City faced some quirky winters in 1909-1910

On Sat­ur­day night, Feb. 13, 1909, it began to rain and by early morn­ing the wind shifted to a cold north-easterly — the com­bi­na­tion of the cold wind and dri­ving rain greeted the early morn­ing ris­ers with quite a spec­ta­cle on Sun­day morning.

The Belle­vue Gazette described the scene:

“When peo­ple looked out­side they beheld a world not our own. Trees and shrub­bery were trans­formed by fairy hands into a crys­tal coat of ice, which glit­tered and sparkled in the win­try air like a myr­iad of diamonds.

The scene was a gor­geous one. Tele­phone and tele­graph wires were strung in every direc­tion and looked like ropes of crys­tal. Belle­vue, like the rest of north­ern Ohio, was in the clutches of the worst sleet storm in its history.

The poles bore their bur­den bravely, but as the wind picked up, the weight of the ice coated wires caused them to sway and snap. There fol­lowed a mighty crash when the poles car­ry­ing a bro­ken and tan­gled mass of wires fell to the ground. About a dozen poles on Mon­roe St. went down. Of the 1,100 sub­scribers of the Belle­vue Home Tele­phone Com­pany over 900 were with­out ser­vice. All of Belle­vue was with­out elec­tric­ity for a week.

Men with lanterns patrolled the streets and most peo­ple stayed indoors because of the dan­ger of the fallen wires.

The sights in the coun­try and the res­i­den­tial dis­tricts, where there are trees and shrub­bery is one no artist’s pen can depict. The mas­ter dec­o­ra­tor, Jack Frost, with his icy hand has trans­formed the trees into huge clus­ters of gleam­ing crys­tals, and every bough and branch glit­ters and sparkles in the win­try sun­light like bril­liant jew­els. It is one of the most inter­est­ing phases of nature and the sight is suf­fi­cient to stir even the dullest imag­i­na­tion in a burst of admi­ra­tion at the deft and skill­ful hand­i­work of nature.”

The fol­low­ing year on April 16, 1910, John Roush, a local weather prophet, pre­dicted a severe snow­storm. Most peo­ple laughed at Roush as they mowed their lawns and some were get­ting their gar­dens ready for plant­ing. On April 18, a howl­ing bliz­zard, that raged for some 24 hours, struck Belle­vue vin­di­cat­ing Roush. The remark­able fea­ture of the storm was the fact that it came at a time when veg­e­ta­tion was in full bloom due to unsea­son­ably warm weather in March.

The beau­ti­ful shade trees that were the pride of Belle­vue were badly dam­aged and some ruined. The new fan­gled auto-delivery wag­ons plowed through the snow and slush with ease aided by chains put on the wheels. The mech­a­nism of auto­mo­biles had been improved to such an extent they could go under most unfa­vor­able road con­di­tions. The bliz­zard was the worst since May 23, 1883, when nine inches of snow fell in the area. The fruit crop in the sur­round­ing area was nearly ruined.

The Pick­ett Cherry Farm, west of town, sal­vaged some 500 bushels of cher­ries when ordi­nar­ily a good crop would yield from 5,000 to 7,000 bushels in a season.

The peach orchards suf­fered the most. The old trees had limbs bro­ken off while the young trees fell to the ground under the weight of snow. The storm also played havoc with tele­phone and elec­tric wires being down, incon­ve­nienc­ing a good por­tion of the community.

Roush appeared at the Gazette office in Octo­ber 1910, and pro­claimed the win­ter of 1910–1911 would be a warm mild one. It was cold and rainy 29 of the 30 days in Novem­ber and the tem­per­a­tures dropped into the teens and the low 20s in December.

Roush, the weather prophet, was not seen on the streets of Belle­vue the whole month of December.

———

Belle­vue His­to­rian Bill Oddo writes a weekly col­umn for The Belle­vue Gazette.

Posted by Becky Brooks on Nov 11 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.