Snow - Starke County Tidbit #54

Tidbit No. 54

Snow - I suppose most of us have had enough of it by now, but the headline from the newspaper below tells of times past.

1913

A snow blizzard created drifts up to 6 feet high closing roads and stopping trains in their tracks.

I remember as a kid, lots of snow - of course I was shorter then and it may have seemed like bigger drifts than they really were.  But in my youth, I had fun in it, like the children of today.  I suppose to my dad it wasn't as much fun, trying to get around to feeding the livestock on the farm.

I believe it was in 1978 that the northern part of Indiana got hit by some really big snow drifts.  The Army Corp of Engineers hired many of us excavators in the county to use our dozers to push snow drifts off of the county roads.  Jim Falk and Warren Bickel helped clear some of the roads in North Bend Township, southeast of Bass Lake.  Extreme caution had to be used, because it was hard to know if a 10 foot snow drift might be hiding a car inside of it.  

Attached are two photos of snow conditions in years past.  The first one shows train engines (I think there are four engines) pushing snow off of the tracks near Boone Grove in 1917.

The second photo shows the south side of Lake Street and the corner of Pearl Street in Knox with lots of snow in 1910.  All of that snow was piled up by hand.

Jim Shilling
Starke County Historical Society

http://www.starkehistory.com

http://www.scpl.lib.in.us/historical/