First Came the Rains, Then Came the Blizzard of 88

The Blizzard of 1888 began with a whimper. That winter had been the mildest in 17 years (and it was, coincidentally, a leap year). Temperatures were warm that week; a light rain fell on Sunday and no hint of what was to come. The snow began early Monday, March 12, as the temperatures (which had been near 50 degrees on Saturday, March 10) plunged below freezing.

In that era of rudimentary weather forecasting, the late winter storm came as a complete surprise. There was, at least, a well-developed telegraph network — and even some telephones — at that time so there was some advance information about the storm. But it was neither accurate enough nor timely enough to give a proper warning of what was on its way.

The blizzard had its origin in two storms that came together off the east coast. One brought moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, the other brought high winds and low temperatures from western Canada. (Does this pattern sound familiar?)

The early morning trains that Monday were on schedule despite the strengthening storm, but it was clear that the weather was getting worse when a 9:49 a.m. train headed south was delayed until it stopped (for good) at noon, in Falls Village.

After noon, things deteriorated dramatically and normal activities ground to a halt as the storm made travel difficult to impossible.

The route south from Falls Village was to remain closed until the following Friday, March 16, when the first train north from Bridgeport finally arrived, at 3 p.m.

The railroad did not just wait the storm out, however. On Monday afternoon, a plow train headed north from Falls Village and started to clear the track . The crew got to North Canaan and gave up; the storm was just too powerful for them to continue. They parked the train by the Warner House Hotel (located at the present-day site of Rite Aid) and kept steam up in the engine so it wouldn’t freeze. They got a supply of water from a hose from the hotel kitchen to ensure the boiler did not run dry.

The storm lasted more than 36 hours: all day Monday and much of Tuesday, with high winds and heavy snow both days.

Its force was such that people who ventured out were often blown down. Visibility was so bad that George Clark of Salisbury got lost between his barn and his house. Fortunately, he found his house after an hour, and survived.

The manager at the Ore Hill mine in Lakeville had the presence of mind to dismiss the miners just after noon on March 12, so they could try to get home. Since there was no way they could know about the storm as they labored hundreds of feet underground, his action probably kept them from becoming snowbound and unable to help their families cope with the storm.

The worst wasn’t over when the snow and wind stopped.

It wasn’t until Wednesday morning that local residents began to venture out to see what had happened. Some of those brave souls had to leave their houses by second-story windows, as the drifted snow was 8 to 10 feet deep; some were as high as 20 feet or more.

Even the city of New York was snowed in, with no transportation moving in or out. All northeast ports were snowed in — and nearly 200 ships had been destroyed, many of them in the (supposed) safety of the port. No trains were running anywhere in the area.

Here in the Northwest Corner, the editor pro-tem of the Connecticut Western News (the editor himself was in Vermont at the time) arrived at the North Canaan office on Wednesday morning, March 14, (the day the paper was supposed to go to press) and found the door was behind a 10-foot high wall of snow.

After taking an hour to clear the doorway, he entered the building only to find two feet of snow covering the entire office. Even the printing press and a barrel of ink were "buried in a drift," he wrote.

The cabinets full of metal "type" were also completely full of snow; every single type slug had to be taken out and cleaned.

Clearly, the paper was going to be a bit late.

In fact, it wasn’t until Monday March 19, that the March 14 issue finally went to press.

The editor noted that he had been besieged by requests for the paper, as the snowbound residents were hungry for news and something to read. Alas, the editor did not even have the "patent outside" to offer his customers. The "patent" portion of the paper, which formed the front and back pages, was sent from a news service each week on preset plates. It contained U.S. and world news, sermons, editorials and filler material. This material was printed first on the front of the broadsheets [the long, wide paper on which publications such as The New York Times and The Lakeville Journal are printed]. The local news was added, later, to the back.

When folded, the single broadsheet formed a four-page paper, with world news on the front, local news inside and filler items on the back. With rail service out, though, the preset items did not arrive until Saturday, March 17.

