Oh Snow

Are you stocked up on milk, bread and toilet paper?

As we all anxiously await to see what tomorrow’s snowstorm brings us, I thought it would be fun to look back on two other March snowstorms.

In 1942, a weekend storm hit the area. “The freak storm traced a dizzy pattern across the entire state,” according to The Daily Times (Salisbury). “Baltimore and surrounding sections and much of Western Maryland was blanketed by heavy snows. … Six to twelve inches of snow blanketed the upper Eastern Shore from Vienna to Baltimore during the Palm Sunday blizzard.”

An Associated Press article in The Cumberland Evening Times reported that Frederick received 17 inches of snow, and Westminster got 30 inches. “A force of 16 men was put to work in Baltimore to clean the streets of 22 inches of snow that caused snow to be closed for the day. … Communications were down, highways were blocked, trains and buses were late, airplanes were grounded, trees and branches fell under the heavy weight of snow, and the inevitable autoist by the thousands had to leave the family car — tires and all — in deep drifts until the thaw.”

While reporting on the 1942 storm, The Daily Mail in Hagerstown compared it to an 1891 March storm. “On Easter Monday, March 30, 1891, it started snowing in Washington County and didn’t stop for two days … When the blizzard finally had ended there were 28 inches of snow on the ground.”

Yikes!

Let’s hope that this week’s storm does not go down in the history books. As long as it’s not as much as the storm we had in January 2016, I’ll be just fine!

Sources: The Cumberland Evening Times, March 30, 1942; Daily Mail, March 30, 1942; The Daily Times, March 30, 1942