If you’re a Rochesterian, there is one crucial aspect without which no picture of daily life is fully rendered; a familiar and frustrating piece of the Rochester experience that can’t be left aside.

I’m speaking, naturally, of snow and its removal, which you may have gleaned from the title.

Rochester has long been gifted with copious amounts of snow, a contribution of Lake Ontario. At times, the blizzards have accumulated enough to effectively shut down traffic.

For the most part, during the horse-based era of transport snow wasn’t a huge obstacle for the everyday driver. A sleigh outfitted with runners pulled by sure-footed horses could glide along the snowed-over streets with relative ease. When the streetcar tracks required clearing, however, the resulting drifts and troughs would cause obstacles for sleigh travel, which frustrated travelers. But with the increasing importance of streetcars and trains as the lifeblood of the city, clearing the tracks took priority. Before long, automobiles began to arrive on the scene, which could easily become stuck in deep snow-drifts. With their increase, plowing and shoveling of the streets shifted from unnecessary to status quo. Sleighs disappeared from the streets, banished to the dustbin of history.

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Shoveling

Of course, the most basic way to remove snow is the good old fashioned shovel, operated off that most plentiful of resources, elbow grease. Get some men, get some shovels, get a wagon or a truck, and begin filling it up.

To me, the below photo looks a lot like the wagon and crew from above. The photoprint is apparently dated 1935, but I’m inclined to believe it’s the same as above, 1922.

The below also seems to be the same operation:

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Steam Shovels

Not every shovel has to be hefted by human hands. This was, after all, the age of the steam shovel, and the Department of Public Works had some of these devices at their disposal.

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Snowplows

A mainstay of the snow removal arsenal, snowplows enjoyed a massive improvement from the horse-drawn to the diesel-powered. Early in the 20th century, one could still see the old horse-drawn plow scraping along streets and sidewalks of Rochester.

In terms of raw power, the diesel engine was where it was at.

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Snow Loaders

In 1925, the Department of Public Works was given a new weapon in its arsenal: a large Barber-Greene “snow loader”, a self-propelled inclined conveyor that allowed snow to be easily loaded from plows and shovelfuls into the back of a truck. This useful piece of equipment was newly-invented as of 1920.

Three more of these powerful pieces of equipment were acquired by the DPW by 1928; a second later in 1925, the third in 1927, and a fourth in February of 1928. All four were employed against the massive 8-inch snowfall of March 10th, 1928.

As of March of 1931, a fifth snow loader was added to the fleet. This would eventually become a full seven snow loaders by February of 1940. The number went up and down from there; the largest total of snow loaders employed by the DPW seems to have been eight at most, in the autumn of 1955, when they were used for leaf pickup.

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Streetcar Plows

One interesting–albeit slightly terrifying–solution was that which was employed by boatwright Captain George Wentworth Ruggles: strap a big propeller to the front of a streetcar and clear the tracks with it.

This whirling blade dispersed drifts along the electric car line between Charlotte and Rochester proper, and was happily adopted to clear another track from Rochester to Irondequoit Bay.

Useful as the rotary snowplow was to the rail lines, exactly the horrific event I pictured upon seeing the exposed fan came to be at least once [warning: this is a bit grisly]:

Sadly, John Wickins did not survive his devastating encounter with the Ruggles plow:

He now lies buried under an upside-down headstone in the Buckbee Memorial Cemetery in Chili.

The inventor of Wickins’s whirling doom, Captain George W. Ruggles, passed peacefully into eternity two years later, May 21st, 1910.

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Bridge Dumping

Finally, there was the question of what to do with all this collected snow. There was one go-to solution at this time: dumping it off a bridge, usually Court Street Bridge, into the Genesee River.

There were two methods employed in this; either dumping directly over the railing or opening up a manhole and shoveling the snow down it, often referred to as a “snow hole”.

In the 1960s, the snow-hole strategy was extended to the Smith Street Bridge, where two specialty snow holes were installed to avoid blocking traffic during snow-holing operations.

Snow dumping was carried on as a matter of course for many decades. In 1972, the question was raised as to whether road salt from snow dumping was causing a gradual increase in the salinity of Lake Ontario, where the waters of the Genesee inevitably ended up.

There doesn’t seem to have been much in the way of change in the modus operandi due to raising the specter of salinity. Now and then, the issue would be raised only to be brushed aside as yet another dumping season commenced, through the 1980s:

Into the 1990s:

Into the mid-2000s:

And probably beyond.

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The Sno-Go

In 1945, the Department of Public Works procured a serious weapon in the war against snow: the Sno-Go rotary plow. These powerful trucks carried rotating screws at the forefront which were able to gobble up accumulated snow and disgorge it into a ready bucket truck.

The Sno-Go’s nickname was apparently “Big Bertha”, after the famous German howitzer gun:

It’s sort of fantastic to think of how much time, money, and labor has been spent, year over year, battling this recurrent white enemy. I’m impressed by the mixture of ingenuity and pure brute force represented in its removal, where even the most perfectly-engineered devices sometimes playing second fiddle to the snow shovel in the arms of a strong young man.

To further sum up, as this is the end of 2025, I’d like to thank everyone for their readership and support of Gonechester. This has been a massive year for this humble blog: besides publishing twenty-three Gonechester posts over the course of 2025, I also have given around twenty-five in-person presentations of four history topics. I’ve been delighted to be able to talk about Rochester’s past for an hour at a time to people who are actually interested, so thank you for showing up!

Happy new year, and a happy 2026 to you!

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A Plea for Support

I know a lot of things demand your money around this time of year, but for Gonechester, January is when the server fees come due. If you’ve enjoyed reading Gonechester over the course of 2025, and would like to see it keep going throughout 2026, consider stopping by my tip jar at buymeacoffee.com/Gonechester and dropping something in it. Thank you, and happy holidays!