Minnesota Weather Summary for the 1820’s
Cool First Half, Warmer Second with Closing Drought
A relatively cool first
half but a warmer, and near the close, droughty second featured the weather of
the 1820's in the Fort Snelling vicinity.
Annual mean temperatures for each of the closing five years were higher
than those of the opening five, the last eighteen months of the decade also
visited by drought.
Bitter winter cold,
perhaps the most notorious aspect of Minnesota climate, predominated over the
very first January (1820),
and later that year, in mid-October, an extraordinarily early 11-inch snowstorm
swept through. Concern about what
constituted a typical frost-free season probably arose in 1822 following late May
and early September visitations; also, in June of that year, a period of heavy
rains and flooding was experienced. The
1822-23 winter (December-February) was the coldest locally for another fifty
years, the succeeding 1823
summer (June-August), however, the warmest for another fifteen. The last five
years 1825-1829 were 2 F warmer than the first five, the contrast most evident
for March-May and October-December. A
noteworthy exception to this, however, was April 1826, unseasonably
cold temperatures and late snows, following the already heavy accumulations of
February and March, resulting in a spring flood of historic proportions.
Rainfall during the 1820's, observed only qualitatively
("light", “heavy", etc.,), seemed to be adequate for the growing
seasons with the exception of 1829. Snowfall,
occasionally measured quantitatively, appeared to be moderate to light, the
above-mentioned '25-'26 winter the major exception. Intermittent drought or near-drought conditions prevailed from
the spring of 1823
through the winter of '23-'24, but a
full-fledged pattern became established over the last half of 1828, prevailing
through virtually all of 1829
and into the early years of the coming decade, the 1830's.