The winter of 1740-41 staged an early arrival, with October "as cold as ordinarily November is," wrote Bolton, Connecticut, town clerk JOHN BISSELL, and a substantial snowfall in mid-November. Two solid weeks of rain in early December resulted in the worst floods on the Connecticut River in half a century, damaging "bridges, fences, hay" and ruining "the Indian corn chambers, cribs . . ." "Extreme cold" followed, then late December brought "a prodigious storm of snow out of the north and north west, which was full knee deep, attended in said storm with violent cold weather," continued BISSELL. "Travelling was almost wholly suspended by reason of the extreme cold and deep snow, and God had sealed up the hand of every man. We had a very sensible consideration of . . . Who can stand before His cold?" LUDLUM reports that by January "Drifting snow soon brought an end to regular travel by highway over New England and the Middle Colonies, and the continuance of penetrating cold soon closed all the rivers and inland waterways with solid ice. Many salt water bays and channels, seldom before frozen, congealed solidly, and even the ocean shore along southern and eastern New England became ringed with an unusual icy surface." Boston Harbor became an expanse of ice so thick that sleighs carried worshipers across it from Dorchester to Sabbath services every week from December 25 until April 1. One man made a 200-mile trip by sleigh over the ice from Cape Cod to New York City. The extreme cold was not confined to the Northeast; that year the York River in Virginia froze hard enough to cross. A January thaw was followed by bouts of more "violent cold" and repeated snowfalls through early March. "The weather continued cold and the snow wasted but slowly, so that there was considerable quantity of snow the middle of April," wrote Bissell. The Connecticut River was still frozen solid enough to be crossed on foot on the first of April. On April 10 snow still lay two and a half feet deep on the ground on the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border. Like the Great Snow of 1717, this phenomenal season produced a story of remarkable survival. "At Guilford [Connecticut], a Sheep was in the winter buried in a storm of snow and lay there ten weeks and three days and came out alive," reported BISSELL. The severe weather affected life in New England long beyond the end of winter. "The spring came on very slowly; the beginning of March about half the people of the government had spent all their hay, and subsisted them by . . . giving out their Indian corn, and by reason of which scarcity a great number of cattle and horses died, and near half the sheep, and about two thirds of the goats," BISSELL wrote. "Exceeding scarcity followed, partly by reason of abundance of Indian corn being ruined by the long rains in December, and partly by people giving their corn to their creatures to save their lives. We suppose the ensuing summer was the greatest scarcity as ever the English felt since the first settlement of this government. Indian corn rose in the price from ten to twenty shillings, and what was commonly sold for twenty shillings, till at last all buying and selling utterly ceased, viz. of corn. Money was no temptation, and men of good estates who had money were forced to put themselves into the quality of beggars, and beg sometimes two quarts at a place,to relieve the distresses of their poor families." (Courtesy, Internet, unknown) http://www.mayflowerfamilies.com/enquirer/weather.htm We located this today and found it to be most interesting! Debbie, CA