[PRCo] Re: PRC - little blurb about snow sweepers

[Fred W. Schneider III]

Your note is interesting Matt.  I'm going to save it in my historical
research file.  

Perhaps the canvas broom covers were a later addition?  I don't know;
just figuring some one with knowledge will answer the question. 

Rotary snow plows were a whole other issue ... they had a tendency to
throw rocks and other missiles through windows and less fragile parts of
buildings.  Lancaster, Penna., had a rotary to patrol its 130 or so
miles unpaved open track.  The double end rotary was built in 1896 and
survived into the late 1930s but pictures of it are incredibly rare ...
it was probably only taken out when nothing else would work, such as the
nows in 1901, 1902, 1918 and 1932.  More often they hired crews of
literally hundreds of day laborers, and gave them shovels, coffee, and
sandwiches ... Bobby Campbell, the treasurer in the 1950s and 1960s,
remembered being ordered to throw out receipts for literally thousands
of sandwiches for shovelers. Often, the same motor flat car that hauled
rail and ties in the summer, carried snow out of downtown to the nearest
bridge over the Conestoga Creek in winter.  (There were no laws
preventing dumping pollutants into streams in those days, and had their
been laws, what was the difference in dumping horse droppings from the
street in the creek or having them wash off farm fields???)  

Matt Barry wrote:
> 
>  From the Pittsburgh Post Gazette almanac, "one hundred years ago -
> April 8, 1902."
> 
> After this morning's unexpected 7-inch snowfall, a near-repeat of the
> record 12.7-inch snowfall on April 3, 1901, the Pittsburg Press reported
> that residents of Bellevue and Woods Run were dumping the heavy snow off
> their rooftops onto the streets, while on the South Side, the "White
> Wings" clearing Carson Street "threw mud and slush on pedestrians, and
> there were many irate people who did not say very choice things about
-- Trailing quotes stripped by Listar --