Bradshaw
Today we get warnings on all sorts of media when the weather is going to turn nippy, but it wasn’t that simple a century ago. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, folks watched flag poles at post offices, along telegraph lines and at railroad depots to get their weather forecasts.
Weather observers began flying the familiar red and black hurricane flag in 1875, mostly along the Atlantic coast in places where they could be seen by ships at sea. They began flying flags for other weather events in 1878, but they did not reach south Louisiana until September 1884. That’s when the State Weather Service announced that, in cooperation with the United States Signal Service, it had “undertaken the transmission of cold wave signals ... particularly in the sugar districts.” It said the system would allow it to announce cold waves at least 24 hours before they reach Louisiana, “which will be of great benefits to the planters and farmers.”
A white flag with a black square in the middle meant the possibility of a frost; a plain white flag meant a frost was “positively expected.”
The flags were to be displayed at a long list of telegraph and railroad stations, including those at Melville, Goshen (now Palmetto), Bunkie, Cheneyville, Lecompte, Bayou Sale, Broussard, Carencro, Grand Coteau, Patterson, St. Martinville, and Washington. The signals were also to be displayed by Dr. A. S. Gates in Franklin, a Colonel Whitworth in Jeanerette, Dr. J. P. H. Wise in Morgan City, Lee’s Drug Store in New Iberia, Charles N. Esler in Opelousas, and by M. P. Young in Lafayette. Steamboats leaving New Orleans and trains “on the various railroads” were also asked to display the flags.
Bradshaw
The weather service urged “planters in the vicinity of each station to cooperate with us by associating themselves with a view to distributing rapidly the news.” The service promised to furnish “at about $2 each” large flags “which can be seen at great distances” to the planters and others who would fly them. Some surviving examples of the old flags measure six feet square.
By 1886, flags warning of cold weather and approaching storms were displayed at nearly three hundred places across the United States and the system was so popular that W. B. Hazen, the head of the Signal Service, asked for $5,000 ($175,000 today) in his 1886 budget to expand the network.
“There is no feature of the service which has proven more valuable, and the system should be extended to every town in the United States, and also to … agricultural districts when practicable,” he wrote in his annual report.
The system had been updated by the early 1890s to include flags for fair weather and rainstorms, as well as crop threatening frost.
The Weather Bureau began phasing out the flags in 1927. They would be used until they wore out but would not be replaced. Some of them lasted until the 1960s.
Of course, the flags were only as reliable as the forecast that they signaled, which by the 1880s, was based on a network that used the telegraph lines spreading across the nation to share and analyze observations. That was much more dependable than in earlier days, when forecasters had little to go on except their local observations, but it was still an imprecise science ─ as it still is to some extent.
Even with the computer models and whizzbang instruments used today, the statisticians tell us that a seven-day forecast can accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast about 90 percent of the time. However, a 10-day or longer forecast is only right about half the time.
I might note that statistical analysis has about the same degree of accuracy.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@ gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
