Dear authors,

Many thanks for your detailed responses to the referees’ comments. I agree with the referees on the changes necessary in the manuscript and therefore the paper will need minor revisions. As I can see, you already made comprehensive improvements to the paper and therefore, I invite you to submit the new manuscript version.

Kind regards,

Chantal Camenisch

Dear authors,

I thank you very much for the revised paper. It is very convincing and certainly an important contribution for the reconstruction of past climate in today’s Southeastern Unites States. The paper is accepted for publication after a few technical corrections:

- Section 3: What is the reason for the missing data in 1840 (see figure 3)? If possible in a few words, could you add this reason?

- p. 10, lines 20-21: Please list the references (including URL) for the daily minimum temperatures from Richmond International Airport weather station (NOAA’s and NCEI’s online repository) in the reference list.

- caption Figure 7: Specify the purpose of the green and red line.

- Figure 8 should be mentioned somewhere in the text.

- There are a couple of typos in the text (this list is presumably not complete):
p. 1, line 22: plantation document[s]?
p. 2, line 28: As instead of AS
p. 3, line 2: China instead of china
p. 5, line 19: Labor instead of labor
p. 6, line 1: This instead of this
p. 6, line 27: […] crops.In […] - a space is missing
p. 13, lines 23/24: with/with
p. 14, line 4: available/available
caption figure 6: twice where/where

Thank you very much for submitting your paper to Climate of the Past and many thanks to the two referees for their reviews.

Yours sincerely,

Chantal Camenisch