Reply #7: Still not as bad as 150 years ago. [View All]

[sofa king]

In the course of my studies of the Civil War battlefields here in the Valley of Virginia, I've found an unusual thing: the weather here in the winter was much, much worse than it has been here of late.

149 years ago, on almost this very day, there was 17 inches of fresh snow on the ground in Highland County. Spring had not even begun to show the first growth on the trees by May 5 there (according to Jed Hotchkiss' diary), and nights were still "heavy frost" nights, meaning well below freezing. Similarly, while Virginia toyed with secession exactly 150 years ago, communications and travel were interrupted by occasional snow in early and mid April.

In almost every winter of the Civil War, both sides in Virginia spent the long months in winter quarters practicing maneuvers by snowball fighting, and there was always--always!--a ground cover of snow with which to work. (Troops here also occasionally resorted to throwing snowballs in combat when they ran out of ammunition--see, e.g., the Battle of Camp Allegheny.)

Robert E. Lee, riding Traveller from Richmond to Lexington in late September, 1865, noted with dismay that it was already so cold that most homes were already heating with wood stoves.

This is coming to you from a guy who considers this past winter to have lasted for six months, because he has spent hours outside through all of it, every day, day and night, often on a moped. I friggin' cannot stand the cold, and secretly I know that if climate change continues, my beloved Valley will once again become frigid cold and unwelcoming. It's only global "warming" for the planet as a whole. For North America and Europe, it's likely to mean a return to the bad old days of never-ending winter.

Edit: I should also mention that Spring was arguably just as bad or even worse. Just a week or two ago the Upper Valley experienced flooding where for a day or so the rivers were around seven feet deep in places where they often run eighteen inches. In 1862, those conditions lasted not for a day, but for six weeks. When torrential flooding again washed out the valley in the early 1900s, the old-timers agreed that that disaster compared not at all to the flooding of the spring of 1862.