The Great April 15 Snowstorm

Charlotte's near-freezing temperatures Thursday morning seemed like quite a shock after weeks of 70s and 80s in March and early April, but it could have been worse.

In fact, it has been worse.

Mecklenburg County commissioner Bill James, who has a real interest and a good understanding of all things meteorological, passed along an item he found in a history book of Mecklenburg County. It was an excerpt about a big snowstorm on April 15, 1849.

I found several other accounts of the same storm, and interestingly, it appears to have developed in a year much like 2012. Temperatures had been unseasonably mild in March and April, but very cold air spilled into the South in the second week of April. It's not clear exactly what happened, but based on the results, we can guess.

There are published accounts of a big snowstorm that struck April 14 and 15 in parts of Louisiana, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. So we can assume that low pressure formed in the Gulf of Mexico and tracked across the Deep South, into the cold air that had pushed southward.

Mid-April snow in Florida? Just imagine that!

But the Carolinas took a hit.

The Mecklenburg County account, in the book that Bill James found, describes it this way:

"Everything in the way of vegetables was well advanced in the spring of 1849. The farmers were ready to give corn its first plowing when the snow came. It fell very gently, no crust on top.

"It was so piled up in the apple blossoms that they looked like snow balls. All vegetation was killed, no fruit that was in bloom escape being killed. The great crop of Mecklenburg blackberries alone escaped, of all our fruits.

"It was not until mid-summer that the trees made a respectable shade, or the cattle could make a tolerable living in the range at large."

That account says 5 inches of snow fell.

Meteorologist Don Sutherland, who has published a number of books and blogs, notes an account of the storm in the Camden (S.C.) Journal:

"It commenced with a slight fall early in the morning (April 15) and continued to increase in quantity until 2 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon, when it fell in large flakes, as in mid-winter ... The housetops were covered with snow, which had not melted on Monday morning (April 16). A mid-winter scene in early spring is a sight that we do not remember to have seen at any former period."

The S.C. Department of Natural Resources says 6 inches of snow was measured in that storm in Columbia.

So it appears the April 15, 1849, event was a storm that hit South Carolina and the southern edge of North Carolina.

The National Weather Service's records for Charlotte go back only to the winter of 1878-79. Since then, the record snow in April was 3.5 inches, on April 9, 1880.