Before #snowpocalypse, there was just God’s wrath

By Asher Kohn

The East Coast is about to be put under a couple feet of snow. Classes are canceled, workplaces are shuttered, and Washington, DC is under a state of emergency. But at least there are fuzzy sweaters, hot chocolate, and — for those who have power — Netflix to binge on. For those who don’t, blizzards can be as scary as they were centuries ago. DC’s mayor has warned that the storm has “life or death implications” for people, particularly those who are homeless.

In 1717, the American colonies were on the receiving end of a vicious blizzard. It was more than just an inconvenience; for colonists back then a snowstorm like this weekend’s was a sign of the apocalypse.

It began with a light dusting. In New England, snow began to fall on February 18. Nobody thought much of it until birds blackened the sky around villages. Deer walked into town squares, seemingly unafraid. Dogs spent whole nights barking. The forests of the Eastern seaboard were frozen bare of food, so prey animals were eating from cellars — and starving wolves were following them into town.

The snow was still falling a week later. Snowdrifts swallowed whole houses, and Puritans were forced to cancel church services. The colonies were pre-industrial, and wealth was often kept in the form of flocks of sheep or herds of cattle. The snow destroyed them. “Scores of these were buried and then of course they froze to death before help could reach them,” reported the Hampton Union and Rockingham County Gazette. When the colonies finally thawed, “the cattle were found standing erect, frozen solidly in their tracks. … The sheep had huddled together for mutual warmth and had succumbed in that way.”

As the storm continued, famed Puritan minister Cotton Mather called it “as mighty a snow as perhaps has been known in memory of man.” Native Americans who consulted with the colonists agreed. A Connecticut preacher named Eliphalet Adams stood in front of his sparse parish and invoked Nahum 1:

The Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet.

In March, finally, the snow stopped. New England was covered with feet of snow, but also a silent peace. Within what Mather called the “tumultuous privacy of a storm,” people didn’t need Netflix to chill. One Abraham Adams of Newbury, Massachusetts jumped through a second-floor window and snowshoed three miles to his in-law’s home, where his wife Abigail was holed up. They welcomed their firstborn child on Thanksgiving.

The intervening centuries have washed the East Coast in sheets of rain and frozen it under feet of snow. But now we have the Farmer’s Almanac and modern meteorology. We know both when a storm is coming and that it’s probably not a vengeful god’s doing.

That doesn’t make it any warmer or drier. Wolves may no longer be baying outside, but for some of this country’s most impoverished, the 2016 blizzard may yet be as deadly and terrifying as 1717. It’s enough to send a shiver up the spine of the capital’s mayor, preparing to serve more than 10,000 homeless people as the first snowflakes fall.

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