This has been a difficult snowy winter in the north east. My husband has used the snow blower more this winter than he has in a total of the last ten years. In researching a topic for today, I found this list on the History site and wanted to share it with you. For full disclosure, this is directly from their site. The picture, however, is the Japanese maple in front of our house.

Snow on Sagamore Ave

March 11-14, 1888
More than 120 winters have come and gone since the so-called “Great White Hurricane,” but this whopper of a storm still lives in infamy. After a stretch of rainy but unseasonably mild weather, temperatures plunged and vicious winds kicked up, blanketing the East Coast in snow and creating drifts up to 50 feet high. The storm immobilized New York, Boston and other major cities, blocking roads and wiping out telephone, telegraph and rail service for several days. When the skies finally cleared, fires and flooding inflicted millions of dollars of damage. The disaster resulted in more than 400 deaths, including 200 in New York City alone. In the decade that followed, partly in response to the 1888 storm and the massive gridlock it wrought, New York and Boston broke ground on the country’s first underground subway systems.

January 27-28, 1922
The Knickerbocker Storm battered the upper South and middle Atlantic United States for two days, dumping a record-breaking 28 inches of snow on Washington, D.C. But by the evening of January 28, the storm was winding down, and several hundred people ventured out to catch a showing of the silent film “Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford” at the Knickerbocker Theatre, the capital’s largest and most modern movie house. During the intermission, the theater’s flat roof gave way under the weight of the wet snow, and concrete, bricks and metal rained down onto the audience. One of the deadliest in Washington’s history, the disaster claimed 98 lives and gave the storm its name.