From The Mud Puddle

I live in the south, North Carolina to be exact. We do see snow here a time or two a year, sometimes accumulating to the nice "snowed in" level. Mostly though we see ice or rain in the winter's months. It came as a surprise then, last night, to read this passage written by Bartlett Yancey in 1811 concerning wildlife in Caswell County (a county directly north and east of where I am)

"Of game we have but little; the greater part of the deer having been killed in an immensely large snow that fell about eight or nine years ago."

Amazing! There was a snowstorm in the early 1800's that killed off a good part of the deer population?

We looked up weather to see if we could find anything about a big snow in North Carolina in around 1802 or 1803 and found THIS:

February 3, 1803 -
a great snowstorm dropped 20 inches of snow over the Winston-Salem area of North Carolina.

Winston-Salem is to the west of the area in question. Depending on the system that drops the snow, the East sometimes does get more snow than the West.

For North Carolina to get 20 inches of snow is a big deal, even more so if that amount varied (as it can) to a larger amount in other parts of the state-even within 100 miles.

But it killed most of the deer population? Amazing!

posted by Muddy at 12:40 PM