(click to enlarge photos)

This week’s subject, a snow-bound Ballard Avenue, was chosen ceremonially: it celebrates the one-hundredth anniversary of Seattle’s – and the Northwest’s – Big Snow of 1916. (Actually, by the time this feature appears in PacificNW, our centennial commemoration will be a bit late, as this is being written in mid-January.)

On the first of February the snow began an unrelenting twenty-four hour drop that added nearly two feet more to the two that had already accumulated through an exceptionally cold January. For many Ballardians, the fact that prohibition began its sixteen year run at the beginning of 1916 added to the chill, especially on Ballard Avenue, celebrated for its saloons. With its rough count of Ballard Avenue bars, the famous newspaper feature “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” figured that there was “one for every church in Ballard.”

The new and heavy snow of early February “put on ice,” and sometimes under, commuting, public entertainment, classroom education, railroads, and weak roofs. The grandest disaster was on First Hill, where the St. James dome collapsed into the Cathedral’s narthex. For this exceptional occasion the Bishop expressed thanks that no one was in church.

Here (at the top) a neighborhood professional photographer, Fred P. Peterson, sights to the southeast with his back near what was until Seattle annexed Ballard in 1907, its City Hall at 22nd Ave. N.W. Peterson has stamped in red ink at the bottom of his snapshot a claim of copyright next to a caption, which records a “record snow fall of 38 inches” accumulated on the second and third of February. At least six trolleys are stalled on Ballard Avenue, and close to Peterson a motorcar straddles the avenue and its sidewalk. The sign swinging above it suggests that this might be a Studebaker stuck in its attempts to get service.

Measured principally by depth and not by winter mayhem, Seattle’s biggest big snow blanketed the village in 1880. (This feature could not commemorate that big snow with a centennial because “Now and Then” first got going in the winter of 1982. I remember that it was raining.) On Sunday January 4, 1880, the rain froze. On Monday it was all snow. Two days later the Seattle Intelligencer purposely exaggerated the depth at ten feet “in order to play it safe.” Pioneer promoters liked calling Puget Sound our “Mediterranean of the Pacific.” On Saturday, January 10, the Seattle Intelligencer advised, “If anyone has anything to say about our Italian skies . . . shoot him on the spot.”

Among our pioneers were many weather watchers who kept diaries. By their authority, six-and-a-half-feet of snow were measured in the first week of January 1880, and on the twelfth it began to rain.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?   Surely Jean, and before the reader reaches the collection of links that Ron Edge has put up, we will pause together and remember the historian Murray Morgan.  We may still consider him the “Dean of Northwest Historians.”  His Skid Road is the most read history of Seattle, and was first published for the city’s first Centennial in 1951.  Murray was born in Tacoma during the big snow of 1916.  Had he lived he would have been celebrating his own centennial about now.  His century will be celebrated at the Tacoma Public Library on Saturday the upcoming 27th, probably in the elegant and yet well-packed Murray and Rosa Morgan Room there.  Check out the library’s web page if you like.   Here’s a portrait of Murray taken by Mary Randlett and shared by her.  Below it  is another 1916 big snow shot.  We miss both Murray and Rosa.

MURRAY MORGAN’S CENTENNIAL

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