Long-continued steady cold winter

March 12. 

The last four cold days have closed the river again against Merrick’s, and probably the few other small places which may have opened in the town, at the mouth of one or two brooks. I hear, from two sources, of portions of brooks, etc., being frozen over within two days, which had not frozen before this winter.

We had a colder day in the winter of ’54 and ’55 than in the last, yet the ice did not get to be so thick. It is long-continued, steady cold which produces thick ice. If the present cold should continue uninterrupted a thousand years would not the pond become solid? 

Rufus Hosmer says he has known the ground here to be frozen four feet deep. 

March 12, 2022

I never saw such solid mountains of snow in the roads. You travel along for many rods over excellent dry solid sleighing, where the road is perfectly level, not thinking but you are within a foot of the ground, then suddenly descend four or five feet and find, to your surprise, that you had been traversing the broad back of a drift. 

The crow has been a common bird in our street and about our house the past winter. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 12, 1856

The crow has been a common bird in our street. See January 7, 1856 ("The cold weather has brought the crows, and for the first time this winter I hear them cawing amid the houses"); February 1, 1856 ("The crows have been remarkably bold, coming to eat the scraps cast out behind the houses. They alight in our yard."); March 10, 1856 ("The pinched crows are feeding in the road to-day in front of the house and alighting on the elms, and blue jays also, as in the middle of the hardest winter, for such is this weather") See also January 23, 1852 ("The snow is so deep and the cold so intense that the crows are compelled to be very bold in seeking their food, and come very near the houses in the village. ");April 9, 1855 ("I see thus often crows very early in the morning near the houses, which soon after sun rise take their way across the river to the woods again. It is a regular thing with them.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the American Crow