General Washington, a man of good condition, was one of the early annual seekers for a pleasant climate, which he found west of the North Mountain, about Berkeley Springs, where he had a hut built, and for years repaired there with his chicken cocks and horses. When he went through Virginia as a young surveyor, he observed the differences in the temperature, and in the humidity, and located some of the best springs and resorts in the Old Dominion. When Washington first visited Saratoga he endeavored, at once, to purchase the tract enclosing the few sources at that time known, so much was he impressed with the superiority of the climate of New York in summer over that of Virginia.
Mr. Jefferson, who was one of the best amateurs in the country at all sorts of subjects, although he lived on the top of a mountain above the tidewater region, and in sight of other peaks, would not spend his summers at home about Charlottsville, but had a road cut far into the west and built himself a sort of lodge called Poplar Forest, in the high country about Lynchburgh; it was a brick house on a slope, one story high in front and two stories high in the rear, of octagon shape, with a portico in front and a veranda in the rear. To this spot Jefferson went both in summer and in autumn to escape his political followers, and to think, read and sleep.
Jefferson was one of the earliest weather prophets in this country and in his works are found many references to the American climate, of use to any future climatologist. About 1805 he wrote to Mr. Volney, the philosopher: “In no case does habit attach our choice or judgment more than in climate. The Canadian glows with delight in his sleigh and snow, the very idea of which gives me the shivers. The changes between heat and cold in America are greater and more frequent, and the extremes comprehend a greater scale on the thermometer in America than in Europe. Habit, however, prevents these from affecting us more than the smaller changes of Europe affect the European, but he is greatly affected by ours. As our sky is always clear and that of Europe always cloudy, there is a greater accumulation of heat here than there in the same parallel. The changes between wet and dry are much more frequent and sudden in Europe than in America, for though we have double the rain, it falls in half the time. Taking all these together, I prefer much the climate of the United States to that of Europe, and I think it a more cheerful one. It is our cloudless sky which has eradicated from our constitutions all disposition to hang ourselves, which we might otherwise have inherited from our English ancestors. Still, I do not wonder that a European should prefer his grey to our azure sky.”
This description in the main holds good to our time, although social causes have increased here the tendency to suicide, though perhaps the ratio of suicide is no greater in America now than it ever was. If we add dueling, which was a form of suicide, to the regular cases of suicide, I have my doubts whether more Americans make away with themselves now than in the early days. I happen to think of one signer of the Declaration of Independence who died from mental excitement over signing that instrument, of another who was poisoned, and of a third who was killed by a fellow patriot in a duel.
Jefferson also noted in 1809, under “Cultivation,” the changes in the American climate, in a letter to Dr. Chapman: “I remember,” said he, “that when I was a small boy, say sixty years ago, snows were frequent and deep in every winter, to my knee very often, to my waist sometimes, and that they covered the earth long. And I remember while yet young to have heard from very old men that in their youth the winters had been still colder, with deeper and longer snows. In the year 1772 we had a snow two feet deep in the Champagne parts of this state, and three feet in the counties next below the mountains. But when I was President the average fall of snow for the seven winters was only 14½ inches, and the ground was covered but sixteen days in each winter on an average of the whole. I noticed the change in our climate in my ‘Notes on Virginia,’ but since that time public vocations have taken my attention from the subject, nor do I know of any source in Virginia now existing, from which anything on climate can be derived. Dr. Williamson has written on the subject, and Mr. Williams in his ‘History of Vermont’ has an essay on the subject of climate.”
Addressing Mr. Louis E. Beck at Albany, N. Y., in 1824, when he was a very old man, Jefferson said:
“I thank you for your pamphlet on the climate of the West; although it does not yet establish a satisfactory theory, it is an additional step toward it. My own was perhaps the first attempt to bring together the few facts then known, and suggest them to public attention, and they were written before the close of the revolutionary war, when the western country was a wilderness untrodden but by the feet of the savage or the hunter. It is now flourishing in population and science, and after a few more years of observation and collection of facts, they will doubtless furnish a theory of their climate. Years are requisite for this, steady attention to the thermometer, to the plants growing there, the times of their leafing and flowering, its prevalent winds, quantities of rain and snow, temperature of fountains, animal inhabitants, etc. We want this, indeed, for all the states, and the work should be repeated once or twice in a century to show the effects of clearing and culture toward changes of climate.”
Thus promptly did our early scholars and sages watch the climatic relations of the country to its population and vitality. These “Notes on Virginia,” which Jefferson wrote during the Revolution, contain five years’ instrumental observation on rain, heat and wind taken at Williamsburgh, the tidewater capital, which is about forty miles from Fortress Monroe, which latter place has since become a winter resort. He computed that we had forty-seven inches of rain annually, considerably more than fell in Europe, but a much larger proportion of sunshine than there, only half as many cloudy days as in France and Germany, and the statesman says about the Alleghany Mountain region, of which Chautauqua Lake is an outpost:
“It is remarkable that proceeding on the same parallel of latitude westerly, the climate becomes colder in like manner as when you proceed northerly. This continues to be the case until you attain the summit of the Alleghany, which is the highest land between the ocean and the Mississippi. From thence, descending in the same latitude to the Mississippi, the change reverses, and, if we may believe travelers, it becomes warmer there than it is on the same latitude on the sea side. On the higher parts of mountains, where it is absolutely colder than it is on the plains on which they stand, frosts do not appear so early by a considerable time in autumn, and go off sooner in the spring than on the plains. I have known frost so severe as to kill the hickory trees round about Monticello, and yet not injure the tender fruit blossoms then in bloom on the top and higher parts of the mountain. A change in our climate is taking place very sensibly, and both heats and colds are becoming much more moderate, within the memory even of the middle-aged.”
General Washington, it may not be generally known, kept all his early diaries on the blank leaves of the “Virginia Almanac,” which was printed at Williamsburgh, showing that he watched the weather as if it were a part of public life.