01/09/2025
Snow rollers in the USA were probably being phased out about 100 years ago, except in the more rural pockets. Their purpose was to pack down the snow on roads to make it easier for sleighs to travel, and even after the early cars and trucks came into use, many of them were stored for the winter in favor of horse drawn sleighs and pungs, which were basically work sleds.
When the road crews came to a covered bridge they had to hand shovel snow from outside onto the wooden roadway, a process that my father remembered being called “snowing the bridge.”
Obviously cars and sleighs couldn’t easily coexist, so at some point snow rollers went out of business, as did the sleighs. I have never seen a snow roller in full gear, just the roller part abandoned to rot away in a pasture in South Royalton, Vermont decades ago.
This photo is from "Vermont's Northland Journal."
