The Coldest Winter In West Virginia Might Have Been 1917

Every winter brings with it some cold snaps. It’s just the way of life here in the mountains and river valleys of wild, wonderful West Virginia. But thankfully, not every winter brings the kind of cold that folks here in West Virginia experienced during the epically cold winter of 1917 to 1918, perhaps the coldest winter the state has ever known — a cold so fierce that, according to historic accounts, the full length of the Ohio River froze solid.

Please note: photos from that 1917 winter in West Virginia are hard to come by. The ones shown here are from more recent winters in the Mountain State.

It was so cold in West Virginia in 1917 that both the months of October and December were the coldest on record.

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It was so cold in West Virginia in 1917 that by the end of October, most weather stations across West Virginia were already reporting totals of 15 inches of snow.

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It was so cold in West Virginia in 1917 that the temperature dropped to 37 degrees below zero in Lewisburg on December 30, setting an all-time record for the state’s coldest recorded temperature that still stands to this day, more than 100 years later.

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It was so cold in West Virginia in 1917 that on the other side of the state from Lewisburg, the Ohio River froze solid its entire length, and folks were able to ice skate across it for several months.

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A few other winters have come close to those record lows: on January 21, 1985, it plunged to 36 degrees below zero in Snowshoe. On January 22, 2022, it hit negative 31 degrees in Canaan Valley.

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According to the Enquirer, the Ohio River at Cincinnati froze 14 times between 1874 and 2014. Although Cincinnati is significantly down river from Point Pleasant, it’s about the same latitude.

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Still, cold as those temperatures are, none quite compares to the winter of 1917. What a frigidly frozen few months that winter season over a century ago must have been!

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Do you think you could have weathered that well-below-zero temperature drop in Lewisburg in 1917? Would you have been out there ice skating on the Ohio River when it froze solid? Apparently, it happened again much more recently as well, in 1977. Brrrr!