A Snowy Sleigh Ride Through The Past

Picture a snowful winter day. The streets are empty, as huge, glistening snowflakes fall from the sky. In the distance, a family can be seen taking in the winter scene as their horses pull them along in a sleigh. It is the perfect Christmas post-card scene, except that what is being described is not from a painting, but a real life event that took place on Main Street in Honesdale some 35 years ago, when Judge James Rutherford and his wife Dorothy decided to take a ride on their sleigh.

“He really enjoyed the sleigh”, explained Judge Rutherford’s son Albert “Ab” Rutherford. “ He also had buggies that he would use in the warm weather. He kept a stable of horses and he and his buddy, Ed Thomas, from Seelyville often went riding together. My father loved his horses. He had them until the day he died, in 1994. They were one of the loves of his life.”

Although only in the distant past, things were markedly different in Wayne County in those days. As Ab explained, “the roads in the winter were in prime condition for sleighing. The roads were not salted in those days, so the road conditions were great for it.” “The roads then were so different”, explained Ab’s wife, Sally.

Ab’s father served as judge of Wayne County Court in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
School was also different when Ab and Sally were growing up. They were members of the last class to graduate in the old high school downtown, in 1958. In the old school, there wasn’t a cafeteria. Students either brought in their own lunch or went home to eat, if they lived close enough. The only things sold at school was milk. There were no hot lunches.

School districts were also much smaller. Each small town seemed to have its own school. “For basketball back then, Wayne County used to have two divisions, North and South, because there were so many schools!”, exclaimed Ab.

With most students living within the immediate area of the school building, snow days were almost unheard of. “Kids weren’t bused to one central location”, explained Ab. “In fact, there wasn’t any public transportation, unless you lived more than two miles from the school. If you lived within two miles, you could walk, so there weren’t as many snow days. We would have to get a real blizzard, which did happen on February 14, 1958, when school closed for an entire week”, he recalled.

Even though they had less snow days, children still found some time to enjoying sledding on the streets in the town. “They used to block off either 14th or 15th Streets and let the kids sled”, he explained. “I don’t think that anyone would stand for that now, but back then, that’s the way it was. I never saw anyone get hurt either. We would have one kid who would stand at the bottom and kind of give a hand signal that would let you know it was OK, and kids would yell “look out below” to let everyone know they were coming and to get out of the way.”

Roads during those years were not salted the way they are now. “They used to plow with one truck”, Ab said, “and then another truck would follow with the cinders. A man in the cinder truck would be seen leaning out and throwing cinders with a shovel. There weren’t big salting trucks like we have now, so the cinders weren’t uniformly spread throughout the road. You’d have snow in come spots and cinders in others. “We used to put snow over the cinders to keep the road good for sledding”, explained Sally. “When they started using the salt was went the really great sledding ended.”