WEST CHESTER, PA — February 13 is a date that still towers over Chester County’s weather history. On this day in 1899, a cooperative observing site near Coatesville reported 35.3 inches of snow in a single 24-hour period, the largest one-day snowfall ever documented in the county.
The benchmark comes from federal climate records maintained and curated through NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, which tracks one-, two-, and three-day snowfall extremes by county. The dataset’s Pennsylvania county records were last updated on August 20, 2025, incorporating data through June 30, 2025.
The Coatesville figure did not occur in isolation. It landed in the middle of the Great Blizzard of 1899, part of the broader “Great Arctic Outbreak of 1899,” a historic cold wave that drove extreme winter conditions across much of the eastern United States and deep into the South.
Accounts from the period and later analyses describe unusually widespread impacts: record-setting cold across the Gulf Coast, snow and ice reaching far beyond their normal limits, and major waterways affected by ice. In New Orleans, temperatures fell to levels that remain among the city’s most extreme on record, while ice conditions on the Mississippi were notable enough to be documented in historical summaries of the outbreak.
In Chester County, the 35.3-inch measurement remains the line to beat, even against modern storms that residents still talk about in shorthand. The January 1996 blizzard buried parts of southeastern Pennsylvania with totals often in the 20-inch range, with higher localized reports in and around the region.
In February 2010, the “Snowmageddon” era storms delivered another run of heavy snow across the Philadelphia region, with a National Weather Service event summary reporting 18 to 24 inches across Chester County from one of the major mid-February systems.
Yet neither of those widely remembered storms topped what fell near Coatesville on February 13, 1899. More than a century later, that single-day total still stands as Chester County’s biggest measured snowfall event on record.
For real-time forecasts, snowfall totals, historical records, and the latest winter weather alerts across Chester County, visit the MyChesCo Weather Center — your local source for weather that actually matters.
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