February 14, 1958 was a Friday night. Snow lovers got a special gift as the heaviest snowfall since 1948 blanketed Birmingham with over two inches of snow.

Unprepared celebrants headed out for a night on the town got a rude surprise.

Roads in the Magic City quickly became snow packed and impassable. Roads between Birmingham and Atlanta were especially dangerous.

The northwest corner of Alabama was blanketed with 3-6 inches of snow. Six to eight inches fell in Decatur.

As often is the case around these parts, snowfall amounts varied over a short distance. While there was two inches on the ground in Bessemer, there was none in Tuscaloosa.

At the Birmingham Municipal Airport, A Delta Airlines DC-7 slid off the runway on Saturday morning and buried itself nose deep in slush and mud when the nosewheel broke. None of the 43 passengers were injured.

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, this one is worth a million memories.

This is a little house that once sat on a hilltop in eastern Cullman County in one of the largest snowstorms in Alabama history: February 14, 1958.

There are some unofficial reports of 18-plus inches of snow from that one north of Cullman and Holly Pond, but my mom says this was the most snow she’d ever seen – including the Blizzard of ’93.

I went home and found this tonight because something in the weather pattern looks like ’58. In fact, one of the analogs to the expected weather pattern around mid-February produced THIS storm.

That doesn’t mean it’ll happen again, but if you didn’t get enough winter back in January – there’s more coming. Sooner than most of us would like!”