“The biggest concern was hoping everyone stayed healthy,” she said. “No way could we have gotten to a doctor.”Like many others, her family kept fed thanks to a larder of garden produce and meat and a stable of chickens and cows. The value of a cleared road, beyond ending their isolation, was access to a doctor.

Townspeople weren't immune from that worry, either.

When 16-year-old Carole Anderson Seiborg became ill with acute appendicitis, impassable roads meant she couldn't get from Newman Grove to a hospital in Norfolk.

The Red Cross would retrieve her by airplane, if the town cleared a landing spot. When they couldn't open a strip of roadway, the town plowed a clearing in an alfalfa field.

Seiborg, now 81, remembers balking at being driven to the plane. The reason? Her “ambulance'' was the back of a hearse.

“It was really upsetting,” she said, adding that she had been without her family to console her. As a farm kid, she had been boarding in town when she fell ill.

Elsewhere, hundreds of rail passengers were trapped on isolated lines and found refuge in towns so small, they overwhelmed populations.