Archive for December, 2006

The Year With­out a Sum­mer took place in 1816 when freak­ishly bizarre cli­matic changes took place because of a large amount of vol­canic activ­ity in the recent years lead­ing up to 1816.

The erup­tions believed to have caused the anom­aly were -

1. The 5 April — 15 April 1815 vol­canic erup­tions of Mount Tamb­ora on the island of Sum­bawa in the Dutch East Indies
2. Mount La La Soufrière in Saint Vin­cent in the Caribbean in 1812
3. and Mount Mayon in the Philip­pines in 1814

Because of these erup­tions a large amount of vol­canic ash was launched sky­ward into the atmos­phere and result­ing in lower tem­per­a­tures and sud­den cold snaps worldwide.

In the north­east­ern US the sum­mer of 1816 started out with a cli­ma­to­log­i­cal bang. May brought on a hard frost that killed off most of the crops that would have been har­vested later that year, then in June snow­storms hit east­ern Canada and New Eng­land result­ing in many deaths.

The inter­est­ing thing about that sum­mer was that the cold didn’t last the entirety of the sum­mer, it only came in fits and spurts, with the tem­per­a­tures rang­ing from down­right hot one day to below freez­ing later the same day. As an exam­ple, on the 5th of June the tem­per­a­ture in Salem, Mass reached 89 degrees, whereas on the fol­low­ing day, after thun­der­storms blew through the tem­per­a­ture was 41 degrees. The tem­per­a­tures then rose until they reached, for that area, almost heat wave pro­por­tions. Then as June slipped into July the cold returned.

Because of the cold snaps, freezes and snow the prices on corn, wheat and other grains rose dra­mat­i­cally. Con­versely beef prices fell, given the fact that farm­ers found it hard to feed their live­stock and wanted to make all the cash they could off of already starv­ing animals.

So what did this cli­matic abnor­mal­ity end up caus­ing, besides pos­si­ble star­va­tion and cold toes? His­to­ri­ans believe that it was the impe­tus for many Amer­i­cans to migrate west­ward and start set­tling the Mid­west. Joseph Smith, founder of the Mor­mon church, was one such man, hav­ing begun his move west­ward after he had sev­eral crop failures.

In Europe, where the cold snap was even worse, there were food riots in Eng­land and France, the gov­ern­ment of Switzer­land declared a national emer­gency, while brown and red snow fell in Hun­gary and Italy, respec­tively, the cause of which is assumed to have been vol­canic ash.

And the pro­longed rain­fall forced Mary Shel­ley and her friends to remain indoors dur­ing most of a planned hol­i­day in Switzer­land. They all decided to hold a con­test, see­ing who could write the scari­est story, lead­ing Shel­ley to write Franken­stein.

La Réu­nion was a social­ist Utopian com­mu­nity founded in 1855 by French, Bel­gian, and Swiss colonists approx­i­mately three miles west of the present Reunion Arena and Reunion Tower in down­town Dal­las, and near the forks of the Trin­ity River. The com­mune was led by the French philoso­pher Fran­cois Marie Charles Fourier whose fol­low­ers and asso­ciates estab­lished over 40 sim­i­lar colonies in var­i­ous parts of the United States of Amer­ica dur­ing the 1800s.

Inspired by the writ­ings of the French philoso­pher Fran­cois Marie Charles Fourier, the colony was intended to become a social­ist Utopian con­clave bas­ing itself on the idea of com­mu­nal pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion for the ben­e­fit of all. Unlike true com­mu­nist sys­tems indi­vid­u­als could own pri­vate property.

Built on a 2,000 acre pur­chase, La Réu­nion had prob­lems almost from the very begin­ning. The colonists, none of them farm­ers, planned to sup­port the colony, mis­guid­edly, through farm­ing, mainly wheat and veg­eta­bles. Mix in a large group of watch­mak­ers, weavers, brew­ers and store­keep­ers and sud­denly there was a large por­tion of the colony that didn”t have the fog­gi­est idea on how to sur­vive in the Texas landscape.

