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By Root 1428 0

but no one anticipated one of the most brutal winters in American history. From November 1779 until the spring of 1780, New Jersey would be pounded by twentysix snowstorms, six of blizzard proportions. It was so cold that the temperatures in the region that January remained below freezing during all but two days. The Delaware River froze over by the end of December and remained so until March 4. The Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania, which intersected with the Delaware just below Philadelphia, froze and the ice was so thick that every day residents of the city rode horses and sleds over it. The York River in Virginia was frozen solid for several months. The water in Baltimore harbor was covered with a thick sheet of ice for twelve weeks. Most of the Chesapeake Bay froze over. New York harbor froze, and remained so for several months, permitting sleds to travel back and forth between New York City and New Jersey. It was the only time in recorded history that the deep harbor had frozen solid.3

Washington selected Morristown, where the army had camped during the winter of 1776–1777, for several reasons. He again wanted to be stationed near Clinton’s army, warm and comfortable in New York City, in case the British decided to move out of the city and attack anywhere on the east coast. Morristown was at the intersection of two highways that he could use to move the army quickly if necessary. It was protected from a British surprise attack by several mountain ranges. It sat in the middle of thousands of acres of farmland with, he thought, plenty of food and cattle for his thirteen thousand man force. (A few hundred men would be billeted in towns a few miles away.) The county was patriotic and he was told that its local militia, led by Colonel Seely, was reliable.

His three thousand man army of 1776–1777 had caused problems in Morris County because the men had been quartered in private homes. As many as a dozen soldiers had stayed with families in small houses built to hold just four or five residents. The people complained of constant drinking, gambling, and cursing by the soldiers. This time, with a much larger army, Washington decided to build a sprawling city of huts in Jockey Hollow, near Morristown, as he had done at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777–1778 and at Bound Brook, New Jersey, the previous year. The massive hut encampment would, again, in population, take its place as the fourth largest city in the United States, behind Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.

Washington designed the huts and the city himself. The log cabins were similar to those at Valley Forge, but this time the huts were built on the sides of hills to provide drainage for water and melted snow. The walls and roofs were solid to prevent seepage. Each had a window cut into a wall for ventilation later, when the weather turned mild. The lack of drainage and haphazardly built walls in the Valley Forge huts, and little ventilation, helped to bring about diseases there. All of the Morristown huts were built in planned neighborhoods, New Yorkers together in one section, Pennsylvanians in another, and along carefully laid out streets. Warehouses, cattle pens covering several acres, and slaughterhouses were erected after the residential huts were completed.

The regiments that arrived early, in milder weather, had more luck with construction and were living in their cabins within two weeks. The men from other states, who came later, took much longer to complete hut construction because they had to battle the elements. Those without huts slept in tents; some had nothing.

On the day after the storm of December 5 and 6, Dr. James Thacher arrived in Morristown with his Massachusetts regiment. They had no cover. Thacher wrote in his diary,

The snow on the ground is about two feet deep and the weather extremely cold; the soldiers are destitute of both tents and blankets and some of them are actually barefooted and almost naked. Our only defense against the inclemency of the weather consists of brushwood thrown together. Our lodging last night was on the frozen