Teams of horses would roll it over snowy roads to make the roads possible for horses and sleighs to travel on.
Tough job for the horses!
How were the roads cleared before snowplows? Before the 1800’s there really was not any effort to get the snow off the roads. To get from one place to another people just put on their snowshoes and made the trek on foot. Then in the 1880’s teams of shovelers did the work, working together. They would actually throw snow onto covered bridges so sleigh travel would not be interrupted. Later teams of horses or oxen pulled giant rollers filled with rocks over the roads to flatten the snow for horse drawn sleighs.
In 1862 the first snowplow was used in Wisconsin. It was attached to a cart and pulled by a team of horses through snow-clogged streets. It was not until 1920 that Norwegian brothers Hans and Even Overaasen and New Yorker Carl Frink came up with designs for car-mounted snowplows. The company Frink started still produces plows today.
Photo credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center, Omena Historical Society, and Mental Floss
