Normally the weekend after Thanksgiving people are focused on what kind of deals they are going to get as they start Christmas shopping in earnest during the weekend of Black Friday. Those plans were put on hold one cold November decades ago when one of the worst snowstorms in Ohio history had people thinking White.
Throughout my career as a photographer, whenever Marietta got a big snow the old-timers at The Times would remind me it was nothing compared to the Thanksgiving snow of 1950.
Andy Elliott, a long-time editor at The Times, would tell me how he walked through waist deep snow from the top of Harmar Hill to get the newspaper out from the offices that were then on Putnam Street.
I always thought that their talk was likely a case of “things were much worse when we were young” storytelling. Now that I am a bit of an old-timer myself, I thought I would take a look at how bad it was.
It turns out the old-timers were right. It was bad — really bad.
I dug up the front page that Andy and others would have trudged from their homes around Marietta to produce. It tells of the county that was brought to a standstill by the storm that produced one of the worst snowfalls of the century.
The headline for the Monday, Nov. 27, paper says it all. CITY BURIED UNDER 27-INCH SNOW FALL. The 27-inch snowfall broke a record set in 1864. The Washington County record for a three-day snow event remains today.
After mild temperatures on Thanksgiving Day, the storm struck hard on Friday and continued through Sunday. The Friday Christmas parade went on as scheduled even though four of the bands that were scheduled to march in it canceled because of the weather. By Saturday, Marietta had 15 inches of snow on the ground, canceling and closing nearly everything for the weekend.
Nearly every industry in the area was closed Monday and it was questionable if they would reopen Tuesday. The National Guard was called out to answer emergency calls, taking patients to hospitals and food to people’s homes. It took one Williamstown woman hours and the hard work of neighbors and the Marietta Fire Department to make it across the Williamstown Bridge before being rushed by Jeep to Marietta Memorial with her husband “clinging precariously to the rear.” The jeep followed the snow plow up the hill to the hospital, arriving just in time for the birth of a son.
Area schools were canceled until Wednesday, giving everyone a very long Thanksgiving break. As is the case with every storm, bread and milk were in short supply.
All local, state and national roads in the area were closed, although crews seemed to be making headway getting Ohio 7 open past Belpre, and Ohio 821 open as far Lower Salem which had run out of bread and milk on Saturday.
Matamoras had it particularly tough after a semi-truck ran over a fire hydrant and drained the village of water. Residents had to melt snow to get water.
Around 30 motorists between McConnelsville and Marietta took shelter at a farm owned by Ray Patterson. The house got so crowded that five of them walked through 15-foot drifts to a nearby school where they built a fire in the stove to stay warm. One of them was a member of our composing room, Jim Loar, who was still talking about the snow 35 years later.
Ohio’s highways today are maintained by much large equipment that is better suited to clear the roads than their counterparts were in 1950. The Times tells of bulldozers and road graders being used to cut through the drifts, with several of them ending up broken down or in a ditch. Of course, today, everyone would opt to work from home until the roads were completely cleared.
Rain on Dec. 2 helped to melt the snow and ice and the city was able to return to normal just in time to begin to get ready for a flood that was predicted to crest at 40 feet but ended up slightly less after a second round of cold slowed the big melt.
Later generations would have their own giant snow to tell their kids about, but in this case, I think people were right.
The Thanksgiving snow of 1950 was the worst. I should never have doubted the old-timers.
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