Thanksgiving Snow Stories
Several stories from the Thanksgiving Weekend Snow of 1950 were shared by readers of Barnesville Area News.
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Janet Smith, retired veteran teacher in the Barnesville School District, was a 16-year-old student at New Concord High School in 1950. She planned to attend a Christian youth meeting in Akron the weekend after Thanksgiving day.
The meetings were slated to take place in the largest church young Janet had ever experienced on Friday and Saturday.
The meeting started as planned on Friday and it was there that she saw Sam Smith from Bethesda.
While he was a familiar face, the two did not interact until that meeting. As they talked, he asked her to meet him the next day, Saturday, at dinnertime. They arranged to meet at the altar of the church.
The meeting was canceled, and the group was dismissed early on Friday because of the snow. That nixed the Saturday night date.
Janet and the other youth in her group were staying with families in the Akron area. Like everyone else, they were snowed in, the white stuff continuing to fall.
On Tuesday they were finally able to walk to the church, about a mile away, and from there one of the adult men would drive the students home to Muskingum County.
When they got to the county line, they couldn’t get up the big hill. Janet’s dad put the chains on the tires of his car and pulled the other car with the kids on to New Concord.
At this time, Sam Smith was attending school in Columbus. That missed Saturday night dinner was not the end of it. The two started dating. They were married several years later when Janet was a senior in college.
Information collected in an interview of Janet Smith by Janie Burkhart, Barnesville Area News
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In November of 1950, my cousin, who was pregnant, her husband, and year-old child were living on Morgantown Avenue. While a snowstorm raged and the roads were becoming more and more treacherous, she went into labor. But Morgantown was completely shut down! A firetruck was dispatched to the rescue. The truck traveled across East Main to the foot of Morgantown where it waited while volunteer firemen hauled a stretcher up the hill, through the snow and to the house.
After bundling up the expectant mother and securing her to the stretcher, the firemen carried her down the hill to the awaiting truck. Eventually, they made it to the hospital, where the baby was born on November 28.
Submitted by Becky Wehr, Mt. Olivett resident
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In 1950, my grandfather, Howard Giesey, was a road superintendent for Tri-State Asphalt. In those days, roadwork did not take place during the colder months like it does today.
Howard would do jobs for people in the Batesville area during the winter months just to help neighbors. He was hired to haul a load of hogs on Thanksgiving Friday from Batesville to Pittsburgh.
Howard got the hogs to the slaughterhouse in Pittsburgh with no problem and turned around to hightail it back home.
The first interstate highways were over eight years away, so a trip to Pittsburgh was at minimum a 3–4-hour ride one-way in a car in pleasant weather, let alone driving a tractor-trailer in a blizzard.
As the weather continued to worsen, amazingly he made it to Barnesville around midnight Friday night/Saturday morning, and he got his rig as far as the top of the hill on SR-147 in Noble County on Tuckahoe Ridge where Bobby Butler’s service station would be a couple years later before the weather ended his sojourn.
That location was where he spent the next three days waiting for a county grader to come through and clear the road so he could make the last four miles to his home.
I still cannot figure out how he got that rig up Barnesville Hill and the hill at the Belmont-Noble county line.
Submitted by by Malcolm Spence, Barnesville native, now of Powell, Ohio
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