Everybody Talks About the Weather

An event happening at the Martin Van Buren Historic Site on Saturday, August 29, explores how weather was monitored in the 19th century.

Conrad Vispo of the Farmscape Ecology Program explains the historic De Witt Rain Gauge to visitors at the Martin Van Buren National Historic Site.

Martin Van Buren National Historic Site will host a free "Historical Weather Day" featuring an interactive historical weather station and meteorological display created and staffed by Conrad Vispo and Anna Duhon of the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program on Saturday, August 29, from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

The Historical Weather Day will be an opportunity for visitors to experience and imagine what a weather station from the 1800s might have been like, and to learn how local 19th-century weather stations in places like Kinderhook and Hudson were part of one of the earliest meteorological networks in the country. It will also be an opportunity to explore what these early, local 19th-century weather observations might reveal about current weather events, such as the record-breaking rainfall that Kinderhook and surrounding areas experienced at the end of July.

The weather station display will feature a collection of antique and replica weather instruments, predominantly from the 19th century, including some that were made or used locally and are still functional. This includes the replica De Witt Rain Gauge (circa 1830) that was expressly designed for the 19th-century New York meteorological network and would have been used locally in sites like Kinderhook. Accompanying the rain gauges at the network sites were thermometers made by the Kendall family of New Lebanon. Some Kendall meteorological equipment from the second half of the 1800s will be on display.

Visitors will be invited to try their hand at reading the weather conditions on some of the still-functional instruments, and learn more about their history and use. They will also have a chance to view handwritten meteorological records from the 19th-century network that are in the process of being transcribed and historic weather books that help tell the story of early meteorology and how it evolved. A daily almanac derived from meteorological and seasonal observations made by network observers in Kinderhook and nearby towns on the early to mid-1800s will be available for perusing, as well as historic weather maps. These historic weather observations provide a window into how weather and climate has changed since Martin Van Buren's time, and some of the local effects of those changes.