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roger.pape
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Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 414
Location: Liverpool, NY

PostPosted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 6:13 pm    Post subject: Weather Reply with quote

(Originally posted January 21, 2009)

Everyone likes to talk about the weather. With all of the snow piling up here in upstate NY, I started reminiscing about the weather in Concordia. We never had as much snow in Concordia, but I seem to remember some pretty deep snow when I was a youngster. Of course, what is up to the knees of an adult is waist-high for a child. None the less, we always had enough snow for sledding. A favorite spot was in the our pasture close to the creamery. We would sled down into the low spot left there from digging out clay for the old brick factory. The goal was to see how close we could come to Ben Kueck's carpentry shop.

Speaking of weather, I got to thinking about the official Weather Bureau rain gauge that stood on St. Paul's College campus for many years. There's a good shot of it in the 'Cooks and Maintenance Staff' segment of the StPaulsCollege movie clip. Prof. Schoede used to be the weather observer for Concordia. When we got our Boy Scout merit badge, he would show us how it was built to provide accurate measurements and how one had to melt down the snow to determine the water content. (That's what the Weather Bureau wanted, not the inches of snowfall.) In later years, no one wanted the job, so my dad salvaged the gauge and set it up in our back yard. My mother then became the official weather observer and had to call the Weather Bureau in Kansas City with the precipitation amounts. When we closed out the house on Bismark St., my sister took the gauge with her so it's now in her garden in Michigan.


Last edited by roger.pape on Sun Jun 22, 2014 2:58 pm; edited 1 time in total
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roger.pape
Site Admin


Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 414
Location: Liverpool, NY

PostPosted: Fri Mar 27, 2009 8:44 pm    Post subject: Spring Floods Reply with quote

One of the things I remember from my youth is the frequent spring flooding of the Davis and Blackwater river bottoms. Significant flooding seemed to occur every few years. High water would block traffic at the bridge on old Highway 40 just west of Sweet Springs as long as several weeks. There is a lot of footage of one of those floods in the latter part of Dad's movies of the Concordia area. You can see Otto Brackman and him boating through the Sweet Springs bridge.

In addition the the traffic blockage, it had a significant impact on farming in the river bottoms. My uncle John Klingenberg's farm land was in the Davis bottom along Route 13 just south of Higginsville Junction. He would plant corn early only to see it flooded out almost every other year. After the land had dried out enough, he and Kenneth would then start over and replant the fields. Every year they would try again, hoping for the best.
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