From “Snow Wardens” to  “tractor plows” the history of Snow Fighting has always been an evolving one.   Before the mid-1800’s snow fighters didn’t really even exist.  In fact, there wasn’t much effort to remove snow from the roads. In 1862,   “Snow Rollers”  started to show up.  They were basically enormous horse-drawn tubes driven by a “Snow Warden” who was hired that flattened the snow so that carts and people could “ski” across the packed snow.

Snow Rollers could be expensive and not very functional for commerce, so in New York, police officers took to the streets with shovels. Their goal was to clear the streets bare, so that wheeled vehicles could travel without snow runners. In the mid-19th century, cities began searching for a new solution.  Milwaukee came to rescue with the first horse-drawn snow plow. This plow gathered compacted snow and piled on the side of streets and sidewalks

It wasn’t until 1888 that people started taking snow removal seriously. After an epic blizzard that buried some places in up to  inches of snow, cities in the Northeast, purchased more plows, divided their streets into “plowable” segments, created routes, and started plowing proactively before too much snow built up.

In 1913 the first motorized “car” plow arrived on the scene.  Quickly, many cities built up motorized snow removal fleets, instead of horse-drawn carts. Tractors were soon equipped with plow blades — leading to the first version of what we would call our modern snow plows.