100 years ago the Christmas Freeze of 1924 started. It started with snow.
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| December 15th, 1924 |
It lasted two weeks and featured lows below ten degrees.
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| December 19th, 1924 |
Parts of the river were completely covered in ice.
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| December 26th, 1924 |
Skating and sledding were popular.
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| December 27th, 1924 |
A Chinook wind and rain finally brought a thaw and some flooding. (It's not clear whether this was an inland wind from the mountains or a "pineapple express" from the ocean.)
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| December 29th, 1924 |
A steamship sank from the ice, and city bridges were undermined, notably the bridge over Mill Creek on 15th Street.
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| Steamer "Relief" in ice and sinking, December 29th 1924 (Salem Library Historic Photos) |
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| December 30th, 1924 |
At the start of the freeze, the paper could note the snow was arriving "on schedule," saying "rarely a December rolls around without a blanket of the beautiful and the similarity of dates make it almost an annual affair."
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| December 15th, 1924 |
That consistent pattern of snowfall in mid-December is very different from our snow trends here today.
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| Even colder in 1919, December 12th, 1919 |
They also noted that the freeze of 1919 had been even harder with lower temperatures still, another ten degrees colder than in 1924, though that freeze lasted only a few days.
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| December 2018 |
Back in 2018 a history column featured the 1924 freeze, but did not stress climate change quite enough — didn't mention it at all, in fact. It also seemed to underestimate the severity of the 1919 freeze.
The snowfall was a reminder of a cold snap that produced 26 inches over a three-day period in December 1919, but the stretch in 1924 turned out to be much colder.
That's not the best way to describe it. The lowest lows had been in 1919, in the days immediately following the snowfall, and were "much colder" by that standard. The freeze in 1924 was a week longer, and in duration its intensity and severity was worse, maybe "colder" in that sense, though again by raw thermometer readings it was not.
The length of the freeze as well as the temperatures greatly exceed what seems remarkable to us today. Our January freeze of this year lasted less than a week with lows around twenty. It was out of the ordinary. The freeze in 1924 lasted two weeks with several lows between five and ten degrees. In duration and in temperature that's quite a difference!
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| Four days vs two weeks; Lows ~20 vs 10 or less (adapted from accuweather) |
At this point in culture and politics, evidence for our changing climate is not likely to change any minds.
But Salem's winters used to be a lot colder.
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