Written By John Caverhill
I know this sounds like an old man’s rant, but winters today are nothing like they used to be. My Father’s diary recorded much more severe winter conditions than we experience now, and I have my own personal snowy memories of winters in the 1940s. While summers had high temperatures, autumn weather came earlier and cold snaps could occur even in late June. For most of the first half of the 20th century, country roads were often impassable for weeks to wheeled traffic for three reasons: deep snow, the basic road construction, and the available snow removal equipment.
Here are some typical diary entries (temperatures are in Fahrenheit).
- Aug. 26, 1914: Fine cool weather - light frost Tuesday morning.
- Nov. 16, 1914: Turned cold - freezing and snowing.
- Nov. 19, 1914: Went skating on Uncle Tom’s pond.
- June 24, 1915: Frost last night.
- Oct. 24, 1915: Hard frost last night.
There would often be consecutive days of cold stormy weather with heavy drifting.
- Jan. 12, 1918: Worst storm I ever saw. Southwest wind – temperature at noon was -5, going down to -10 at 4 o’clock.
- Jan. 13, 1918: Still stormy – no church today.
- Jan. 14, 1918: Townline badly drifted but so hard that the horses go right over the drifts.
I specifically remember one major school closure. Our teacher, Miss Chute, as usual spent Christmas 1944 with her family in Aylmer. Dad’s diary reads:
- Jan. 3, 1944: No school as Teacher hasn’t got back.
- Jan. 8, 1944: John and Ronald both returned to school today. Ronald is staying at Scotts for the week.
Ron attended Ilderton Continuation School 3 ½ miles away, so when the roads were bad, he boarded with friends in Ilderton.
Weather-related school closures were actually very rare because all kids walked to school over the snowbanks. Car travel was out of the question—it was sleighs or walking. One of the mid-40s winters was so bad that unless you lived on the paved highways, your car sat unused until spring thaws started.
The short section of road from our laneway to the townline was a typical example of how a road could be blocked until spring. The road was much lower than the field on the north side. The snow drifted waist-high across the road, level with the field. The snowplow pushed through, leaving head-high banks on each side. The next storm filled the road head-high and the dump trucks at that time lacked the power and the weight to force their way through, so the road was blocked for the rest of the winter. Sleighs travelling our road to get to Ilderton turned in our laneway and cut across the field to the townline, then continued down the tenth. I remember watching the bulldozer hired especially for the job as it battled to finally open the road around the beginning of March. Many roads contained similar snow ‘traps’.
That piece of road was particularly frustrating to me. We kids would compare and brag about the height of the drifts we encountered on the way to school. I lived right beside a ‘champion’ snowbank, but it was on the east side of our lane. Each morning I gazed longingly at that vast expanse of snow, then turned away to head west down the road to school.
I rest my case!
