Record-breaking blizzard buries Panhandle and South Plains

This Week in Texas History
by BARTEE HAILE

Looking down on snow-stricken northwestern Texas from a private plane on Feb. 4, 1956, a photographer for the Associated Press likened the “gigantic, white no-man’s land” to “a huge white sheet thrown over a world-sized bed (with) no sign of roads or people.”

According to an official report by the U.S. Weather Bureau, the freak storm came in two stages. Part One was a rather ordinary front that hardly covered the ground in the Texas Panhandle. The heaviest accumulations were in eastern New Mexico and El Paso, where children, who had never seen snow, frolicked in five inches of the cold wet stuff.