Just how deep the snow was in the record January 1918, seems to grow with the years of those who remember. Everybody who can recall that snowfall will agree that it was a record never quite equaled since. I had always remembered it as waist-deep on a short-legged newspaper carrier boy.
But there came to light in conversation about this year’s snowfall the estimate by one veteran of many winters that the accumulation of snow in 1918 reached 31 inches. That’s the deepest snow ever reported in Southern Illinois, and it could be that it is the result of making allowance for a wee bit of drift caused by the swirling winds that January week.
The Daily Republican of January 15, 1918 reported the snow was 18 inches deep, two Inches more than the depth estimated for the newspapers report last Tuesday.
The 31-inch report of the big snow in 1918 may have come from another estimate in the newspaper of that day. Explaining why the Coal Belt Electric Railroad stopped running it’s interurban cars between Marion and Herrin, the Daily Republican reported that the cars encountered drifts 30 inches deep on some of its tracks on South Park Avenue in Herrin.
Steam trains were also affected. Trains on the C & EI failed to arrive in Marion at all on Friday of that week and ran two to six hours late on the following day. Illinois Central trains were four hours late and the miners train on the Missouri Pacific was an hour late on its short run In from mines in the county.
The suffering occasioned by the 1918 snow was increased by the bitter cold. The temperature was recorded officially at 21 degrees below zero.
This week’s heavy snowfall was less unendurable than the winter storm of January, last year, because 1978 temperatures were milder during the first part of the week than the below-zero weather reported with a 10-inch snow on Jan. 12, 1977.
Although February is usually a month of severe winter weather, January is more often than not a raw winter month. That has been true at least as far back as 1884 when there was a mercury reading of 28 below. On Jan. 29, 1902 there was a big sleet storm in this area, and just 25 years later what was described as the worst sleet storm in history gripped the community. Similar storms held the January headlines again in 1930 and a record of 23 degrees below zero was reported Jan. 13, 1912 along with a 13-inch snow.
The 1918 siege of winter began with an eight-inch snowfall in December. It remained on the ground six weeks, made deeper by subsequent snows which blew into drifts, halted traffic of all kinds and paralyzed the community. One southern Illinois farmer, driving his cattle to shelter, froze to death, and a man found unconscious in the snow on a vacant lot in Herrin succumbed to exposure.
Whether the snow was 18 inches or three feet deep can’t change the recollections of those boys who can hark back to that winter of 1918 when the rain that fell and froze on top of the snow enabled them to skate through back yards and over fences on the glassy surface that covered wide expanses of snow drifted within inches of the tops of fence posts. Delivering newspapers in a style that had all the thrills of a ski slope was a heady experience for a boy on skates until occasionally the icy surface caved in and the boy, skates and newspapers sank in the snow bank from which wading out wasn’t easy.
One of the Daily Republican headlines that week read, “Peckerwood Ridge Comes to the Rescue.”
Only the old settlers and their descendants would recognize the geographic significance of that headline on a story which originated in the southeast section of Marion between South Market and South Buchanan Streets.
That area won recognition in the press of that day for the performance of a company of coal miners who couldn’t get to work because of the snow. The men who earned their living with pick and shovel turned to tools of their trade to free their community called Peckerwood Ridge from winter’s isolation. They got together at the south edge of town, and started shoveling snow from the sidewalks. They shoveled their way out of Peckerwood Ridge and up the South Market Street Incline to the Public Square.
Their shovels not only opened a way for residents of Peckerwood Ridge to travel to town in the only way available to them “on shank’s mare,” but they cleared the route for occupants of each home they passed by outside their own neighborhood. Hence the word “rescue” in the newspaper headlines hailing their performance.
Another January which visited all of winter’s fury upon Southern Illinois was that of 1937 when snows and sleet storms were followed by a quick thaw and rain which caused simultaneous flooding of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. A thousand refugees from the river counties of Southern Illinois lived out the rest of winter in a tent city in the Williamson County fairgrounds.
In more recent years, temperatures in January reached 7 below Jan. 10, 1962, 12 below on Jan. 28, 1961 and Jan. 24, 1963 and 6 below Jan. 13, 1964.
(Extracted from Glances at Life, by Homer Butler, Marion Daily Republican, January 27, 1979)