Blizzards of '88

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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Yes, it’s been a mild winter, and now that we are in the second week of March, many of us think we’ve escaped any major storms. Instead of getting cocky about it, let us recall the Great Blizzard of 1888, which hit the New York area 135 years ago this week. Actually, there were two blizzards of note that year with especially tragic consequences.

                During the first 10 days of March 1888, the weather was unseasonably mild. Then came heavy rains that turned to snow as temperatures dropped rapidly. On March 12, New York City plunged from 33 °F to 8 °F and rain changed to snow at 1am. Once the snow got going, it continued unabated for a full day and a half. In a 2007 article, the National Weather Service estimated that this nor’easter dumped as much as 50 inches of snow in parts of Connecticut and Massachusetts, while parts of New Jersey and New York had up to 40 inches.

Drifts averaged 30–40 feet from New York to New England, with reports of drifts covering three-story houses. The highest drift was recorded in Gravesend, Brooklyn, at 52 feet. Up to 58 inches of snow fell in upstate Saratoga Springs, 48 inches in Albany, 45 inches in New Haven, Connecticut, and 22 inches in New York City. The storm also produced severe winds; 80 miles per hour wind gusts were reported, although the highest official report in New York City was 40 miles per hour, and there was a 54 miles per hour gust reported at Block Island. The next day, March 13, New York City recorded a low of 6 °F, the coldest so late in the season, with the high rising to only 12 °F in the afternoon.

In New York, neither rail nor road transport was possible anywhere for days, and drifts across the New York-New Haven rail line at Westport, Connecticut, took eight days to clear. Transportation gridlock as a result of the storm was partially responsible for the creation of the first underground subway system in the United States, which opened nine years later in Boston. The New York Stock Exchange was closed for two days. A full two-day closure would not occur again until Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Telegraph infrastructure was disabled, isolating most of the large northeastern U.S. cities from Washington D.C. to Boston for days. Following the storm, New York began placing its telegraph and telephone infrastructure underground to prevent their destruction. Fire stations were immobilized and property loss from fire alone was estimated at $25 million (equivalent to $750 million today). A silver lining to the storm was that it led to in the founding of several bird and wildlife sanctuaries in the tri-state area.

From Chesapeake Bay through New England, more than 200 ships were either grounded or wrecked, resulting in the deaths of at least 100 seamen. In total, more than 400 people died from the storm and the ensuing cold, including 200 in New York City alone. One of those fatalities was Roscoe Conklin, who was an influential Republican politician – he contracted pneumonia from walking three miles home from his Wall Street law office. It did not help efforts to push the snow into the Atlantic Ocean that there was severe flooding after the storm because of melting snow, especially in Brooklyn.

For a very unhappy reason, the other “great” 1888 storm became known as the “Schoolhouse Blizzard.”

Two months earlier, there had already been some heavy snow across the north and central plains, accompanied by very cold temperatures. On January 12, the U.S. Weather Bureau received a message from its forecaster in St. Paul, Minnesota, which read: “A cold wave is indicated for Dakota and Nebraska tonight and tomorrow; the snow will drift heavily today and tomorrow in Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin."

The preceding day, a strengthening surface low dropped south-southeastward out of Alberta, Canada, into central Montana and then spread into northeastern Colorado. The temperatures in advance of the low increased some 20–40 degrees in the central plains -- for example, Omaha in Nebraska recorded a temperature of −6 °F at 7 a.m. on January 11 and by the next day it had “soared” to 28 °F. The strong surface low rapidly moved into southeastern Nebraska by 3 p.m. and finally into southwestern Wisconsin by 11 p.m. Eventually, the invasive and unstable air mass covered a total of 780 miles from Canada into the U.S.

This respite from brutal temperatures was short-lived. The blizzard was precipitated by the collision of the immense, colder air mass with warm moisture-laden air from the Gulf of Mexico Within a few hours, the advancing cold front caused a temperature drop from a few degrees above freezing to −20 degrees in some places. This wave of cold was accompanied by high winds and heavy snow. The fast-moving storm first struck Montana in the early hours of January 12, swept through Dakota Territory from mid-morning to early afternoon, and reached Lincoln, Nebraska, at 3 p.m.

Because of the temporary temperature increase, many people were unprepared for what followed it. One Minnesota observer reported that a “dark and heavy wall built up around the northwest coming fast, coming like those heavy thunderstorms, like a shot. In a few moments, we had the severest snowstorm I ever saw in my life with a terrible hard wind, like a hurricane, snow so thick we could not see more than three steps from the door at times." The Boston Daily Advertiser reported under the headline "Midnight at Noon" that “at Fargo....mercury 47° below zero and a hurricane blowing...At Neche, Dak. the thermometer is 58° below zero."

In addition to its sudden severity, what made the storm so deadly was the timing -- during work and school hours. The very strong wind fields behind the cold front and the powdery nature of the snow reduced visibility on the open plains to zero. People had ventured from the safety of their homes to do chores, go to town, attend school, or simply enjoy the relative warmth of the day. As a result, thousands of people—including many schoolchildren—got caught in the blizzard. The death toll was 235, though some estimates were as many as 1000. 

The death toll of children could have been much higher but for the caution of many teachers who kept their students in the schoolrooms rather than releasing them to try to go home. Exceptions nearly always resulted in disaster. In some instances, heroic efforts saved lives. Near Zeona, South Dakota, the children at the local school were rescued when two men tied a rope to the closest house and headed for the school. There, they tied off the other end of the rope and led the children to safety. And in Mira Valley, Nebraska, Minnie Freeman safely led 13 children from her schoolhouse to her home, 1.5 miles away. All of her pupils survived. That year, "Song of the Great Blizzard: Thirteen Were Saved" or "Nebraska's Fearless Maid" was written and recorded in her honor by William Vincent.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including The Last Hill, with Bob Drury. To purchase a copy or to pre-order Follow Me to Hell (to be published on April 4), please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.