Great Storms of the Chesapeake by Healey David

Author:Healey, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2012-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

In the waterfront town of Elkton, a pedestrian makes his way along the path shoveled out in the wake of the Blizzard of 1899. Main Street remains hopelessly clogged with snow. Courtesy Historical Society of Cecil County.

Counting the snow that had fallen in the days leading up to the weekend storm, the snow was now at least three feet deep in most places around the Chesapeake Bay. The wind blew it into enormous drifts. The Sun described how in Frederick County, the snow had drifted up to twenty feet deep and reached to the second story of many homes. A passenger train became stuck in a snow drift between Laurel, Maryland, and Washington, with a congressman among the stranded. “In all parts of Maryland there was for two or three days almost complete stoppage of travel by rail and steamboats, and for a much longer time by public roads,” the Sun reported.

The storm was particularly hard on the Chesapeake Bay oyster fleet, whose oystermen found themselves stranded in the ice. Short on food and fuel, they abandoned their entrapped skipjacks and crossed the ice toward land. It was a matter of survival. But even on land, conditions were dire. The crew of an oyster dredger caught at Drum Point made it to shore in Calvert County and then headed north to Baltimore. Someone later made a discovery of the bodies of these five men, who had all died of exposure in the cold and snow. Other crews struggled through the drifts and reached Baltimore, frostbitten and starving after marching for eighty miles through desolate, snowbound country.

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