[SunkenCiv]

The forest fire explanation has always appeared to be the best one, and until someone comes up with a way for a volcanic cloud to remain just wide enough to not be reported outside a fairly narrow piece of the Eastern Seaboard, after having travelled more than 2000 miles (the nearest volcano is probably more distant than this), there is no resort to a volcanic eruption as an explanation for this.

[King Prout]

lack of stench, depth of shadow, and speed of clearance argues against the forest fire hypothesis.

remember that, at that time, the continent was not particularly rife with record-making people.

[blam]

"The forest fire explanation has always appeared to be the best one."

That's all I can figure too. (Forest fires smell though.)

[King Prout]

and the jet stream could account for the "narrow" band and high density across such a distance.

[ruoflaw]

I would have to disagree because there was a huge forest fire in Pennsylvania and possibly Virgina in the early '90s. and although we are on the NWCentral part of Ohio which was hundreds of miles west of the fire, the wind blew the smoke into our area. It was a very windy day and I was at a grocery store when people first saw what looked like fog blowing in but it was a yellowish gray and then the street lights came on in midmorning. It wasn't too long before we could not see the cars in the parking log. We could smell the smoke and I remember it well because I have asthma. People had trouble driving because there was very little visibility. In 1994, I was doing historical research in Pennsylvania for a dig and I think we were about halfway through the state when the archaeologist pointed out to me the area that had been devastated by that fire.

[SunkenCiv]

Okay, so, after ten years I've come around to this way of thinking:

There is a suggestion that smoke from forest fires could have been the cause. It has been said that fires were burning to the north. But to blanket the entire area with smog so thick as to blot out the sun and the moon would have required a fire that gave even Hell a run for its money. Nor would it just appear for twenty-four hours and vanish. What's more, a fire of that magnitude would have left traces in the backwoods. But no such trace seems to exist... The sooty fallout seems to add fuel to the forest-fire suggestion, but the smells described do not. The pungent odor that comes from coal burning is sulfur. What's more, malt houses and brewing equipment have long been sanitized with sulfur compounds, so perhaps what the good doctor remembered was a nasty nose-full of sulfur dioxide. By contrast, there's no evidence of even a whiff of smoke from a forest fire. No one in New England that day complained that the smell of wood smoke was everywhere... Could the Mysterious Darkness of May 19, 1780, have been the result of smoke from a volcanic explosion? ...at the other side of the North American continent, the west coast Cascade Range still has active volcanoes... According to the United States Geological Service, and some native legends, Glacier Peak last blew its top "sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century." The exact date is a mystery... But the year of 1780 is in the ball park.

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