Space City Rewind: Houston’s Great Snow of 1895
Posted by Matt Lanza at 10:01 AM
Note: In our second installment of the Space City Rewind, we tackle the biggest snow on record in Southeast Texas. Our first installment about the November 1992 tornado outbreak can be found here.
“All of Wednesday night polar spirits swept the earth until boundless snow had deformed the withered heath and the people of this section for the first time within the memory of the oldest inhabitant, looked out upon nature fringed with a beard made white with other snows than those of age.” – Brenham Daily Banner, February 15, 1895
Back on Christmas Eve in 2004, much of South Texas was blanketed in white, as a perfect setup to create a miraculous White Christmas occurred. Galveston received four inches of snow, Angleton six inches, Friendswood three inches, and Bay City 8-10 inches. While the 2004 Christmas Eve miracle stands almost on its own for modern Southeast Texas snowstorms, the great Valentine’s Day snow of 1895 stands alone as Southeast Texas’s and the Gulf Coast’s greatest snowstorm of all-time. The following interactive map shows snow totals from this remarkable event, which affected a swath from Texas to Maryland.
Above: An interactive map with snow reports and some details from the 1895 storm
So why did this event occur? How disruptive was it for coastal residents? Will we ever see its like again? Put your feet up, because the latest installment of the Space City Rewind takes you back to the 19th Century: The Great Snowstorm of Valentine’s Day 1895.