But they stuck it out and suc­ceeded at grow­ing some wheat and veg­eta­bles, although not enough to sus­tain the colonists. Throw in a bliz­zard in 1856 which destroyed all of their crops and the blaz­ing Texas sum­mer heat and it”s lit­tle won­der why they failed to take hold.

With over 350 colonists even­tu­ally made La Réu­nion their home, the com­mune was already begin­ning to fail as its pop­u­la­tion began to leave the area. Some returned to their native Europe while oth­ers just moved out away. In 1860 the grow­ing town of Dal­las incor­po­rated the La Réu­nion colony into its own land area and absorbed the skills of the remain­ing colonists into its gen­eral population.

Lit­tle of the exper­i­ment is left today, mainly an odd reminder here and there. The most rec­og­niz­able reminder of the colony was a tower built in 1978 which was named Reunion Tower as an eso­teric honor to the colonists who have become a lit­tle less than foot­notes in Dal­las history.

I live in Dal­las, and as far as I can tell, other than the first 7–11 and, of course, the JFK assas­si­na­tion, Dal­las doesn’t have a lot of tales, but by gum we did have our very own Nazi POW camp towards the end of WWII.

The 3 and a half acre camp, which was a branch of the Camp Mexia Pris­oner of War camp, started out its life in 1933 as a Civil­ian Con­ser­va­tion Corps camp on the shores of White Rock Lake, roughly 1/2 a mile from my home. The camp was made up of roughly 200 unem­ployed men from the sur­round­ing areas who lived there as well as made improve­ments to White Rock Lake Park. How­ever, after the start of WWII the CCC camp was given over to the Army Air Corps’ Fifth Fer­ry­ing Com­mand, which used the camp as an induc­tion cen­ter and boot camp for nearly two years.

Then in 1944, some of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corp sol­diers cap­tured by Amer­i­can G.I.’s were shipped off to the White Rock Lake branch of Camp Mexia. The camp even­tu­ally held 403 men who were bussed to work every­day at the Regional Quar­ter­mas­ter Repair Shop at the con­verted Cen­ten­nial Gen­eral Exhibits Build­ing at Fair Park.

There was never an escape attempt from the camp, even though civil­ians would often call about escaped pris­on­ers wan­der­ing the area but when ques­tioned by MP’s they would reply that they’d just got­ten lost or wanted to go for a walk. The area, I can attest, is very pretty.

At the end of the war a large per­cent­age of Hitler’s sol­diers wanted to stay in the States, but the gov­ern­ment quashed the idea, forc­ing all to return home to their native lands.

The atomic bomb test­ing por­tion of the Man­hat­tan Project, code named the Trin­ity Project, had 8 pos­si­ble test sites. These pos­si­ble sites were¹ -

1. The Tularosa Basin near Alam­ogordo, NM
2. The lava beds (now the El Mal­pais National Mon­u­ment) south of Grants, NM (which could have been fun, as the west­erly winds prob­a­bly could have car­ried fall­out to Albuquerque)
3. The Alam­ogordo Bomb­ing and Gun­nery Range, today known as the White Sands Mis­sile Range
4. An Army train­ing area north of Blythe, Cal­i­for­nia, in the Mojave Desert
5. San Nico­las Island (one of the Chan­nel Islands) off the coast of South­ern California
6. A desert area south­west of Cuba (NM) and north of Thoreau
7. Padre Island south of Cor­pus Christi, Texas, in the Gulf of Mexico
8. San Luis Val­ley, near mod­ern day Great Sand Dunes National Mon­u­ment, located near Mosca, Co.

Gen­eral Leslie Groves had decided on using the area north of Blythe, but opted not to use because he didn’t want to have to deal with the base’s com­man­der, Gen. George S. Pat­ton. So the “honor” fell to Alamogordo.

1. I got this list from World Wide School. [↩]