A few days ago, we had a surprise snowfall of less than half an inch that caught local officials by surprise. Suddenly the internet was awash with complaints – “Where are the snowplows?” One poster complained of losing control of his car five times on his way home, yet he somehow managed to use his cell phone to take and then post about a half dozen photos through his windshield, all while he was driving on the interstate. Another whined about people “needing” to be on the roads and those roads had not yet been treated.
It’s 2025 and somehow even bad weather is now the fault of the government. Elected officials should know most drivers have no clue what to do if it snows. Drivers have the inalienable right to operate their vehicles at the same speed in snow as they do on dry pavement, so to not have each and every road completely clear of ice and snow the minute a storm begins – predicted or not –is an obvious dereliction of duty.
I couldn’t help but think a few of those whiners should have lived here seventy-five years ago, when Easton’s winter travel landscape was very much different than it is today.
Studying historical records, it is surprising to see there is nothing that indicates consistently higher annual amounts of snow during the middle of the 20th century than we see today, but then again, road crews weren’t as capable at clearing the roads as quickly as they can today. While temperatures are generally a little warmer now than they were back then, this is still New England, and it’s never considered all that unusual for it to be fifty degrees one day and fifteen the next.
In looking over Easton’s old town reports, it appears that the town was plowing at least some of the roads by the mid-1930’s when they purchased a Studebaker truck for $869 and a snowplow for just over $350. By the late 1940’s, town reports began including line-items for snow removal, but they generally amounted to less than $500.
In 1950, Easton’s highway crew was hard pressed to keep all its growing number of roads clear during any storm with accumulating snow, having only three or four trucks equipped with plows (town reports didn’t list exact vehicle inventories) and a measly three sand spreaders at their disposal. Records from that era began to show fees paid to private contractors who were called in to help with snow plowing during some of the larger storms. There were still several miles of roads that hadn’t yet been paved, and many of those unimproved roads weren’t plowed at all until after the snow stopped falling.
During those years, the state maintained and plowed Black Rock Turnpike, Sport Hill Road to Union Cemetery, the Monroe Turnpike (Route 59), and Center Road.
Without the widespread use of chemicals to melt the snow, most roads quickly became caked with frozen snow and ice that lasted at least until the daytime temperatures rose above the freezing mark, which in many instances meant a week or more. Sand was used rather sparingly, normally only spread at intersections and on the hills. In addition, town roads seldom had drains, so any standing water became a dangerous issue as it froze and turned to ice.
Vehicles of that era were not the all-wheel-drive models we are so accustomed to driving today. Pre-1957, there were only two commercially built 4-wheel-drive pickup trucks on the market, one built by Dodge and the other by International Harvester. Willys sold some 4-wheel-drive Jeep station wagons as early as 1949, but they were so under-powered and harsh riding, that they had very few takers. Passenger cars of the day were exclusively rear-wheel drive.
Snow tires didn’t become widely available until 1952 when Goodyear introduced its “Suburbanite” cleated tread. Even then, the added cost of buying extra tires and/or rims prevented many families from using them.
Chains were the order of the day for almost everyone. Difficult to install and then properly adjust so that they would not come loose and bang against the wheel wells, they none-the-less were used by the majority of the population who needed to travel on Easton’s roads between late November and early April. The problem was that they couldn’t be driven very far on dry pavement, so that meant taking them on and off the wheels on a rather frequent basis. Getting dirty and wet often was the norm for many drivers.
In 1950, there weren’t many options for clearing the driveway of the family home. There were no snowblowers yet available. Toro introduced their “Snowhound,” the first mass-marketed residential snowblower, in 1953. Unlike the powerful machines available today, the Toro couldn’t handle more than a foot of powdery snow and it only cleared a maximum of seventeen inches on each pass.
Finding a landscaper with a 4-wheel drive pickup and a plow would have been extremely rare. A few may have used surplus WWII Army Jeeps, but the plows of that era were usually just the up and down variety. Angling a plow generally meant getting out of the vehicle, pulling a steel pin, and manually swinging the blade from side to side to select the proper angle, and then reinstalling the pin to hold the blade in place.
The traditional method of snow removal from a rural driveway generally required a strong back, a healthy heart, and a snow shovel. If the driveway was flat, clearing the snowbank deposited by the town plow was often enough to allow the family car to get off the road and at least partway to the house.
Ambitious kids in the 1950’s often earned a fair amount of their spending money by shoveling out their neighbors. Parents of these would-be entrepreneurs needed to be extra vigilant to make certain that both their snow shovel and its operator cleared the family walks and driveway before heading off the property to earn some cash.
Something most younger people today will have a difficult time grasping is the fact that school usually remained in session even when the roads were covered in snow. In snowy weather, the rear wheels of the school buses were always chained-up before the buses headed out to pick up the children. In 1950, Easton only had four privately owned school buses to pick up and deliver the entire contingency of kids attending grades one through eight at Samuel Staples Elementary on Morehouse Road.
Four buses resulted in some long runs even in ideal conditions. But unlike today, children were often required to walk long distances to meet at their assigned bus stops. Many of those stops had between 10 and 15 kids waiting to be picked up. Some of the children along the more sparsely populated roads in the northern end of town had to walk in excess of half a mile before they caught the bus to school.
Nobody froze to death because everybody was sensibly dressed to survive the elements – heavy coats, woolen hats and mittens, and always a pair of rubber boots covering the shoes. However, unless the snow had started late in the afternoon or early evening of the previous day, school was seldom cancelled. Delayed openings occurred naturally whenever more than one bus was late in getting to school; they were never planned and announced in advance.
There were also less accidents than one might imagine. First, there were far fewer cars on the road since most families only owned one vehicle, and in many cases, only one member of the household had a license to drive. Second, since most people who lived in Easton during the winter months had grown up here, the vast majority of them had been instilled with enough common sense to install their tire chains before venturing out onto a snow and ice-covered road. Those who didn’t were soon on foot after their car became stuck in a snowbank or couldn’t make it up a hill. For most folks, experiencing that misery just once was more than enough to make them change their ways. If you lived in New England, you were accustomed to dealing with the harsh winters, so adjustments were made, and life went on in spite of the weather.
Today, municipalities have the equipment to keep most of the roads in passable condition in anything short of a full-blown blizzard. Roads are down to bare pavement within hours, not days or weeks. Homeowners either have a good snowblower, a small tractor or ATV with a plow, or a contract with a capable landscaper who likely can move more snow with his one-ton 4-wheel drive pickup fitted with an eight-foot hydraulic V-plow than any one of the Town of Easton’s International dump trucks could in 1950.
Our personal vehicles are mostly all-wheel drive with heated seats and steering wheels. Our anti-lock brakes prevent us from skidding and allow us to steer even under heavy braking on slippery roads. Our remote starters allow those who don’t garage their vehicle to warm up the interior and defrost the glass without even leaving the comfort of their house. No one has to get up early to put the chains on the car.
Yet today, we close businesses and schools with the mere forecast of anything more than a couple of inches of snow. Schools are regularly delayed when it’s colder than normal, even if the roads are dry, and the kids catch the bus in front of their house rather than a half a mile away at some randomly designated bus stop.
Yet, even with more capable vehicles, better snow and ice removal by both towns and the state, and cautious officials who err on the side of safety with school delays, there are those among us who think that our local government should do more. It’s winter, we live in New England, and it snows just as it has for the last thousand years. Perhaps it’s better to just let it snow, adjust your day a little, and enjoy it!
