The Blizzard of ’88 began without warning. March 10 had been warm and sunny. On Sunday, March 11 rain fell in New York City, but around midnight it changed to heavy snow that fell for the next 36 hours. Many early commuters were caught, unaware that they were heading into the teeth of a storm that would last two more days. The whole Northeast suffered a similar fate, receiving snowfall amounts ranging from twenty-one to fifty inches. In New York City, fifty mile-per-hour winds swirled and drifted the twenty-one inches of snow, and in Northampton, Massachusetts, the snow on Main Street lay eight feet deep. In her diary for Tuesday, March 13 (page 25), Elsie Putnam of South Deerfield, Massachusetts, wrote, “people crawl over drifts on their hands and knees” and “no trains passed to-day.” Across the Northeast, trains became trapped by the increasingly heavy snow, and passengers were trapped in the cars. With the railroad shut down, many towns soon ran out of coal, their main heating fuel. The snow knocked down power and telegraph poles by the score. So many power poles were knocked down that after the storm many East Coast cities made a concerted effort to bury their lines. Overall, 400 people died during the three days of the storm, 200 in New York City alone, and at sea, nearly 200 vessels were forced aground, sunk, or abandoned.