Midwestern Blizzards

Our One-Room Country Schoolhouse

     The winters of 1948-49 and 1949-50 were absolutely brutal in the Midwest.  Some regions had over 100 inches of snow each winter.  The Great Blizzard of 1949 occurred the first week of January.  Much has been written about that record-breaking storm, but there were many blizzards those years and I cannot separate them in my mind.

     As one storm was followed by another with no melting in between, the snow packed solid, deeper and deeper.  The snowdrifts around our farm became so high that the cattle could literally walk across the fences.  The water tanks for the animals froze solid and tank heaters had to be used to make drinking water available for the livestock.  It was always a worry that we would lose electric power because then no water could be pumped from the well to the tanks.

Home on The Farm

A Sad Day - Leaving The Farm for Last Time in 1965

          The wind blows unhindered across the small plot of land where I spent my childhood. Unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I can never go home. The farm buildings, fences, and trees have been gone for many years now, the soil returned to cropland by some other family or agribusiness. The only Norrises remaining from our branch of the family rest peacefully in the town cemetery. 
     Many years ago, I began to document my memories so that my children and grandchildren would have a glimpse of an era long gone, a way of life remembered by only a few of us lucky enough to have experienced life in rural America during the mid-Twentieth Century.