Northern Ohio is a big hub with the great lakes, 80/90 and 75 all intersecting. Do you realize the supply chain shit show that would happen if trucking in Northern Ohio shut down every time there was bad weather? Oh yeah, and those truckers can just not get paid I guess. Not to mention the people travelling that drove into the storm. Not a lot of places to stop off the highway in BFE Erie county, Ohio, and trust me, the roads off the highway there are way worse.

It may have shortened the duration but I think there were way too many other structural problems to have avoided the depression entirely. It's not clear farmers could have paid their mortgages even at lower rates due to rapid deflation in commodities caused by the tariffs and overproduction from industrialization.

Don't forget, the secretary of the Treasury at the beginning of the depression, Andrew Mellon, was a staunch believer in liquidationism. Effectively, liquidate everything and everyone to get the rot out of the system. They actually welcomed deflation and claimed it had solved the '20-21 depression.

New York banks were going to fail no matter what. Over leverage in the stock market and literally lending Germany money to pay reparations to GB and France so they could repay war debt to the same banks. The stock market was in a bubble due to industrialization and mispricing currencies post war and was bound to crash, taking all those over-leveraged banks with them.

The Fed added fuel to the fire by raising rates in a deflationary environment, but that environment already existed due to terrible government and near zero banking regulations.

That is a gross over-simplification of an extremely complicated situation. Government, yes; fed alone, no. The Fed certainly played a big role in allowing the recession to become a depression, but they were far from the sole cause. The toxic debt cycle Europe was stuck in repaying American banks for WWI, the Smoot-Hawley tariff Act, the gold standard, stupid repricing of currencies post war and mismanagement of banks all caused/led to the depression.

High interest rates killed farmers because the tariff Act killed commodity prices and there had been a land bubble previously. Farmers couldn't pay their loans to banks which caused over-leveraged banks to fail, taking all deposits with them. That example is just one of the many structural failures that occurred due to a multitude of poor decisions.