Posted on 01/05/2010 7:04:26 AM PST by SwinneySwitch
What is a norther? J. Frank Dobie wrote that weather forecasters never use the term, preferring cold wave or cold spell, but it is a term familiar to all Texans. Northers, said Dobie, blow the world inside out and freeze the lining; they are cold enough to freeze the horns off a brass billy goat. Another Texas writer from the 19th century, Alex Sweet, said the thermometer falls rapidly during a norther, sometimes 40 degrees in an hour. A man in Austin, wrote Sweet, “saw the thermometer fall three feet in two seconds — off a nail.”
Whether they are called cold waves, northers or blizzards, the worst to hit Texas, in the recorded memory of man, came on in the middle of a Saturday night on Feb. 13-14, 1899. It swept down into Texas and within hours temperatures dropped to the lowest the state had ever seen. It was fiercely cold. The temperatures are hard to believe, but they were well-reported at the time. In the Panhandle, temperatures plunged to 31 degrees BELOW zero at Tulia. The temperatures dropped to 23 degrees BELOW at Abilene, 16 degrees below at Denison, 11 degrees below at Dallas, and four below at San Antonio. The oasis of warmth in the state was at Corpus Christi, which registered a balmy 11 degrees above zero.
It was stone cold around the country. Trains were stalled, causing “coal famines” in the frozen cities. “There is great suffering,” the Caller reported, “especially among the poor in New York and other large cities where the cold is the worst known in decades.” Some people were found frozen to death while others were burned to death. Potbellied stoves, the main source of heat in many homes, were loaded up with coal, if the occupants had it, or wood. The fires were stoked until the stoves glowed red-hot. There were tragic accidents caused by people trying to get warm by crowding in too close. In Corsicana, a 10-year-old girl burned to death when she stood too close to a hot stove. In Alice, a woman was burned to death when her dress brushed against a stove and ignited. There were similar stories from all over. The Laredo Times reported that many thousands of lambs and other livestock were frozen to death on the range. The San Antonio Express reported that “for the first time in human memory, the San Antonio River was turned into a cake of ice of sufficient thickness to hold human weight.”
Capt. Andrew Anderson, who came to Corpus Christi with his parents in 1852, got caught in that terrible blizzard.
“We were 50 miles down Laguna Madre (when the storm hit). We were iced in. The Laguna had frozen over. It was snug and warm in the cabin (of the boat) all night, but in the morning we couldn’t get the cabin door open. By chopping with a hatchet we were able to open it, and what a sight we beheld. There was snow and ice over the sails and rigging. It was impossible to move them. After much beating and shaking of the canvas, however, we were able to hoist the sails. Then we went to work on the anchor, and finally got that loose. It was so intensely cold we had to stop every little while and get a drink of hot coffee. Finally we started out with a head wind. We got up 25 or 30 miles, as the wind was rather favorable, and anchored at sundown. We had to climb the hoops around the masts to get the sails down that night . . . It was about noon when we reached the (bay) and the wind died down. We had to pole in from the beacon to the wharf.
“During this same terrible cold spell, a fellow in an open boat with vegetables from Ingleside landed in front of my house (on Water Street). There was so much steam from the water he couldn’t see anything, and so he anchored. He was so cold he didn’t see how he could live if he remained on the boat. So he jumped overboard, thinking he would just as soon freeze to death in the water as in the boat. After swimming a ways he was able to walk. Reaching shore, he asked me to go out to the boat and get another fellow off, who had remained behind. The bay was frozen out 30 or 40 feet from shore; my skiff was on top of the ice, and the oars were about six inches thick with the ice ... . We found the man on the boat nearly gone, just sitting huddled up, covered with canvas; he didn’t respond when we called to him. We pulled him off the boat and tumbled him into the skiff and made for the shore in a hurry. He just lay there in the skiff, appearing to be dead. But on shore they put some whiskey in him first, and then some coffee, and brought him to.”
The Caller correspondent at Alice reported it was five degrees above zero. At Tarpon (Port Aransas), the boat harbor froze over and people walked on the ice between the boats. Thousands of frozen fish, stunned by the cold, lined the shore. At Corpus Christi, according to the Caller, the blizzard killed all the cabbage and garden truck around the city ... It killed the city’s oleanders ... It froze meat in the market; saws had to be used to cut it ... It froze vinegar in bottles, ink in ink stands, and bluing in the stores (breaking the bottles) ... froze the combs off chickens and froze “a bunch of goats to death back of town” ... froze the river solid at Nuecestown (near Calallen); people could walk from bank to bank . . . froze Nueces Bay from shore to shore; a man who delivered mail from Rockport to Corpus Christi by horseback rode his horse across the frozen Nueces Bay ... It froze Corpus Christi Bay out past the piers; fishing boats at the wharves were encased in ice; boys walked on the ice as far as the Central Wharf bathhouse (past where the L-head is today) ... It froze seagulls, which fell like stones. The bay-freezing blizzard of 1899 was surely the coldest weather that Corpus Christi had ever seen.
Murphy Givens is the former Viewpoints Editor of the Caller-Times. E-mail: givens.murphy@gmail.com.
And I thought it was cold today! LOL
Texas is getting ready for another arctic blast on Wednesday...
Here in Austin, the weather forecast is for high of 32 with wind chills in the single digits..
I know many northerners are chuckling but Thursdays high is about 30 degrees below normal..
I’m glad I kept my winter gear..
My dad used to say the only thing between us and the North Pole is a barbed wire fence. And that blew down last year.
I always enjoyed reading Murphey Givens columns.
BTW, we registered 25 degrees this morning in the hill country.
... and without a doubt, it was caused by SUV's and was all George Bush's fault!
This must be the norther that my grandfather (b.1879) told me about. He said Galveston Bay froze over but I could not remember the year. He lived in Galveston at the time and left after surviving the 1900 storm and it’s aftermath.
Thanks for posting this.
You see!!?
You see!!?
This current man caused Climate Change is so real and dangerous that it has even traveled back in time to 1899!!!!
Yeah, and I'm in San Antonio and not looking forward to it. I hate cold.
I’ve experienced many a blue norther here in N. Texas, but I’ve yet to see a chicken with its comb frozen off. Ouch!
My grandmother (b. 1892) lived her whole life here. She told me stories of ice skating when she was a girl, said it was colder then.
in the early 80’s in Wichita Falls...it was 29 degrees and a blue North’r hit.....became -4 degrees w / 40 mph winds for 18 hours............phones rang and volunteers geared up to help farmers bust ice in the stock tanks and spread hay constantly........
I recall being in Dallas one time walking around town with in a regular business suit while the natives were huddled in parkas. It seemed like a warm winter day to this Yankee, but the Texans were freezing their butts off.
I guess it's all what you get used to. ;~))
Yikes! But that was Wichita Falls, I forgot to mention I was in Houston, we don’t usually get weather that cold or that quick. My husband raises cattle in Brazoria County, he might have to break ice on his water troughs with this one that is coming.
I wondered if someone was going to call the storm by the correct name.
funny too is how domesticated cattle must be led into the wind face first whereas range cows know to put their head into the weather.....for the non rancher....a cow whose butt is into the wind can freeze his butt off........literally
Talk about bad weather: deep freeze one year and the Hurricane, the next.
Texas northers are when the flames on a fire freeze solid and can be broken off and ground up for chili powder.
People here in the Midwest find it hard to beleive that
my coldest deer huntin day of my life was 1982(?) just
north of Houston.....3 degrees....
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