By: Mehitabel Glenhaber

In the summer months, especially on a 95-degree day like we’ve been having a lot of this year, visitors to the Revere house often ask, “Wouldn’t they have been hot?” How did people in colonial Massachusetts actually feel about wearing long-sleeves and long skirts and cooking on open hearth fireplaces in summer weather? Answering these questions involves bringing together a number of details about everyday life and climate in Colonial Boston.

First, let’s zoom out and consider colonial New England’s climate in general. Boston in the 1700s would have been a lot colder than Boston today. Global temperatures have risen about 1 degree Celsius since 1750 due to anthropogenic climate change.[1] But on top of that trend, Paul Revere actually lived at the tail end of The Little Ice Age (1500-1750), a period in global geological history during which temperatures in northeastern America especially were colder than average.[2] Around the time that the city of Boston was first colonized by the Puritans, Massachusetts frequently experienced severe winters. The Charles River and sections of Boston harbor would fully freeze over most years, and below-freezing days would occur even in April and May.[3]

By contrast, summers would have been a bit milder than today,[4] especially before most northeastern cities were paved with so much heat-absorbing concrete.[5] Boston residents would certainly have worried a lot more about staying warm enough in the winter than cool in the summer. We see this in the architecture of colonial New England buildings. Bostonians built houses with low ceilings to limit how much air they had to keep warm. New England homes usually have vertical floorplans with central fireplaces and chimneys on the ground floor to get the most out of the heat generated by cooking – rather than the separate kitchens and high ceilings we see in colonial buildings built in warmer climates in the southern colonies.

Nonetheless, even in the 18^th century, New Englanders would have had to deal with warm weather. Summers in colonial New England were still much hotter than recent British immigrants would have been used to. As one colonist wrote in 1775, “[w]hen [the] severe winter goes at once comes a summer (for they have no spring) of a heat greater than is ever felt in England.”[6] By the Revere family’s lifetimes, summers were already getting longer, drier, and hotter in Massachusetts.[7] The Little Ice Age was drawing to an end. The increased deforestation of eastern Massachusetts also meant that ecosystems had less shade cover and retained less water, leading to hotter weather and patterns of flooding and droughts.[8] Even in the 1780s, Samuel Williams occasionally recorded temperatures up to 99 in Massachusetts.[9] So it is certainly fair to say that the Revere family at least sometimes had to contend with extreme heat.

Massachusetts’s warm summers weren’t just unpleasant – they could pose real risks to health or agriculture in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the 1620s, Plymouth colonists found that some of the species of crops they had brought with them from England could not grow in Massachusetts’s hotter, drier weather.[10] The summer of 1637 was so hot that John Winthrop wrote about being forced to travel at night to avoid the midday heat.[11] In 1646 and ‘47, summer droughts killed so much of the wheat crop that the Massachusetts Bay Colony put an embargo on exporting grain, and called for a “day of humiliation” to pray for a milder weather.[12] Summer was also a dangerous time for mosquito-borne illnesses, including malaria and yellow fever. Medical manuals for colonists traveling to the New England colonies in the 17^th and 18^th centuries often warned about the health risks of adjusting to a warmer climate. One colonist, William Wood, argued that new colonists should arrive in the fall to allow time for “seasoning” and “paling and thinning of the blood” before encountering Massachusetts in the summer.[13]

Beyond extreme heat waves and health risks, were Bostonians of Paul Revere’s era bothered by summer heat? The evidence points to yes. In fact, William Hubbard wrote in his General History of New England (1680) that New England weather “annoyed” its inhabitants by being “a little too much of the two extrems of heat and cold.”[14] Another colonist, Daniel Neal, writing in 1720, wrote that “[we are] tormented all summer with mus keetoes and almost frozen dead in winter.”[15] (A feeling which is still familiar to people living in even urban Boston today!) While the Reveres’s summers still weren’t as hot as today’s, sleeping in a stuffy house with a dozen other people, doing heavy labor under the beating sun, or trying to cook on a muggy day can’t have been pleasant.

Even without modern comforts like air conditioning, refrigerators, and moisture-wicking synthetic fabrics, though, the Reveres would have had strategies for cooling off. Windows could be thrown open in the summer time (at the cost of inviting in bugs), and the Reveres’s lived a short enough distance from the harbor to easily hop in for a swim.[16] Rather than piling into the kitchen to keep warm like they would in the winter, the family could disperse through the house and spend more time outside.

While colonial clothing can look bulky to modern viewers, covering the body, wearing hats, and wrapping handkerchiefs or “modesty pieces” over the neck and shoulders were a strategy for protecting oneself from the sun before the invention of sunscreen. And most New England colonists wouldn’t have worn the same heavy wool clothing year-round. In the summer, they layered lighter cotton and linen fabrics, [17] which this author can tell you from their time performing as a historical reenactor are actually much more breathable than a lot of modern polyester fabrics. Similarly, 18^th century Bostonians who could afford to would have switched out their bedsheets and the coverings of their furniture for cooler linens in the summer months.

Even with all of these strategies, though, it’s certainly fair to imagine that the Reveres were often as uncomfortable in Boston’s summer as we are now, and probably much more so. Thankfully, unlike the Revere family, modern Bostonians have one more strategy for coping with a heat wave available to us – to pop over to an air-conditioned museum!

Mehitabel Glenhaber is a Program Assistant at the Paul Revere House. 

[1] Synthesis Report of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (Climate Change 2007). Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 2007. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar4/syr/.

[2] Anya Zilberstein, A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3.

[3] William R. Baron, “Eighteenth-Century New England Climate Variation and its Suggested Impact on Society,” Maine History, 21, 4 (1982): 201-218.

[4] Zilberstien, 3.

[5] Daniel Speiss, “Summer in the City: Heat Islands and the “Cool” West End,” The West End Museum blog, https://thewestendmuseum.org/history/era/modern/summer-in-the-city-heat-islands-and-the-cool-west-end/.

[6] Zilberstein, 33.

[7] Baron, 205.

[8] William Cronon, Changes In The Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 122.

[9] Zilberstein, 165

[10] Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Climate and Mastery of the Wilderness in Seventeenth-Century New England,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Volume 63: Seventeenth-Century New England, https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/1742, 16

[11] “Climate and Mastery,” 7.

[12] “Climate and Mastery,” 9.

[13] Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Apr., 1984), 215.

[14] Zilberstein, 31.

[15] Zilberstein, 30.

[16] Jane C. Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home, 1760-1860, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 121-122.

[17] “Fear of Hot Climates,” 235.

Works Cited:

Baron, William R. “Eighteenth-Century New England Climate Variation and its Suggested Impact on Society.” Maine History 21, 4 (1982): 201-218.

Cronon, William. Changes In The Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. “Climate and Mastery of the Wilderness in Seventeenth-Century New England.” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Volume 63: Seventeenth-Century New England. https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/1742.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Synthesis Report of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (Climate Change 2007). 2007. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar4/syr/.

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Apr., 1984), pp. 213-240.

Nylander, Jane C. Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home, 1760-1860. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

Speiss, Daniel. “Summer in the City: Heat Islands and the “Cool” West End.” The West End Museum blog. https://thewestendmuseum.org/history/era/modern/summer-in-the-city-heat-islands-and-the-cool-west-end/.

Zilberstein, Anya. A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.