Seattle’s Surprisingly Mild Winter of 1876
While outsiders imagined the Pacific Northwest as a frozen, inhospitable tundra, locals were enjoying a 'genial' December filled with blooming garden flowers.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The slur has been so often cast, and has become stereotyped, that it rains all winter in our climate. The record of the past four weeks ought to set this late report at rest. During the whole of the present month and the most of the last week in November, we have had dry, pleasant weather without a single shower, the lack of snow or storms of any kind, much of it sunny and with scarcely any frost. Even so much that flowers in the gardens have kept blooming right along, and the streets and roads that were actually dusty are at least mostly dry and solid. Nor is this an exceptional year, for the dry weather of the present season is presumably confined to the month of December; and it is reasonable to anticipate yet several weeks at least of dry, clear weather before the first of March. Looking back, in retrospect, we recall that the winter months of 1875 and 1876 were almost entirely dry as well as free from snow and frost. The winter of 1874, though cold and snowy, was, in this Territory, a dry season. It is a pity that it is not practicable to disabuse the minds of dwellers along the latitude of forty to forty-five that our winter climate here, under the forty-ninth parallel, is not as inhospitable as the coasts of Labrador, and, from their being, as really is the case, about as mild and inviting as that of Delaware or the Carolines.
“It is a pity that it is not practicable to disabuse the minds of dwellers along the latitude of forty to forty-five that our winter climate here... is not as inhospitable as the coasts of Labrador.”
Long before the 'Seattle Freeze' or modern climate anxiety, residents were fighting the same reputation for gray, wet winters. This 1876 editorial highlights a recurring cultural obsession with the Pacific Northwest's misunderstood climate, proving that complaining about—and defending—Seattle’s weather is a foundational civic tradition.
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