We found a diary of Grandpa’s at the farm a few years ago. It’s south of Buffalo with harsh winters. He was a farmer and would deliver milk and food to be sold in Buffalo and Rochester — by horse and buggy.
The trip is two hours by car now in perfect weather. He was gone for days at a time in blizzards.
I just wanted to cry reading about this and other trials they dealt with in the late 1800s and early 20th Century.
Mom and my brother’s family live in the farmhouse now, and winters still are a problem. -15 yesterday morning and they lost power. I was freaking out, but Mom, who’s 98, was in great spirits. She’s been through worse.
A week ago we lost power for two days after 9.5 inches of wet snow.
I just through more wood on the fire.
Got out the kerosene lamps and went about the day.
City people have no idea.
He said the oldest people in his area seemed to take it all in stride. And the ones who coped better than anyone else were the elderly folks who had no problem buying things at the few stores with generators — because they never bothered to use ATMs and had plenty of cash on hand.
My folks ended up with a diary from a very, very distant cousin we'd never had any idea about, circa 1840s (I can't recall offhand, and I'm too lazy to look for it). It was found by non-relatives during remodeling, and had been used apparently during an earlier renovation (circa 1940) as insulation inside a wall (not an uncommon end for old books, new books, newspapers, comic books, mail order catalogs, etc). There's a single sheet from an old "Morton Salt Girl" scratch pad with a handwritten note that the book had been used "a hundred years ago" by this distant cousin, which is how the earlier renovation date can be ballparkeed.
('Civ catches his breath)
Anyway, the finder gave it to one of my first cousins (this happened out of state) who said they were the only people they knew with the same last name as the diary keeper. That cousin left it here with my folks because they had no further interest in it.
The book started out in upstate NY (east of Watertown) in a place name that consists (or did when I visited it one time) of a self-serve gas station and convenience store, as a docket for a j-o-t-p. His son took the barely-used book with him when he went west, then wound up serving as a j-o-t-p in his new home"town". Eventually the book served as his diary (he kept a lot of of weather observations, important for a farmer), a place for his thoughts (essays, an early form of FR), various frontier remedies for ailments, and such.
The tail end of those diary entries paint a bleak picture of a dying man in legal trouble in an unforgiving society.
Building a personal anecdotal database of weather was important for future planting and harvesting etc.