I wondered why Hezekiah Hopkins and his family, along with others from Haddonfield, moved to Ohio in the early 1800s. To help answer this question, I've put together a timeline of Hezekiah's life, and some of the events that happened during it.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 23 Oct 1767 | Born, Haddonfield, Gloucester County, New Jersey |
| 5 May 1768 | Death of Father, Haddon Hopkins, Haddonfield, Gloucester County, New Jersey |
| 1788 | Hezekiah inherits his father's land on reaching twenty-one. |
| 15 Nov 1789 | Married Martha Griffith in Gloucester County, New Jersey |
| 11 Apr 1791 | Applies for membership in Haddonfield Meeting. |
| 15 Dec 1794 | Sold 393 acres of land in New Jersey to David Garrison |
| 1800 | Counted in Census, Philadelphia County, Lower Dublin Twp. |
| 1810 | Counted in Census, Philadelphia County, East Southwark Twp. |
| 24 Jul 1810 | Transfered to Abington MM, Pennsylvania |
| 1810-11 | Flour and feed merchant, Philadelphia |
| 29 May 1811 | Transferred to Philadelphia SD MM, Pennsylvania |
| 1814-19 | Accountant, Philadelphia |
| 10 Apr 1815 | Eruption of Tambora volcano, Indonesia, which caused worldwide weather changes |
| 1816 | The year without summer, caused by the Tambora eruption |
| 1819 | Panic of 1819, first depression in U.S. history |
| 1820 | Counted in Census, Warren County, Wayne Twp. |
| 28 Jun 1820 | Transferred to Miami MM, Waynesville, Warren County, Ohio |
| 22 Sep 1823 | Died in Ohio |
I had assumed Hezekiah's moving to Ohio to be due to a search for greater opportunities, or because he had few reasons for staying in Philadelphia or New Jersey. What didn't occur to me until later was that larger issues might be involved. Two of those issues are weather and the economy.
The weather in the late 1810s was largely influenced by the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia. This eruption threw up so much material into the atmosphere that it influenced the weather world-wide for several years.
The eruption happened on April 10th, 1815. The following year was called The Year Without Summer. In America, New England was especially hard hit, but all the states were affected. The weather was colder than usual, and there was much less rain. Crops yields were much lower than normal, and farmers made less money. Trade with other countries, especially Britain, was affected.
Thomas Jefferson made detailed observations and records of the weather in Monticello. For 1816, he had this to say:
“We have had the most extraordinary year of drought and cold ever known in the history of America. In June, instead of 3 and 3/4 inches, our average of rain for that month, we only had 1/3 of an inch; in August, instead of nine and one-sixth inches our average, we had only eight tenths of an inch; and it still continues. The summer, too, has been as cold as a moderate winter. In every State north of this there has been frost in every month of the year; in this state we had none in June and July, but those of August killed much corn over the mountains. The crop of corn through the Atlantic States will probably be less than one-third of an ordinary one, that of tobacco still less, and of mean quality.”
Source: Edgar A. Imhoff, Monticello Research Report, May 2009, quoting from a letter from Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, 8 September 1816.
In his book Tambora, The Eruption That Changed The World, Gillen D'Arcy Wood writes that there was heavy snow in New England in June of 1816, and again in July, and that three killing frosts during the summer devastated the crops. When the cold continued, along with the accompanying drought, many farmers in New England sold their farms and moved to Ohio and Indiana. Thomas Jefferson reported a similar migration from Virginia.
The economy in the late 1810s was affected by the bad weather, by land speculation, and by the actions of the Second Bank of the United States. These factors, among others, resulted in the Panic of 1819, the new country's first depression.
“Especially in northern New England, where considerable farming took place on climatically-marginal lands, the cold years brought disaster. To make matters worse, the swing from warm to cold in the 1810s coincided with an increase in economic competition from the midwestern United States and central Canada. The additional stress of crop shortfalls due to shortened growing seasons forced many farmers to leave New England for what they believed were more hospitable climates to the west {emphasis mine} (Smith et al 1981).”
Source: William R. Baron, “1816 in Perspective: the View from the Northeastern United States”
in THE YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER?
WORLD CLIMATE IN 1816,
edited by
C. R. Harington
(Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa, Canada, 1992)
Gillen D'Arcy Wood writes in Tambora that the price of American wheat rose sharply in 1816-18, when European harvests were poor, then fell sharply in 1819-20, when European harvests improved. This left many American farmers with wheat they couldn't sell, or sold at a loss. Those who had bought land on speculation in the West were often wiped out.
Although the whole country was affected by the Panic, for my purposes I'm most interested in how it affected Philadelphia. Here is an account of what it was like there in 1819:
“One of the most significant phenomena of the depression was the advent of a new problem casting a long shadow on future events: large-scale unemployment in the cities. Although America was still, an overwhelmingly rural country, the cities--the centers of manufacture and trade--were rapidly growing, and this depression witnessed the problem of unemployment for factory workers, artisans, mechanics, and other skilled craftsmen. These workers were often independent businessmen rather than employees, but their distress was not less acute. Concentrated in the cities, their plight was thereby dramatized, and they lacked the flexibility of farmers who could resort to barter or self-sufficiency production. In the fall of 1819, in thirty out of sixty branches of manufacturing (largely handicraft) in Philadelphia, employment in these fields totaled only 2,100, compared to 9,700 employed in 1815. There was a corresponding decline in total earnings-from $3 million to less than $700 thousand during the later year. Very drastic declines in employment took place in the cotton, woolen, and iron industries.”
Source: Murray N. Rothbard, THE PANIC OF 1819,
Reactions and Policies,
Online edition prepared by William Harshbarger.
So the combination of bad weather, a depressed economy, and unemployment were probably enough to lead Hezekiah to think, as the New England farmers did, that moving to the West would be a good idea. I don't know whether these were his main reasons for moving, but think they must have played a part.
Back to Hezekiah and his family.
This file was last updated on 6/23/2020.
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