Weather rambling — ‘Howdy, Mr. Sunshine’

“Here’s howdy, Mister Sunshine, for you’re welcome round this place,” Edgar Guest wrote in his “Just Folks” column published July 5, 1921 in The Post-Star. “We’re mighty glad to meet you and to see your smiling face.”

Too much blasting heat with not enough rain in July could put a scowl on a farmer’s face.

“The dry weather is continuing and crops of all kinds are suffering. The potato crop will be a failure,” the Lake Luzerne correspondent reported in the July 25, 1890 issues of The Glens Falls Messenger.

“Hot weather continues. A good crop of rain would be of great benefit to crops,” the Indian Lake correspondent reported.

The South Johnsburg correspondent reported it was 92 degrees in the shade on July 15.

“And still no rain. Crops of all kinds are suffering,” the Creek Centre correspondent reported.

It was a continuation of a heat wave.

“The thermometer marked ninety in the shade yesterday,” the Messenger reported on July 11. “Tuesday was one of the hottest days experienced in this vicinity in some time. Thermometers in various parts of the village (of Glens Falls) registered one hundred degrees in the shade.”

Farmers persevered despite the heat.

“Farmers are busy haying and harvesting rye.”

It was hoped that relief of summers past would come again.

“The generous rain of Thursday night came not a moment too soon,” The Glen’s Falls Republican reported on July 25, 1871. “Yards and gardens have assumed the same thirsty appearance of the droughts of last year.”

“The crops are flourishing in this vicinity,” The Glen’s Falls Republican reported on July 6, 1875. “Raspberries are commencing to ripen, and where there are any bushes they hang very full.”

The raspberry harvest created work for itinerant laborers.

“Raspberry pickers have come,” The Glen’s Falls Republican reported on July 13, 1875. “Pickers ask fifteen cents a quart for them and charge nothing for the worms.”

After the scorcher of 1890, pleasant weather in July would come again, or at least it would seem pleasant.

“If any person on Lake George has kept meteorological data for a succession of years I would like to have access to it for the compilation of weather statistics,” editor W. H. Tippets wrote in the Lake George Mirror on July 18, 1896. “For I have an idea that four days out of five are pleasant hereabouts and I would like to gather authentic statistics to prove it.”

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