Wiscasset residents consider themselves a hardy lot boasting of being used to ice, snow and bitter cold temperatures. Some are saying this winter is like the ones they remember growing up.

But imagine what winter was like before there were snow blowers or plow trucks to clear away snow, when people relied solely on fireplaces for heat. It wasn’t unusual for Colonial homes like the Cook-Hubbard-Marean house on the corner of Main and Pleasant streets in Wiscasset to have a fireplace in nearly every room. Built in 1795, its owner equipped the two-story house with 17 fireplaces. Fortunately, wood was plentiful then and folks kept the home fires going to stay warm and to cook with.

A number of early residents kept journals and often recorded the weather and daily temperature. Charles E. Knight kept a day journal for 53 years beginning in 1884. Born in 1854 and raised in Wiscasset, Knight lived in the same two-story home in the village for over a half-century. The house, known then and today as the Blyth house for its original owner, is also on the corner of Main and Pleasant streets, one door down from the Cook-Hubbard-Marean house.

Knight was a Bowdoin College graduate of 1877 with a degree in law. He was a classmate and close friend of arctic explorer, Rear Admiral Robert Peary, initially credited as being the first man to reach the North Pole in 1909.

Among Knight’s journal entries is this one from Jan. 29, 1886. He describes a terrible ice storm that struck Maine over a three-day period. “The trees loaded with tons of ice have been crashing into the streets,” he writes. “Selectmen have had gangs of men clearing roads. Still raining and freezing & trees still crashing. The big elms on High Street are a sorry looking sight.”

Old photographs in the archives of Wiscasset Public Library attest to Knight’s entry and show some of the havoc the ice storm caused in the village. The Storm of 1886 may have held the record as the worst one until the Great Ice Storm that began Jan. 8, 1998 that’s still fresh in many Mainers’ memories.

The final journal in Knight’s collection is for 1933. As always, he records the day’s weather. For Dec. 29, he writes, the mercury dipped to 25 below zero overnight and stood at 15 degrees below zero at noontime. “A record day, relentlessly cold, lots of snow,” he scribbled in pencil.

Asa Willard “Will” Plumstead who lived on Jewankee Point, Wiscasset (now known as Young’s Point) faithfully kept a journal, too. His daily entries start in 1880 and end in 1919. 

A January entry 1880 entry tells of a journey he made through the winter countryside by horse and sleigh. The trip began from the family farm on Jan. 22, a sunny but below-freezing morning that carried young Plumstead to the city of Gardiner. The 18-mile trip, which today takes about 30 minutes by car, required nearly three hours, which was pretty good time back then.

In the so-called “good old days,” Mainers’ didn’t plow snow, in fact they looked forward to having lots of it so they could use their horse-drawn sleighs and sleds. Some communities “rolled snow,” packing it down with large wooden contraptions resembling steamrollers pulled by teams of horses or oxen. The harder packed, the better it was. They even carried snow to patch bare places on the roads to make travel easier.   

Moving on to Feb. 1, 1911, Plumstead notes the mercury had dipped to four below zero. The chilly temperature however didn’t keep him or his family from attending a supper and dance at the Grange Hall in nearby Montsweag, now a part of Woolwich.

“Minus 10 degrees,” writes Plumstead on the page for Jan. 13, 1912. That afternoon, he journeyed to Portland to attend a lecture at Williams Hall on Congress Street. The following morning when he caught the northbound train for Wiscasset, he recorded the temperature in the port city at 18 below zero. The mercury remained below zero for a week.

On March 19, 1916, Plumstead writes of a brutal blizzard and having to shovel snow for nearly five hours after the storm finally abated. Two days later, he was back at it, shoveling for another three hours to clear a path out to the main road.