When was the first ever snowman made?

Answer 1

People have been building snowmen probably as long as there's been snow. A researcher and writer named Bob Eckstein found the earliest known illustration of a snowman (so, the earliest discovered thus far anyway) in the margins of a Medieval devotional book called The Book of Hours, dating from about 1380.

There's a story floating around the 'net that the first snowman was made by Vernon N. Paul and his nine-year-old daughter, little Yetty Paul, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in 1809 ("a well-documented fact," said one writer!), but that's pure urban legend. The first thing that clued me in was the date, 1809. As far as I know, there were no white people whatsoever in our neck of the woods at that time. There were some Europeans in the area just earlier, including a French fur trader, Jean Baptiste Perrault, in 1789 near the Red Cedar River (nearer Menomonie, Wis., but still roughly in the area...); and many people coming just after: the first among them, a sawmill operator named Hardin Perkins, also on the Red Cedar River, in 1822. But not a single European, family man or not, was living permanently in the whole Chippewa Valley region of Wisconsin (the region that includes Eau Claire) in 1809.

Answer 2

• snow
• ice
• others

Answer 3

The first recorded snowman was made during the Middle Ages, in medieval times. The earliest documented mention of a snowman dates back to 1494 in a book of medieval rituals.