THE GREAT SNOW STORM OF JANUARY 1836: Never before in the recollection of any man living has there been but once before so great a body of snow on the ground in this section of the country as there is at the present time. On Thursday night (the 7th) the snow commenced falling and continued with very little intermission until Monday morning following. During Friday and Saturday there was no wind, but on Saturday morning it commenced blowing and continued to blow during the night and throughout Sunday it blew a gale. In consequence the snow is piled in heaps. Indeed we are surrounded on all sides by mountains of snow, which put their snow capped peaks one above another in a style quite magnificent. It might be said that “Alps on Alps arise” in the very center of our little village, for when we looked out on Monday morning and saw that our own and neighbors houses were literally buried in the snow, and that mountains had been raised between which it would be necessary to tunnel before the ordinary connections could be established. We thought we saw enough to make the stout heart quail in view of the immense labor we should have to perform in digging out, but we of this woody and snowy region, proverbial for our industry and perseverance, are used to hardships and not easily discouraged. In this emergency the Yankee spirit was up and every man and boy who could wield a shovel took it in hand with a firm determination to dig out or die in the attempt. By Monday night our citizens were able to hail from different quarters, but although the work has continued today there is scarcely any communication between the village and the country. The people are still busily engaged in opening the roads, but many days must elapse before the traveling can be made even tolerable. On April 1 of 1807 the snow fell 4 1/2 feet deep on the level, while it is now a trifle over 3 1/2 feet on the average. No mail was received from the South for nearly a week and The [Susquehanna] Register was unable to get out its regular issue because of not receiving paper but the [Montrose] Volunteer gives a more lengthy account. The mail which left New York Thursday morning and should have reached Montrose on Saturday, only after extreme exertion, got as far as Jackson on Saturday then came to Breed’s, 11 miles, on Sunday and on Monday made the nine miles to Montrose. (Submitted by F. B. Jewett, Brooklyn.)

JACKSON: Alvin W. Barrett, age 94, one of the oldest men in Susquehanna County, died at his home at Lakeview, January 4. He was born in Brattleboro, Vt. in 1817. Mr. Barrett was one of the most active men for his years, having enjoyed good health up to the past few months. When the decedent was about 16 he came with his father, Hosea Barrett, to Jackson Township, where a farm was made in the wilderness. He assisted his father in clearing up the forest on the tract of ground that had been purchased. In 1836 he married Miss Mary Jane Hazen, of Jackson, who was born at Loudenderry, Vt., Jan. 3, 1819, her parents David and Jane Hazen having accompanied the party, including the Barretts, from Vermont to Jackson. In 1841 Mr. Barrett purchased the farm on which he lived so many years, erecting a log house in the forest and cleared the land. Afterwards he replaced the log buildings with substantial modern structures and had one of the best farms and was one of the most progressive and successful farmers of that region. Mr. Barrett was a loyal Republican, casting his first vote for William Henry Harrison and voting for every Republican President down to President William H. Taft.

NEW MILFORD: The finest yoke of oxen we have seen in a long time is owned by Ray Pratt of this place. They are well matched as to size and color and weigh 3020 lbs.

SOUTH AUBURN: Mark Overfield, of Shannon Hill, and Ethel Place, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. T. R. Place, were united in marriage at the M. E. parsonage at Auburn 4 Corners, Jan. 4, Rev. J. A. Transue performing the ceremony, after which the happy couple left for Binghamton, returning to the home of his father, S. E. Overfield, on Saturday. ALSO, in West Auburn, Larry, the favorite family horse at A. F. Possinger’s, died last week.

HARFORD: The men of the M. E. church will hold a bee in E. N. Hammond’s woods, Saturday, to get out timber to repair the church. Dinner will be furnished at Mrs. Hammond’s by the Ladies’ Aid.

HOP BOTTOM: The sound of sleigh bells were heard for the first time this week.

MONTROSE A Montrose man one night recently, while trekking down the middle of the road, lost an overshoe. He offers a reward of fifty cents for its return. He figures that with overshoes at $1.10 per pair, a fifty-cent reward is none too small. ALSO, Thomas A. Edison, the inventor, passed over the Lehigh Valley railroad on Thursday of last week, his private car being attached to a train.

CLIFFORD: David Davis, aged 80 years, one of the best known and most highly respected residents, died on Thursday of last week. His brother, Daniel Davis, who came east from Colorado some months ago to visit him, took his death keenly. He was taken ill on Friday and on Saturday, the day of his brother’s funeral, he too passed away. The former was unmarried, while the latter, who was past 70 years old, has a wife and a number of grown children in Colorado. The bereaved wife came in response to a telegram to arrange for the funeral and burial.

