Annual-to-decadal variability in northern extratropical temperature is dominated by the cold season. However, climate field reconstructions, which would be essential for understanding the underlying mechanisms, are often based on tree ring records. These represent the growing season and hardly capture cold season effects. Here we present cold-season (October-to-May average) temperature field reconstructions for 1701-1905 based entirely on phenological data. These include mainly the freezing and thawing dates of rivers and few early-spring plant observations. We digitized and processed ice-free periods of Russian rivers as a proxy for temperature back to 1720 from ca. 800 sites. These records were complemented with other ice phenology data from Europe and North America, documentary sea-ice records from Iceland and Labrador, and plant phenological proxy records. In total, we used 68 records for the field reconstruction. Furthermore, we utilized a Bayesian reweighting method, in which 30-member ensemble AGCM simulations serve as prior temperature fields while the phenological data constrains the likelihoods/weights of each field.