Tidewater Whiplash: The Winter of 1700–1701 in Tidewater Virginia

I have said it before, but I will say it again.

I am constantly amazed at how much we have lost in just everyday living from the past to the present.

This factoid became glaringly obvious while doing research for my latest book, The Petal Keeper. Heroine Huldah Byford is at the mercy of a dead-end marriage and the constant weather changes of the then Virginia frontier during a weather event now dubbed as "The Little Ice Age."

But more on that in a moment.

Huldah and her husband, George Baker, in order to slaughter the pigs and to keep the tobacco dry and curing, are in need of a cold December that 1700. Instead, they and others in the Chesapeake Bay / Jamestown River region wage war against a rather balmy and overly wet month. The temperature never found its way below 45 degrees. (Freezing temperatures were necessary to slaughter the hogs this time of the year). The rain assaulted the area for thirty days. The wet and mud permeated everything, leaching into barns, houses, and most importantly, into the tobacco sheds. Only constant vigilance at curing fires in the tobacco barns, and using the last of the family's stores of root vegetables and corn to keep the hogs fattened, helped them wait out the above normal temperatures.

When the warm air fled, and the cold air came, they got more than they bargained for.

Overnight, as December marched into January, the mild spell collapsed. Winds whipped out of the northwest, plunging the Tidewater into a deep frost in a matter of hours. Creek edges hardened, harbor margins locked up with ice, and the humid wetlands turned into brittle, frozen plains. The mud itself froze into solid sheets of ice.

Huldah and George, as did other colonial families who had been lulled into a false sense of security during the warm December, suddenly found themselves in a war of a different kind, one more brutal and determined to kill them then the unusually warm weather. They rationed firewood, sheltered livestock from temperatures that felt entirely alien to the Virginia lowlands, and kept the curing fires going in the tobacco sheds for entirely different reasons. And the temperatures now were too cold to slaughter the hogs. For a pig farmer, like George Baker, this was devestating, for the pigs must be kept fattened until the weather warmed.

The killing cold settled atop the Virgina tidewater and refused to let go. ‘Twas what George and Huldah had feared. In a matter of twenty-four hours, they had gone from too warm to butcher the pigs to too cold. And the still constant need to keep the curing fires burning exhausted them both, for now it was necessary to be sure the delicate leaves did not freeze.

The vegetables, even the last of those that were good enough for stews and soups, ran out. The corn dwindled. George, with damaged, aching hands, set rabbit traps in the freezing cold and snow, and he harvested oysters from the brackish, frozen flats around Bailey’s Creek. Huldah hated oysters, but she ate them greedily enough as a means of nursing Lawrence, just as she ate the heavy, bitter mush mash of cornmeal stretched with ground-up dried acorns she had gathered beneath the snow herself.

Two weeks into the brutal killing cold, Huldah found Clover dead in the barn, and she grieved for the unborn calf she was certain she carried. George wanted to butcher and eat her, but Huldah refused. And then God, in His providence, provided a dead sow that had somehow wandered from the pen into the yard the next day. George butchered it, preserved the meat in the snow, and Huldah boiled the head, hooves, and skin into a thick, gelatinous porridge that, while not particularly tasty, lasted them several days at least.

What those 18th-century settlers were experiencing was the erratic heartbeat of the Little Ice Age—a centuries-long period of global cooling that reached its dramatic peak between the 17th and early 18th centuries. Driven by reduced solar activity and volcanic eruptions, the era was defined not just by bitter cold, but by wild, unpredictable climate swings. One week promised early spring; the next brought arctic isolation.

Its hard to imagine being so solidly bound to the skies as were our ancestors, but as we look back at the whiplash winter of 1700–1701, it’s a stark reminder of how bound our ancestors were to the whims of the skies—a reminder that bringing the past into the present, one book at a time, starts with understanding the elements that shaped our characters' everyday fight for survival.

About Donna

Donna Hechler Porter has always had stories in her head. When they were not swirling and gnawing, she had her head in a history book - both fiction and non-fiction. Now, she puts her love of old things, including her genealogy, to good use by writing both genealogy books and novels. She has published five historical novels, several of which have won awards, four genealogy books on her family history, and several smallish books including a book on the 1778 Big Siege of Fort Boonesborough and a book with tips and tricks for bringing history to life for young people. A graduate of Texas A & M University, she currently teaches middle school English and literature at a small private school east of Houston and runs a private tutoring business. She stops for all garage sales and to collect treasures from the side of the road. She dreams of life in a log cabin in the woods, even as she is addicted to antique and thrift shopping.

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