LATHROP: On Jan. 2 our kind neighbors, including Bert Green with his gasoline engine, gave us a surprise and cut enough wood to last all winter. As we enjoy its genial warmth we shall think of the kind hearts that prompted the deed. -Mr. and Mrs. I. T. Whitbeck.

FOREST CITY: There has been a change in the local barber shops in the Forest House and Friedman’s Hotel. Andres Berish has gone from the latter to the former and Henry Witteman from the former to the latter.

LYNN, SPRINGVILLE TWP.: Mrs. Dean Baker has been suffering the last two weeks with a gathering in her head, which was very painful. She is somewhat better at this writing.

SILVER LAKE: Leap Year! If there are any old bachelors left for 1913 it won’t be the girls’ fault.

GREAT BEND: Lillian, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell J. Barry, was poisoned from the artificial coloring on popcorn balls, which she ate last Sunday. The little girl was weakened from whooping cough and her digestive organs were much impaired before she partook of the corn. It was feared for some time that she could not live, but she is now thought to be out of danger.

As a prosecutor, I can tell you that one of the more frustrating aspects of the criminal justice system is how immigration issues are handled by the federal government. Prior to getting involved in the criminal justice system, it had been my understanding that the reason that so many illegal immigrants were in the country was that there was no way to “capture” them. After getting involved in law enforcement, I realized how often the police encounter these illegal immigrants in the normal course of their duties. Traffic stops, accident investigations, interviews with witnesses, domestic complaints, physical altercations, drug interdiction work, and other police work routinely identify suspected illegal immigrants at the local level. Once identified by a local law enforcement entity, an average taxpayer would tend to believe that the rest of the process would be relatively straightforward - the illegal immigrant would be taken into custody and deported.

From the very beginning, I learned that common sense had no place in immigration enforcement and deportation proceedings. It was often difficult to really predict what the immigration folks would do with a particular suspect - even after verifying the fact that the suspect was here illegally. For a period of time during the Bush Administration, the illegal immigrants were not deported unless they had committed some kind of violent crime. In other words, illegal immigrants who committed a DUI offense were not deported, while those involved in physical altercations in a domestic dispute would be deported. Oftentimes, nothing would be done in the absence of an actual criminal conviction. In other words, you could catch the illegal immigrant, but the federal government would do nothing to deport them.

We actually had illegal immigrants on probation or parole after being convicted and they were allowed to remain in the country. One of the conditions for their supervision would be that they comply with all laws - which was a joke since their very presence in the country was illegal. In my experience, the supervision of illegal immigrants does not go very well - they simply disappear, leaving unpaid costs, fees and fines in their wake. To put it mildly, it was a frustrating situation - and I cannot even begin to imagine how it must be for those communities that have large numbers of illegal immigrants.

During the beginning of the Obama Administration, the immigration enforcement tightened up for a period of time - and any conviction would result in a deportation - and we even had deportations where there were no convictions at all. It was a breath of fresh air from Washington. But that did not last - and slowly things trended back toward non-enforcement. I just read a news report that the Obama Administration has directed that no deportation proceedings will be initiated until there is a conviction in the state court.

In other words, the federal government will not agree to detain an illegal immigrant until there has been an underlying conviction for the state violation - and then they will deport the illegal immigrant. This means that the local communities now have to maintain custody of the illegal immigrant on the local charges - no matter how minor - until a conviction is obtained upon which the deportation proceedings would be based. Moreover, there would be no guarantee that the illegal immigrant would even be deported - only that those deportation proceedings would be instituted. Undoubtedly, this will put a financial strain on local law enforcement - and require local prosecutors to devote resources to prosecuting illegal immigrants with the knowledge that there is little likelihood that those costs will be recouped from the offender - as he or she will either be deported or, if released into the general community, the offender will likely disappear.

Admittedly, there are many facets to the illegal immigration problem and there is no easy solution to the problem. But the solution should not be for the federal government to abdicate its responsibilities to enforce immigration law and then place the burden squarely on the local communities to bear the costs of prosecuting illegal immigrants simply in order to get the federal government to do its job. This is not a Republican or Democrat issue - Administrations from both parties have failed to fulfill their law enforcement responsibilities and there is no end in sight.

Please submit any questions, concerns, or comments to Susquehanna County District Attorney’s Office, P.O. Box 218, Montrose, Pennsylvania 18801 or at our website www.SusquehannaCounty-DA.org or discuss this and all articles at http://dadesk.blogspot.com/.

