This week, people throughout New England heard the wind howling in the night, rattling windows and pinging snow against the panes. And they awoke Tuesday to find all that is familiar—cars, mailboxes, shrubs, garden sculptures, even dogs—covered by snow. But the storm’s arrival had been predicted days in advance. Even though the meteorologists sometimes get it wrong, in recent years we’re given a heads-up when we are about to get hammered. It wasn’t always so.
A 1940 headline from the Boston Herald. (Photo courtesy of the Harvard Historical Society)
On Saturday evening, March 10, 1888, residents of Harvard went to bed assuming the next day would be a continuation of the balmy weather of the past few days. In all, it had been one of the mildest winters in years throughout southern New England, and it looked as though winter was almost over entirely. There had been some talk of a storm coming in from the Rockies and another up from the south, but meteorologists were convinced both would dissipate. Instead, those two storms combined and exploded against the East Coast.
From light snow to howling cyclone
By 4:00 a.m. on Monday the light snow and coastal winds of Sunday had turned to a “howling cyclone of snow, winds, and bitter cold,” according to an article in Yankee Magazine of March 1978. The winds gusted to 84 mph.
In cities, horsecars were blocked, derailed, and buried in drifts. Schools, stores, and factories closed early, but many people were buried in snow before they could reach their homes. The most powerful locomotives “butted impotently at the mountains of snow and spun their wheels on icy rails.” In suburbs, “lone travelers were trapped and died on country lanes.” Parts of Massachusetts got 30 to 40 inches of snow, and drifts reached 30 to 40 feet.
It wasn’t until Friday and Saturday that the principal roads in Harvard opened for travel, “not even a dog or cat track being visible on top of the drifts.” Jeremiah Desmond, who had operated a milk route from his home near Bare Hill Pond to the Still River depot, was unable, for the first time in 16 years, to cover it “and remained idle at his home from Monday to Thursday.” (From an unidentified news clipping in Historical Society archives.)
As Yankee Magazine put it, “For swift, overwhelming fury and paralyzing power, nothing like it has ever been seen.” Savage and catastrophic, “without equal in all records, it has come to be known as ‘The Blizzard of ’88.’”
Lesser, but crippling
Lesser snowstorms have also crippled Harvard. A clipping from the Nashoba Free Press describes the first real snowstorm of 1969 to hit Harvard with full force, which occurred on February 13. Cars were buried, and in many instances the snow reached about half the height of doors and was up to most window sills. At least one dog had to be dug out of its dog house. Several cars went off roads that had been plowed. On the bright side, secondary roads became havens for cross-country skiers. One particularly unfortunate event befell Police Chief Burgess. On the night of the storm, on his way to extricate the police cruiser from drifting snow, he fell and broke his leg.
Other memorable February snowstorms described in miscellaneous clippings at the Historical Society were those of 1893, when there was record snowfall, and 1934, when “no rural mail was delivered in Harvard,” amid great drifts, trees broken, and “wires in a tangle.” The Great Blizzard of 1940 brought Boston to a standstill, and within recent memory the Blizzard of 1978 caught us unaware and crippled Harvard and other places for the better part of a week.
What could be worse than a winter with a serious blizzard? How about a blizzard plus a whole year when summer never comes? In New England, 1816 turned into a frigid disaster and came to be known as “eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death.” According to the National Geographic Society, heavy frosts were recorded every month; a blizzard struck in June; ice storms coated trees in July; birds froze, hundreds of cattle and sheep died, and farmers perished in snowdrifts.
Sport and fun; hardship and death
Harvard winters of the mid-1800s to the early 1900s brought sport and fun as well as hardship and death. Ellery Royal, who lived at 1 Elm Street as a boy, kept diaries from 1906 to 1912. He describes frequent “swell” sleigh rides to Bolton with friends and an annual family sleigh trip to Boston. He and his friends played hockey on Bare Hill Pond as well as at the reservoir on Bolton Road They made “chute the chutes” for sledding. Royal writes: “Made a lantern to go on my sled, on the chute the chutes. We lighted the chute up with cattails dipped in kerosene.” He mentions “dandy skating, good sliding, fishing thru the ice at Hell Pond. Caught 3 pickerel”—but also frozen pipes, temperatures below zero for days in a row, and shoveling out “at home, Mrs. Eaton’s, and the Bakers,” for which he earned 75 cents.
In “Memoirs of Old Harvard Days,” Fred Savage describes an adventure of the early 1860s that fills me with nostalgia for the sled rides of my childhood—down my big hill and, if the “scout” waved me on, across the avenue and down another hill. Savage recalls that “when the sliding was the best, the two hills from Mr. Hannah’s place to the old J.K. Willard house was just alive with sleds and children, evenings and all. Many times we boys (with their double-runner sleds with each sled’s name put on with gilt letters) would start at J.K. Willard’s house, go down both hills, turn at the corner … go over the flat and down the other road as far as where the slaughter house now stands. Then we would go up to the top of what is now Bagster hill and slide back.”
With the help of genealogist Susan Lee, who identifies the J.K. Willard house as 15 Woodchuck Hill (where the Saalfields now live, if I may sound like Savage for a moment), I can picture their route. They come flying down Woodchuck onto Oak Hill and coast through the center and down Lover’s Lane to the white barn belonging to 5 Elm Sreet. They pile off, pick up their sleds, walk up Old Littleton to the top of the first rise, climb on, and come whizzing down, gradually coming to a stop as the road rises to the Common.
I’m just now realizing that while I have been coasting with Fred, feeling sorry for Chief Burgess, and worrying about Jeremiah’s milk route, the present-day snow has continued to fall—just as predicted. I now have drifts outside my door that could contend with any of those in these historical storms.
