[TSgt]

Algore will sue God.

The Year Without a Summer (also known as the Poverty Year, Year There Was No Summer, and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death[1]) was 1816, in which severe summer climate abnormalities caused average global temperatures to decrease by about 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F),[2] resulting in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.[3][4] It is believed that the anomaly was caused by a combination of a historic low in solar activity with a volcanic winter event, the latter caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped off by the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815, the largest known eruption in over 1,300 years.

[Vigilanteman]

Same thing happened in the United States. Scores of people left New England and moved into the Finger Lakes area of New York. The building and completion of the Erie Canal helped hasten the exodus. By 1830 or so, Buffalo was the 4th largest city in the United States (after New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore).

Very interesting history of what the canal did for the economy of New York: It basically made it the top economy and most populous state in America for the next 130 years or so.