Nature’s Wrath: A Train Buried in Snow + Johnstown’s Disaster

The winter of 1880-1881 brought relentless blizzards to the Midwest, burying trains and leaving communities without food or supplies—an ordeal later immortalized in The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Just eight years later, the Johnstown Flood of 1889 swept through Pennsylvania after the South Fork Dam collapsed, killing over 2,000 people. These rare photos capture both disasters in chilling detail.