LOOK UP: We’re not sure if our unseasonably warm weather is
responsible but reports of spring harbingers have been pouring
in.

Ron Housler saw robins on Wednesday morning in Lantz Corners and
a killdeer the previous day. Wendy Ginkel reported three robins on
Wildwood Avenue and, “Hawk” at the high school heard a robin on a
wire on Willard Avenue “just a singin’ away.”

B-R-R-ADFORD: It may not be over yet but, honestly, this winter
has been a pussy cat compared to winters of Bradford past.

The Feb. 26, 1910, Era, reported: “ ‘The coldest winter that I
can remember,’ said P.L. Webster last evening, ‘was the winter of
1856-57. The thermometers on one especially chilly day that winter
registered 40 degrees below zero. At one stretch, for a week, it
averaged 25 degrees below. For 40 days, there was no thaw that
winter, even on the sunny side of the roof or street. The snow was
about 3 feet deep.

“ ‘That was a hard winter hereabouts. There were but few farms,
and feed for cattle was hard to get. In the previous June, there
had been a frost and this had ruined crops of various kinds,
including hay. I knew of a dairyman in Ellicottville, N.Y., who
drove to Lafayette in this county and paid $40 a ton for hay, which
he took back with him as a real prize. In order to keep cattle from
starving, they were given twigs of elm and basswood to browse upon.
Trees were chopped down for them, and they subsisted upon this
meagre fare.

“ ‘The deepest snow I can remember prior to the present winter
was in 1839. Snow was then 4 feet deep on the level. But during the
72 years in which I have lived in Tuna Valley, the deepest snow is
that of this winter (1910), and it is the most difficult snow to
get through. There has been alternate snowing, melting and freezing
in the weather program this winter, and, as a result, the snow is
packed so hard that it is impossible to drive through unbroken
roads in the country. The snow is so hard that a man with a wooden
shovel can make but little progress in trying to shovel it.”