Guest Blog Entry by Shayla Carey
This January has been extremely cold, with polar vortex
winds driving arctic air straight down to our little section of the world. Though Landis Valley doesn't take daily
thermometer readings, the nearby Lancaster Airport does and our coldest temperature
was recorded there four times this month:
a frigid -1°. According to Eric Hörst, director of the Weather
Information Center at Millersville University (WIC), this January is shaping up
to be the 7th coldest on record (since 1914) for Lancaster.
Weather forecasters and websites like to put up the “Real
Feel” temperature, but it is still only a number, one of many ways to say the
same thing that Henry Harrison Landis wrote in his diary over one hundred years
ago. His sporadic records tell of some
days hitting as low as -2° (Wednesday, January
14, 1914), though the official low for that day was -3°, according to the WIC. We like to think of the old song line, “Jack Frost
nippin’ at your nose,” rather fondly, but Henry saw the reality a bit
differently. He eloquently reports that “The
weather is so cold there is no pleasure being outside of the house.” That morning he was “Rather late getting down
stairs. Awful cold but the sun came up
bright and clear but the thermonator [sic] said 2 below and when I went out I
found it biting cold.” Apparently, Jack Frost
got a bit nasty that year, as he did this one.
January wasn't always so bleak for the folks in Henry’s
world—or cold, for that matter. On New
Year’s Day, 1881, he writes about his boys “keeping holaday (sic). The[y] each have a little sleigh and they are
out the whole day.” A few days later
that same year, he mentions that he “Took the boys to school this
mor[n]ing. A fresh snow of 6
inches. Sleighing very good.” On January 25, he notes,
“This after John Lawrence and the boys took the teacher and
went to visit schools. There were 6
sleighs of them and the whole school went along… Then [the] boys came home
about 4 o clock. They had been at
Fruitville and at Gamber’s School house.”
In fact, he mentions the fine quality of the sleighing often
that month. This is a good thing, as he
hauled not only people in his sleigh in 1881 and ‘82, but wood, tobacco, and shoats
(weaned piglets) as well.
These accounts are of only parts of Henry’s January days—an important
part. Sometimes the weather cooperated
with his farming, as when his pigs survived the cold and Emma’s chickens produced
a good amount of eggs. Sometimes,
though, it didn't cooperate, like when, in February, 1881, meltwater came into
the tobacco cellar and threatened his crop.
All in all, Henry’s diaries fill in details that data can
leave behind. It’s a reminder that
diaries are invaluable, even if the characters are long gone and the landscape
has changed beyond reckoning. Some
things, like the feel of biting cold on a January day, never change.
Winter is traditionally a time of hunkering down and improving the mind. Come to one of Landis Valley's Winter Workshops and discover skills you never thought you had.
