TICONDEROGA — With New York’s spring 2026 weather switching from warm to cold, dry to wet, and even mixing in some surprise late snow, researchers at Fort Ticonderoga are noting surprisingly close parallels to weather reports from the time of our nation’s founding 250 years ago.
First among these parallels was the prolonged deep cold of January and February 2026.
With those prolonged low temperatures, Fort Ticonderoga witnessed the complete freeze of Lake Champlain in February 2026. This rare event had not occurred since 2019 and is less common in the modern age than during the colonial era, according to National Weather Service data.
Since then, weather in 2026 has tracked similarly with the 1776 written record from Fort Ticonderoga.
While the historical records are not daily nor scientific, major weather patterns are observed in the writings of Continental Army soldier Nathaniel Brown Dodge, field physician and surgeon Dr. Lewis Beebe, and lifelong Albany native and Army Captain John Wendell.
These reports include at least seven days with significant rainfall at Fort Ticonderoga in April 1776 and, importantly, snow in mid-April and again for several days in early May 1776. This year, Fort Ticonderoga logged snowfall on several days in April and saw an unusual trace amount of snowfall May 3.
“When we guarantee the faithful historical accuracy of our REAL TIME REVOLUTION initiative, we mean it, and this year, even nature is playing along,” Fort Ticonderoga President Beth L. Hill said in a press release. “1776 was an especially challenging year for the Continental Army, in no small part because of the weather.
“Whether battling snow and cold or dragging entire regiments through mud and mosquitoes, our nation’s forefathers and soldiers truly fought against all odds. Their inspiring victories at Fort Ticonderoga mirror the spirit of a nation, which has endured all manner of strife for 250 years, thanks to the sacrifices first made amidst the storms of 1776.”
The following entries are drawn from soldiers’ diaries and journals kept at and near Ticonderoga during the spring of 1776, as the Northern Continental Army gathered to make its stand against the expected British advance from Canada (citations at bottom of release):
— April 7, “Light rain.” (Robbins, 7 April 1776.)
— April 8, “Rain in the afternoon.” (Robbins, 8 April 1776.)
— April 9, “Pleasant.” (Robbins, 9 April 1776.)
— April 10, “Rain begins at dark and continues very hard all night.” (Porter, 10 April 1776.)
— April 12, “Snow’d very hard until 2 o’clock.” “It snowed.” (Porter, 12 April 1776. Dodge, Nathaniel Brown, “A Letter and Diary of 1776,” Vermont Quarterly: A Magazine of History, Volume XXI, Number 1, January 1953.)
— April 15, “Pleasant.” (Robbins, 15 April 1776.)
— April 16, “Hard rain in the afternoon.” (Porter, 16 April 1776.)
— April 19, “Cold and inclement.” (Robbins, 19 April 1776.)
— April 22, “Rainy, misty weather.” (Robbins, 22 April 1776.)
— April 23, “Fine, pleasant weather.” (Robbins, 23 April 1776.)
— April 25, “Pleasant day.” (Beebe, 5 May 1776.)
— April 29, “Very hard head wind” blowing south-to-north on Lake Champlain. (Wendell’s journal and orderly book, MS.7197, 29 April 1776)
— April 30, “Rainy Weather all day” on Lake Champlain south of Ticonderoga. (Wendell, 30 April 1776.)
— May 1, “We had a Snow of abt. 4 inches” at Skenesborough. (Wendell, 1 May 1776.)
— May 5, Beebe reports “a hard snow storm attended us the whole of our passage from Ti” to Crown Point. (Beebe’s “Journal of a Physician on the Expedition Against Canada, 1776,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Volume LIX Number 4, October 1935, 5 May 1776.)
— May 6, “Bad weather.” (Wendell, 6 May 1776.)
— May 11, a party traveling south from Ticonderoga up Lake George faced “very hard head wind against us so hard indeed; that I as well as the men that were with me, expected nothing but to have been cast away.” (Wendell, 11 May 1776.)