Change is going to be the buzz word for the Susquehanna County Library system this year. We will be switching on January 23, 2012 to a new catalog and circulation system called Evergreen, which will save money and provide better services.

Evergreen will be a state-wide system. As a result, all libraries will have to share borrowing policies, which have been pre-set by the organization running the new system.

What does this changeover mean to library patrons? Videos and DVD’s will circulate for 1 week instead of 2. Fines will be 25 cents per day for all items except DVDs (which continue at $1 per day). Circulation notices for overdue items will be sent more quickly (7, 14, and 21 days after the due date). If you keep your reading history, you will need to download it from your patron record as it will not transfer to the new system.

If you currently have items that are overdue, all four library locations will be accepting nonperishable food donations instead of fines of late items returned during the first two weeks of January. These food donations will be given to our local food banks. There will be minimum of one food donation per late item returned and this program does not apply to late fines that you have previously incurred.

To learn more about this transition, you may visit the library’s website at www.susqcolibrary.org. We look forward to seeing many new patrons in 2012 and urge you to subscribe to our e-newsletter.

Hot Diggity Dam

As the long season of darkness sweeps over the country, it’s a natural time to think about lighting - and how dependent we are on electricity during this dim time of year. You can heat your home with several different energy sources, including natural gas, heating oil or wood. But unless you’re living off-the-grid, the lights throughout your abode burn brightly because of electricity from the grid.

Yes, I have a couple of candles, a flashlight and two kerosene lamps in my household. But I don’t use them. Instead, like more than 99 percent of us, I just flip up a switch to turn on electric lights throughout my house.

Of course people use electricity for many other purposes. We run all the equipment in emergency rooms on electricity - and when I’m trying to wake up in the morning I sometimes think it’s almost equally important that we run our coffee makers on electrical current, too.

It’s commonplace to note that the landscape of energy is changing in this country. But it’s harder to get agreement on where we should get our electricity in the coming years. People disagree about that, and for some good reasons. But no matter what you feel about our various energy options, some basic facts about solar energy are worth review.

We could start by noting that most of the energy we use is ultimately solar in origin. Fossil fuels, after all, represent solar energy that Mother Nature stored deep in the Earth over whole geological eras. One down side about fossil fuels is that once we use them, they’re gone.

Engineer Bob Olsen of Washington State University recently explained to me his view that we have quite a wonderful system of “renewable solar” energy in place, especially in the Western parts of the U.S. and around the region of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

“That’s the case not because of solar electric panels, but because of the world’s largest solar collector - seawater,” Olsen said.

Because we live on land, we don’t often think too clearly about the seas. But the oceans cover about two thirds of the planet. They absorb a lot of heat energy when light shines on them. Each day they soak up enormous quantities of energy from the sun, warming and evaporating as they do so. It’s evaporation from the seas that fills the sky with clouds. Water in the clouds comes down as rain or snow.

Olsen sees precipitation as the linchpin of renewable solar energy. That’s because the rains flow into major rivers across which we’ve built hydroelectric dams. By running the water behind the dam through turbines, we generate electricity. Electric utilities take that energy and move it from the dams to our kitchens and workplaces.

The dams have several good features. One is that they have the ability to cheaply store a great deal of energy. The vast reservoirs behind each dam are natural storage devices. Solar electric panels on a roof don’t have this feature unless linked to expensive batteries that degrade over time. Simply put, dams can easily produce electricity when the sun isn’t shining, a clear advantage in having them power the grid.

If we ever get a large slice of our electricity from windmills and solar panels, I think there will still be room for the dams. They - like fossil fuel and nuclear plants - are able to produce juice on a still night when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. Because we want large amounts of electricity at our fingertips 24-7, windmills and solar panels cannot be our sole source of electricity.

Another positive attribute of the dams is that they make a lot of electricity without producing any greenhouse gases. And once the basic investment of constructing the dams is finished, they are economical to run because their “fuel” is freely supplied by Mother Nature. That’s essentially why those of us who live in regions of the country with dams have relatively cheap electric rates.

From where I sit, the hydroelectric dams are gifts that keep on giving - every time we switch on the lights.

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. Follow her on the web at rockdoc.wsu.edu and on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

Dear EarthTalk: How is it that global warming could negatively impact water supplies in the U.S.? ~Penny

Climate change promises to have a very big impact on water supplies in the United States as well as around the world. A recent study commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a leading environmental group, and carried out by the consulting firm Tetra Tech found that one out of three counties across the contiguous U.S. should brace for water shortages by mid-century as a result of human induced climate change. The group found that 400 of these 1,100 or so counties will face “extremely high risks of water shortages.”

