The worst blizzard in the history of this region, and possibly the worst in the history of the United States, hit on March 11th and 12th, 1888. It became so infamous in the memories of the people who lived through it that it was given the name, The Great White Hurricane. The storm affected the eastern seaboard from New Jersey to Maine, with some areas receiving as much as 50 inches of snow. The Connecticut Valley around Springfield averaged more than 40 inches in most locations.
Weather forecasting was a science still in its infancy in the late nineteenth century, and this storm was not anticipated. The inhabitants of this region had no advance warning and no time to prepare. Trains loaded with passengers were stranded on the tracks. People went to work, not knowing how bad the storm would be, and many died trying to return home. Schoolchildren, who usually walked home from school in those days, were caught in the onslaught and never made it back home. In some rural areas, like the Berkshire hill communities to the west of the Connecticut River Valley, people were stranded in their homes for up to two weeks.
The major cities along the coast, like New York City and Boston, experienced freezing rain and ice, in addition to the snow. Telegraph lines, the most common form of communication at that time, collapsed from the weight of the ice. Food and fuel were scarce, and since back then fresh food was shipped daily due to refrigeration concerns, many went hungry when deliveries couldn’t get through.
Wind gusts make an already bad situation even worse. With winds reported as high as 48 miles per hour, snow drifts 40 to 50 feet high were created along the streets of most of the region’s towns. Some people, unable to escape the onslaught, died in those drifts. The unusual length of the storm, almost thirty-six hours, made attempts to help the stranded even more difficult. When all was said and done, some 400 people lost their lives in this unprecedented disaster.
“There was no communication from the outlying districts and the farms on the first day after the snow. There were no trucks and scrapers in those days. The farmers broke their own roads to the center of the town. By the end of the third day, teams from every section had reached the center. You would consider the road thus opened as a very poor substitute for our snow-cleared streets, now opened to auto traffic within a few hours.
I remember one incident as a Federal street team reached the common on the second day. Several young men jumped off the sled to shovel Tim Kenfield out. This was the veteran violinist, who lived in the house now owned by Charles Trainor beside Hopkins Store. Mr. Kenfield, universally hailed as ‘Tim,’ enjoyed a reputation for pithy sayings. I remember just how he looked as he appeared from a side door in his shirt sleeves with long white beard blowing aside, a veritable patriarch, and stopped the enthusiastic shovelers with these words: ‘No, boys, leave it alone; the Lord blocked me up, and the Lord can unblock me!’ And so it was; the deep drift in front of Tim’s house stayed till the sun melted it.”
— unknown author from Belchertown
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