In April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted in the largest volcanic event in recorded human history. By 1816, a dense veil of atmospheric ash enveloped the globe, triggering the infamous Year Without a Summer. While global temperatures plummeted, New England bore a brutal brunt of this ecological anomaly.
In Vermont, where a speculative boom in Merino sheep farming was at its absolute peak, the weather turned apocalyptic. Heavy snowstorms blanketed the state in June, followed by severe killing frosts every single month of the summer. Green pastures turned to brittle, frozen dust overnight.
The sudden loss of forage crops—primarily hay and pasture grasses essential for sustaining huge herds—devastated the local agricultural economy. Desperate farmers watched as their prized sheep starved due to the catastrophic collapse of local fodder distribution. With Vermont hay yields decimated by over 80 percent, farmers had no choice but to slaughter entire flocks or attempt impossible feed imports from unimpacted regions.
The severe shortage of forage forced desperate livestock owners to drive surviving herds into mountain forests to feed on tree leaves and bark, a practice known as browse feeding that provided pitifully low nutrition. The sheer impossibility of securing feed transformed Vermont's landscape from a booming sheep-farming empire into a ghost region of abandoned homesteads. This localized ecological disaster triggered Ohio Fever, driving thousands of ruined Vermont farmers to pack up their remaining possessions and move west toward the fertile Ohio Valley in search of warmer, reliable soil.