Lack of rail service interrupted a great deal of the daily routine of the area, for at this time in our history everything moved by rail. Without trains no one got mail, newspapers or supplies. Commodities such as coal for heating, and kerosene for lighting, all came by rail. The North Canaan quarries could not ship their lime, though the local kilns were all "banked" to keep them warm. The Barnum and Richardson Company could not ship pig iron and could not receive iron ore, lime or charcoal.

Needless to say no passenger trains went anywhere either whether they held shoppers, salespeople, commuters or just travelers.

As inconvenient as it was for train customers, the huge amount of snow was a problem of much larger proportions for the railroad men. It was too deep to plow with anything but a rotary plow (like a modern snowblower); and snow that deep could easily derail a train.

Rotary plows were scarce in 1888 and most plowing was done with a special plow car pushed by a locomotive, or by a plow fitted to the front of a locomotive. When these proved inadequate, the only way to clear the tracks was by using an army of men with shovels. The call went out for manpower. A force of 150 men worked on the Housatonic rails to clear them; similar-sized gangs worked on the Hartford & Connecticut Western rails.

Any able-bodied man who could get to a railroad station could find work.

The problem had been caused in part by New England geography: All the local railroads had numerous "cuts," or places where the roadbed had been cut into hillsides, sometimes to a considerable depth. All of those cuts were now filled with packed snow.

Each one had to be dug out, with the snow being piled onto flat cars and taken away to someplace where it could be shoveled off and disposed of.

In some places, each shovelful of snow had to be moved three times to get it clear of the track.

Brute force alone would not meet the challenge of this storm, as a crew discovered with tragic results on the nearby Harlem Valley railroad.

A force of five locomotives working its way north from New York City derailed near the Sharon station in Dutchess County. Five of the train crew were killed and the engine was wrecked.

One force of locomotives was powerful enough to plow snow of moderate depth, but the resulting cloud of flying snow made it impossible for the engineer to see what was ahead. As long as there were no obstructions or big drifts all went well, but if there was a tree or a large drift, the locomotive would slam into the obstruction and derail.

If the plow train had more than one locomotive, as it often did, those following would smash into the derailed leader with tremendous force, compounding the damage. This made snow plowing a risky endeavor in a storm of any magnitude.

No fatalities were logged on the local Connecticut rails. But rail traffic did not resume until late Friday, March 16, on the Housatonic line. There was partial service on Sunday, March 18, for the Hartford & Connecticut Western.

Full service to Millerton on that line was not restored until Monday, March 19, one week after the start of the storm.

The most difficult portion to clear was the stretch between Winsted and Norfolk.

But the largest, most time-consuming single drift in the area was at Ore Hill (near Belgo Road and Route 44) in Lakeville. All in all, it took a week just to clear the two miles of track from there to Millerton. The first mail delivery in the aftermath of the storm made its way to Salisbury on Saturday, March 17, arriving from the Lime Rock railroad station by sleigh.

Gradually, life got back to normal, but some of the effects lingered on. The Newburgh Dutchess and Connecticut railroad, which ran from the state line to the Hudson River at Dutchess Junction, was not entirely cleared until March 25.

It took an army of men to shovel out the deep cuts between Pine Plains and Millerton. Many houses and businesses could only be reached by way of tunnels cut through the drifts from the road. More than one resident had to use a second-floor window as a door until the snow was finally cleared.

Pedestrians used the top rails of plank fences as walkways in some areas.

Storekeepers discovered a huge demand for old boot and shoe boxes. The boxes were turned into makeshift snowshoes that made it possible to walk on top of the snow.

In some cases walkers had to step over telephone wires as the drifts had nearly buried the poles. (Note that there were no electric wires in this area in 1888.)

Others reported walking along the tops of the trees in apple orchards.

It is a tribute to our ancestors that they coped with this storm as well as they did.

For them, it represented a return to an earlier time when not much moved all winter. The 1888 storm has become a legend, but there have been big storms since. Large snowfalls in 1947 and 1978 tested 20th-century residents of the Northwest Corner.

One has to wonder how well 21st-century residents would cope with a 50-inch snowfall coupled with high winds. Modern highway plows are no better able to cope with 20-foot drifts than the trains of 1888 — and modern folk are much less patient. What would we do with no electricity or cable television, especially when the batteries run out on our cell phones, iPods and laptops ?