Cold or hot, Vicksburg weather is consistently inconsistent

No doubt it was cold here last week, but it has been worse—lots worse. In 1899, 120 years ago, the temperature in Vicksburg was about the lowest it has ever been—10 degrees below zero.

That was in February 1899, but there was a warming spell on the way for after a day or so, the temperature climbed 20 degrees—from 10 below to 10 above. A local newspaper noted that the only folks smiling were the plumbers and coal merchants.

The Mississippi River was clogged with ice, not just ice floes, but solid ice “from shore to shore.” Boats were caught in the freak storm, and trains were stalled because the transfer boats that took them to Louisiana couldn’t operate.

“It is a sight rarely witnessed by our citizens,” the paper said.

Most houses were heated by coal, but it was almost impossible for the mules to pull the wagons, for they slipped and stumbled to their knees creating “a pitiable sight.”

I’ve seen ice floes on the river here a few times, but only one other year than 1899 has the river frozen over, and I think that was in 1940 or ‘41. My cousin, the late Charlie Faulk, took a picture of it, and I believe the old river bridge is in the background.

When I was young, we relied on Mr. Sherill on WQBC AM radio to tell us about the weather he termed “out our way,” which was on Fisher Ferry Road, or there was Woody Asaff or Judy Moon on TV with weather reports. But to find out what it was like 150 years ago one must go to diaries or old letters.

B.L.C. Wailes, who was the state geologist and an internationally respected scientist who lived at his plantation, Fonsylvania, also out Fisher Ferry Road, kept a daily journal, each day writing about the weather. He consistently recorded the weather patterns, which were inconsistent.

I checked out his entries on every Christmas day for 10 years, 1852 to 1862.

If he had been dreaming of a white Christmas in 1852, it was just that—a dream—for the temperature was 78 degrees, not even slightly resembling a Currier and Ives print.

I’ve always heard that if you don’t like Mississippi weather, just wait a bit and it will change. The next year, 1853, Wailes wrote that the day was “dark, cold, cloudy, gloomy.” In 1855, the white Christmas came true as there was heavy sleet on Christmas Eve and by the next day, ice covered everything, and it snowed off and on all day. The next year, it was warm and there were a few clouds

The Christmas weather was haphazard—some years warm and cloudy, at other times cold and gloomy. One year he wrote that it was 18 degrees at sunrise, and that Fonsylvania Road was frozen and slippery.

Unlike today, he paid little attention to the fact that it was Christmas Day. It was often business as usual. One year he went to buy some property, and gifts seem to have been reserved for his slaves. On another occasion, he was busy, but noted he would take another day in place of Christmas. Only once did he mention any decorations, and it was where a sanctuary was “very tastefully decorated with evergreens, wreaths, and festoons.”

While Wailes wrote about the weather in the county, Emma Balfour recorded her thoughts and observations from her home on Crawford Street. Like Wailes, she found the city weather unpredictable.

All the scars and blemishes were covered when a light snow covered Vicksburg in 1985. This aerial photo shows Court Square and some surrounding buildings. Photo from the Old Court House Museum Collection.

Mrs. Balfour loved flowers, and one year, she wrote that her flowers just kept on blooming from spring through summer and fall into winter. In February, new growth was pushing old leaves off the trees when suddenly the temperature took a nosedive and within a few hours, the house tops were covered with snow. Four days later it was like springtime again. Sound familiar? It was 1849.

Weather was Mrs. Balfour’s constant worry— it was too hot, too dry, too dusty, too much rain, and there was the fear of cold.

One year, the dust was so suffocating that she had to keep the windows closed, and another year she wrote, “I water & water each day expecting it will rain … water seems to do very little good.”

One Christmas was so dry she was watering flowers and the next year, it wouldn’t stop raining until it turned into sleet and snow “and now everything bends to the ground by the weight of the ice—it is so beautiful that I could enjoy it but for my fear for my poor shrubs being broken and killed.”

The worst winter was 1855-1856, even though in late November, it seemed that Vicksburg might not have any cold weather. Mrs. Balfour was planning a floral arrangement for the altar at Christ Church when the weather changed, and she wrote, “Man proposes, God disposes.”

Her only consolation was knowing that peach trees must have a dormant season, so she felt “we shall have a splendid fruit year.” The cold lingered for over a month, ice forming inside her house, and the temperature dropping to 8 degrees on Feb. 5, 1856—the coldest it had been on that date since 1835 when it was zero.

Fast-forward a century to 1951 when a storm dropped tons of snow and ice on Warren County. It was the coldest I had been until in the late ‘50s when I moved to Alaska (at which time I promised God that if He let me go home I’d NEVER complain about Southern heat again).

When the big storm hit in 1951, we didn’t have telephones in Campbell’s Swamp (sometimes I wish I didn’t have one now), and the electricity was off for several weeks. We had electric lights and a radio, but they didn’t work. Mother still cooked on a wood stove, and we heated the house with wood. There was an outhouse out back, so the only plumbing to freeze were one’s personal pipes.

That was the winter I began to dislike eggs, for Mother’s Rhode Island Reds never stopped laying, and, though the roads were impassable for over a week, the cupboard was getting bare—only the hens were never late for work. Relief came when our neighbor, Pete Hullum, made trips on his tractor to Tom Kinzer’s store at Yokena or Hearn’s store, bringing necessities and the mail.

There was a similar storm in 1961 and again in 1989. In that last one the trees on the Old Court House lawn looked like Grant’s army had just been there, but community spirit prevailed, for Ed McKnight and his farm crew volunteered to clean up the mess. (I surely was glad Ed good grades in history when I taught him at Warren Central.)

Out our way, my neighbor Ronnie Anglin took his generator from neighbor to neighbor, running it at each house for a few hours at a time, providing some hot water and keeping the food in the freezers from ruining.

Hot water was what I missed most, for I like a good shower every day, something I didn’t worry about until I realized that I no longer thought the dog smelled bad.

There seems to be nothing new in history, despite the predictions of global gloom and doom, for old letters and diaries indicate it has all happened before right here in Warren County and Vicksburg.