According to Tetra Tech’s analysis, parts of Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas will be hardest hit by warming-related water shortages. The agriculturally focused Great Plains and arid Southwest are at highest risk of increasing water demand outstripping fast dwindling supplies.

While the mechanisms behind this predicted dwindling of water supplies is complex, key factors include: rising sea levels and encroaching ocean water absorbing lower elevation freshwater sources; rising surface temperatures causing faster evaporation of existing reservoirs; and increasing wildfires stripping terrestrial landscapes of their ability to retain water in soils.

Researchers have already begun to notice dwindling water supplies across the American West in recent years, given less accumulation of snow in the region’s mountains as temperatures rise. According to a 2008 study out of the Scripps Institute for Oceanography and published in the journal Science, Western snowpack has been melting earlier than it did in the past thanks to global warming, leading to markedly longer dry periods through the late spring and summer months in states already suffering from extended droughts. Given that the length and strength of these changes over the last 50 years cannot be explained by natural variations, researchers believe human induced climate change is the culprit.

The upshot of these changes is that Americans of every stripe need to curtail their water usage - from farmers irrigating their crops to homeowners watering their lawns to you and I taking shorter showers and turning off the tap while brushing our teeth. Even more important, water and resource policy managers need to conceive of new paradigms for the management of freshwater reserves to make the most of what we do have. And all of us need to work together to cut down on the emissions of greenhouse gases that have led to global warming in the first place.

Analysts also worry that warming-related water shortages could erupt into conflict, especially in parts of the world where one country or group controls water resources needed by others across national borders, such as the Middle East where already five percent of the world’s population relies on just one percent of the world’s fresh water. Parts of Africa, India and Asia are also at risk for water-related conflicts. American policymakers hope that the situation won’t get that dire in the U.S., but only time will tell.

Dear EarthTalk: Ever since the red dye #2 scare in the 1970s I’ve been wary of using food colorings or buying food that appears to contain them. Are there natural and healthy food colorings? ~Nancy

Many of us are still wary of food dyes because of reports about links between red dye #2 and cancer in the 1970s. While red dye #2 was subsequently banned from products sold in the United States, many health-conscious consumers continue to avoid foods with other artificial colors or dyes - even though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still considers them safe for human consumption.

But a 2010 analysis of past research on links between food dyes and health by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) found compelling evidence that ingestion of artificial dyes can contribute to hyperactivity, restlessness and attention problems in some children - particularly those with ADHD. “What’s more, the studies suggested that removing dyes from those children’s diet was a quarter to half as effective in reducing those symptoms as giving the kids Ritalin or other stimulants,” reports Nancy Cordes, CBS News’ Consumer Safety Correspondent. “In other words, certain kids with ADHD might not need drugs if the artificial dyes were removed from their diets.” Several commonly used artificial food dyes are suspected carcinogens as well.

While it might be impossible to prevent your children from eating anything with artificial dye, you can do your part by shopping at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s - both chains have banned products that use artificial dyes and carry all-natural food coloring for home cooking and baking projects.

One brand to look for is India Tree, which makes a line of food coloring derived from vegetable colorants. The company’s “Nature’s Colors Natural Decorating Colors” contain no corn syrup or synthetic dyes, and are highly recommended for coloring icing in rich jewel tones or soft pastels.

Another company specializing in natural (as well as organic) food colors is Nature’s Flavors, whose products are widely used commercially in ice cream, baked goods, frosting, dairy products, syrups, sauces, beverages and even hair colors. The company recently began to sell their products to consumers, as well, through retail stores. They use a variety of plant materials, including beets, turmeric root, annatto seeds, purple carrot, purple cabbage, gardenia flowers, hibiscus flowers and grape skin. “Our natural food colors are made from plants and contain powerful antioxidants, which help the body repair itself from the effects of oxidation,” claims Nature’s Flavors. “Using natural or organic food colors may actually help the brain and slow down the effects of aging.”

Another leading maker of all-natural food coloring is Chefmaster, whose products can be found at Whole Foods and other natural and high end food retailers, as well as on amazon.com and elsewhere online.

CPSI would like the FDA to ban eight of the most common artificial dyes, or at least affix a warning label to products that contain them: “Warning: The artificial coloring in this food causes hyperactivity and behavioral problems in some children.” In the meantime, concerned eaters should stick with products, stores and restaurants that use natural ingredients.

EarthTalk® is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E - The Environmental Magazine (www.emagazine.com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com.