The Great Eastern Shore Deep Freeze in the Winter of 1976-77

Perhaps the deepest of all Eastern Shore deep freezes set in before Christmas, 1976, and it didn’t let up until well into February, 1977, two full bone-chilling months. Back then, only older folks on the Shore could remember anything like it—and those memories went clear back to 1918.

In order to top the Eastern Shore deep freeze of 1976/77, you pretty much have have to go back to the winter George Washington and his men spent at Valley Forge. On its website nowadays, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency’s history of Maryland weather rates 1977/78 the “coldest winter on the East Coast since maybe the founding of the Republic.”

By Christmas Day, 1976, the ice had already started inching out from creeks and rivers and into the Bay. As you can see from the photo up top here, the expanse that ice soon covered reached proportions that seem unfathomable to many of us living on the Eastern Shore today. Some of the scenes in old photos have an almost magical quality of winter wonderland, don’t they?

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