WINTER WINDS OF HISTORY LOOKING BACK AT MEMORABLE WINTER WEATHER IN THE LAKES AREA
Liberty Street in Culver, once a popular sledding hill, under a heavy blanket of snow circa 1915. Writer / Jeff Kenney Photography / Antiquarian and HIistorical Society of Culver
Whatever dreams area residents may have each year for a white Christmas, most know it’s this time of year -- February and January -- when the real winter weather is most likely to set in. Late last year provided at least one exception in that the South Bend area saw the most Christmas (that is, eve and day of) snowfall on record (12.8 inches), though most Lakes Magazine readers saw very little of the white stuff. Looking back at historic winter weather, of course lake effect conditions cause enough variance in snowfall that Lakes Magazine readers may have considerably different recollections of a given winter from, say, northern Starke County to Rochester, for example. That said, South Bend is officially Indiana’s snowiest city, averaging more than 70 inches per year of snowfall.
In terms of temperature, the coldest officially recorded in Northern Indiana was -24 on January 12, 1918. The coldest full day on record was January 20, 1985 with a low of -22 and a high of -11, part of an arctic wave that swept the entire US. Wind chill factors read more than 50 below, and temperatures slid nearly that low during the winter of 1983-84.. The coldest temperature officially on record in Indiana as a whole was -36 on Jan. 19, 1994 (it was recorded in New Whiteland, south of Indianapolis, if you were curious). On January 1, 1864, several Indiana newspapers reported that temperature had dropped 88 degrees in 12 hours, from 60 degrees above zero Dec. 31, to 28 degrees below zero the next morning. Inasmuch as ice on the lake is a measure of winter weather, it might be worth noting that in March, 1885, Lake Maxinkuckee was covered with 18-inch ice, remaining ice-bound until April 7 of that year.
THETHE LAKES MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2021 LAKES MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2020/ thelakesmagazine.com / thelakesmagazine.com/ 45
