions about a world governed by a beneficial Providence were...