Content: severe winter weather causes the road to be closed; the telephone at home is not working; a new type of snow removal equipment (steam shovel) was used on the nearby cement road; sale of pigs and calves; with the roads being snowed in, the pigs have to be transported by sled; shortage of coal; concern for Lester’s well being in the cold weather.
SCANS
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TRANSCRIPTION/ TRANSLATION
This is a character-by-character transcription of the original document written in Kurrent. It adheres to the spelling and line-spacing of the original.
- Characters in italics are written in Latin script in the original
- Characters in square brackets [ ] were added by the transcribers.
- A question mark in square brackets [?] indicates that the transcribers were not sure about the spelling of the preceding word.
English Translation: 1936-02-18
Words written in italics in this translation indicate English words written in Latin script in the original.
CONTEXT
Snow Removal
Snowed-in roads have always been a challenge during Wisconsin winters. The 1920s and 1930s was a time when snow removal on paved roads in the rural Midwest began to change. Earlier there were only two options: shoveling by hand or horse-drawn snow ploughs.
By the 1930s, trucks with mounted snow plows became more common.
In this letter Anna Seifert described a new type of steam snow shovel that she saw for the first time: “On the cement road near Lüdkes, they are now using a steam shovel. They are throwing the snow to one side, just as they did with the dirt when they dug the ditch here.”
