Both auroral and geomagnetic activity provide information from which the behavior of the magnetosphere and the solar wind can be inferred. Swedish auroral sightings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries show a remarkable pattern of changes in the latitudes at which the auroras were observed. Auroral reports from New England confirm that these variations were hemisphere-wide. The pattern of changes took place over an 106-year period and is easily distinguished from the much smaller changes that are related to single sunspot number cycles. We infer that the pattern reflects corresponding changes in the solar wind and the resultant magnetospheric configuration and that these changes were much greater than those observed since in situ measurements began. Our results show that a minimum solar wind occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It has been argued elsewhere that minimum solar winds also occurred around the beginnings of the eighteenth and and twentieth centuries. Since all these periods are also the reported minimums of the '80- to 100'-year variation in sunspot activity, we conclude that both the changes in the solar wind and in the strength of the cycle in sunspot number reflect underlying fundamental long-term changes in the sun itself.