This approximately seven-minute-long mini-documentary by Bangor’s Cole Land Transportation Museum shows the sometimes overlooked history of snow removal in Maine.
Long before the industrial strength steel snowplows of today, Mainers used big wooden wheels, pulled along by horses, to pack down street snow to a manageably hard surface for passage.
But that approach led to problems in the spring, and motivated local inventors to come up with new equipment to clear the snow.
“Where they’d roll that snow down with the rollers and run over it all winter, it was so hard that there were places that had to use dynamite to break it up,” Gerald Cole, former vice president of truck freight carrier Cole’s Express, says in the 2010 video.
Visit the Cole Museum website to see their list of tour and historical videos.