Monday, Dec. 31, 1917
A 72 year old Troy woman is found frozen to death in her home as the city suffers through the third consecutive day of below-zero temperatures. Mary J. Shaver’s body is discovered by her brother in the basement of her residence at 727 River Street this afternoon. Temperatures in Troy have fallen as low as 26 below zero since last Friday. Elsewhere in Rensselaer County, The Record reports, “the majority of mercury thermometers could not register the intensity of the cold.” “If this weather keeps up people of this city will get so accustomed to arctics and mittens that they will sleep in them and they will refuse to believe in a Fourth of July,” one reporter writes. Train and streetcar traffic have been “completely disrupted” by the cold snap. “Locomotives standing on the tracks have been stalled by freezing pipes, several hours’ time being lost in thawing them out,” our reporter notes, while “Trolley cars resembled refrigerators. “Persons riding to and fro either huddled together to keep warm or had to bundle extraordinarily warm, the suffering in many cases being worse than if the passengers were in the open air.” People may not have to shovel snow, but many have to shovel coal into their furnaces repeatedly to maintain a bearable degree of warmth.
“Their backs are strained shoveling coal into the furnaces and then again shoveling out ashes and still it is cold in plenty of homes where generally it is not difficult to maintain normal conditions,” our writer laments.
“When will this terrible weather stop? That is the question that men and women are asking themselves and one another. It is the succession of these frigid swoops that causes the nervous apprehension.”
“Folks generally will not feel at all sorry to say goodby to the old year at midnight to-night,” another writer observes, “because the last month of the twelve has had a kick in it that has frozen the imagination and the inspiration of those who like to ordinarily observe the departure of the old year in the time-honored fashion and also welcome the new one.
“Of course it will be welcomed on a chance anyway that the new year cannot be any worse as far as the weather is concerned.
“In many a household there will be the salutation as the old year goes out to the ringing of bells and the blowing of siren whistles and for a few minutes anyway everybody will try to forget the weather” and the world war in which hundreds of Trojans and millions of Americans are preparing to fight.