Winter in Earnest: Shoveling Snow in Hettinger, North Dakota, 1942
On February 16, 1942, John Vachon photographed snow being shoveled in front of the hotel in Hettinger, North Dakota, in Adams County.
On the northern plains, winter wasn’t a season you watched through the window. It was work — done with a shovel, in front of the town hotel, in the middle of a North Dakota February, whether you felt like it or not.
The hotel walk still had to be cleared, the town still had to function, and the snow kept its own schedule. This is what the coldest weeks of the year actually looked like at street level.
Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USF34-064595-D
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