Second Decade

Church steeples, horse-drawn sleighs, picket fences, snow-covered fields...is this what you think of when you picture an old-time winter in New England? The cultural and historical roots of these images go back to Colonial times, but the historical reality isn’t always so idyllic. On January 19, 1810, a strange and sudden cold snap, accompanied by violent winds, plunged the region into a sudden deep freeze that nearly everyone who lived through it remembered vividly for the rest of their lives. As the wind tore apart roofs, shook down barns and snapped the masts of sailing ships like toothpicks, New Englanders braced for a punishing assault from the weather. When it was over, the memory of the “Cold Friday” gave them a new benchmark for measuring extreme weather, and the story of one particular family’s tragedy, printed in a single newspaper, somehow became one of the most often-told tales in all of New England’s 19th century folklore. In this revealing episode, the first in the second season of Second Decade