Judd speaks with Press Herald about Year Without a Summer
Richard Judd, the McBride Professor of History at the University of Maine, spoke with the Portland Press Herald for the article, “More than 200 years later, Maine still feels a chill from the Year Without a Summer.” In April 1815, Indonesia’s Mount Tambora had one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history, according to the article. The eruption released tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, which became a layer of sulfuric acid that eventually covered the planet and is widely understood to have caused in 1816 the Poverty Year, or Year Without a Summer, the article states. “On the coast, we were very much into a commercial economy. Up the rivers, there was a local barter and exchange economy,” said Judd, who has examined that period in Maine history. Away from the coast and towns that grew up along the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers, most of the territory was considered frontier and most of the farmers were subsistence farmers, the Press Herald reported. The possibility that the freakish weather might become the new normal and mean the end of farming in Maine caused many families to move to Ohio in search of better agricultural conditions. “They left in droves,” Judd said.