About a year ago, Past is Prologue discussed the deepening drought which followed a run of remarkable wet years and invoked memories of past dry periods. Drought is a strange thing because it presents many and varying faces. Cross our countryside today and see crops brown and stunted but, in an adjacent county, the passage of a few random thunderstorms has allowed an area of corn to continue tall and green. Smaller trees in younger woodlands or standing alone struggle under baking sun and withering dessication. Sometimes, larger trees, or mature forests, can send taproots deep into the receding water table to hold their heads up.
Drought works within the land as much as upon it.
It has always been thus, and we forget drought during runs of abundant moisture, complaining as much about excess as about dearth. When Jamestown was settled in 1607, Eastern North America seems to have been in a dry period. Scientist Dennis Stahle, and colleagues, in an article that appeared in Science magazine, suggest that two major droughts, at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries were as deep as any in hundreds of years. Given the stocks of Indian corn available to Native Americans and the colonists in at least some of those years, agricultural needs seem generally to have been adequately supplied by localized rains. But this was still a dry time in Eastern North America and may have had serious implications for the groundwater table, the level of which is established by rain.