Ann Arbor Yesterdays ~ Talk About The Weather

Ann Arbor Yesterdays

Talk About The Weather

By Lela Duff

“The weather is always doing something,” said Mark Twain. (My favorite is really
this one: “Everyone talks about the weather but nobody ever does anything about it." Since that famous remark isn't included in Bartlett, however, I can’t be quite sure that our greatest American quipster ever said it.) At any rate, one of the few things Ann Arbor still has nowadays that we can be sure it had in 1824, on the arrival of Allen and Rumsey is weather.

During that first February those gentlemen were blessed with a mild, “open” winter, as they were also the following year, when John Allen wrote to his Aunt Jane Trimble on Feb. 20 that the farmers were already ploughing. More damaging to the business of settling the county than either cold or heat seemed to be an excess of rain, from which the summer and fall of 1831 suffered the most continuously of any period before or since. Swamps become lakes, the Huron overflowed its banks for weeks on end, the primitive bridges were washed away, and roads were indistinguishable from surrounding mud.

On March 20,1838 came an electrical storm with a torrential rainfall, accompanied by a disastrous wind. Little Tommy Welch, John Allen's nephew, was struck by lightning and killed. The record breaking rainfall occurred some years later, however, when pioneer days and their problems were far in the past. On July 29, 1860, came the heaviest storm ever known in “Ann Arbor’s first hundred year,” according to Dr. Stephenson. On that Sunday morning 9 inches of rain fell in 2 1/2 hours, the Huron rose 18 Inches in 15 minutes, and Allen's Creek swept away every bridge that spanned it along Ann Arbor’s most important east-west streets. The old bridge to the North Side was badly damaged and had to be condemned The only wind storm that the early books label a tornado occurred July 7, 1874. "All day long the sun had been excessively hot,” the record states, “and just at sunset two dark clouds were seen to approach from the southwest." No mention is made of the funnel shape we have since learned to look for. Passing from west to east, the wind uprooted hundreds of forest trees, some of them large oaks 2 or 3 feet in diameter.

There were plenty of torrid days in these parts in the 19th century but the summer of that tornado seemed to top all records. During the last week of June, 1874, the temperature ranged from 98 to 108 in the shade.

Just to cool you off, I shall now quote some statistics of the lower end of the thermometer. On Decoration Day 1897, the temperature sank to 30 degrees and the ground was covered with a heavy snow. But in midwinter a number of times in that first century the mercury dipped in Ann Arbor to from 20 to 30 degrees below zero. Many of my readers will remember the fierce blizzards of 1917-18, during World War I when the coal supply was rationed. Does anyone recall the harrowing tale that buzzed around town one morning that winter of the late interurban car between here and Chelsea stuck in the snow without lights, while the motorman and conductor, leaping off the two ends of the car to try to reconnect with the trolley, were both, lost in the whirling drifts and the dark and frozen to death? Was it true?