From Mother Goose to Ogden Nash, March winds have been the poet’s muse. In the familiar nursery rhyme, they bring April showers and May flowers. In 1888, however, March winds brought in the biggest blizzard to hit the Northeast in recorded history. Beginning on March 12, the storm lasted three days and crippled the region with 30 to 50 inches of snow and winds up to 70 miles an hour. Drifts from 12 to 15 feet high buried Norfolk, and it took well over a week for the roads and the rails to be opened back up. Intrepid photographer Marie Kendall set out to document the aftermath of the storm and climbed the church steeple to take this photograph of the south end of the Village Green. Recognizable today are Crissey Place at the left, with its picturesque French roofline, and the houses along Mountain and Litchfield Roads, built for the Robbins School. In the foreground, John Bassett’s house was torn down a year after this photograph was taken to make room for the construction of Battell Chapel. Just beyond sits Battell House, then the home of the Misses Eldridge. And how did the poet Ogden Nash describe March? In 1949 when the federal income tax was due on March 15, he quipped: “Indoors or out, no one relaxes/ In March, that month of wind and taxes./ The wind will presently disappear./ The taxes last us all the year.”

—Ann Havemeyer