As bad as this winter has been, can you imagine how you would feel if there were no spring or summer to look forward to?

As bad as this winter has been, can you imagine how you would feel if there were no spring or summer to look forward to?

Folks didn�t know it beforehand, but that�s exactly what happened in Ohio and much of the United States and Europe in 1816.

My historian friend from Madison County, Michael Bergman, and I were talking about that episode in Ohio�s history the other day. It is known as �the year without summer.�

On April 10, 1815, the volcano Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa erupted, throwing copious amounts of ash and debris into the sky that blocked out the sunshine in large parts of the world for most of two years.

It took about a year before it affected the United States but, because of the eruption, frost formed in every month during the summer of 1816 here, causing widespread crop failures, Bergman said. In those days, the land was mostly agricultural.

Many old-timers referred to the year as �1800 and froze to death,� he said.

Folks knew something was wrong when snow fell in June, but in those days of limited news sources, it took a long time before they learned what had happened.

Bergman said the eruption was so massive that it threw 150 times more ash into the sky than Mount St. Helens did when it erupted in 1980.

In addition to the extreme cold during the year without summer, there was no rain and only occasional snow, resulting in severe drought that added to the farmers� woes.

Many farmers along the more heavily populated East Coast lost everything, including their property, which prompted them to move to Ohio on the Western frontier, where land was easy to obtain. The movement west was so large that it was called �Ohio fever,� Bergman said.

During that cold summer, farmers planted crops that failed and then replanted them � and they also failed. Things were so bad that when the summer of 1817 rolled around, farmers had no seed corm from the summer of 1816 to plant. The only seed available was a very limited amount from the summer of 1815. Seed prices skyrocketed, and farmers took another hit.

That calamitous time in Ohio�s history reverberates with Bergman because he also is a farmer.

He reminded me that early February was important to the farmers of old because it was a bellwether for how things would go until springtime arrived. Farmers considered Feb. 2 the halfway point of winter and believed that they still should have on hand enough wood to heat their homes and hay to feed their animals to last until May.

Bergman warms his house with a wood stove and has cattle to feed. He told me he is in good shape.

Retired weather columnist John Switzer writes a Sunday Metro column.

jswitzer@dispatch.com