It’s that time of the year again! Time to begin the harvest of the first crop of the year – ice. But blessedly, it’s not 1910 and thanks to the marvels of modern refrigeration, the ice man cometh no more. But what did our forbears go through in trying to keep their food cool year round? Let’s take a look.

A brief history of the ice industry

Harvesting ice became big business during the 19th century. Early on, though – in the 1700s – ice was consumed mostly by the upper classes, except in the colder northern climates where everyone could fill their ice houses and keep food cool year-round. By the year 1880, 381,000 tons of ice were sold and consumed in Boston alone, 5 million tons consumed in the United States as whole.

It should be noted here that ice was important for other reasons as well. It was used to chill dead bodies; it was also used as ballast in ships. It became common for every homeowner to have an ice box in the kitchen, the precursor to the “domestic electric refrigerator,” and the ice block was placed at the top of the box and air circulated around it.

An ice wagon came around and delivered to the homes each week in the more urban areas. The homeowner – usually the housewife – would put a card in the window telling the ice man the weight of the block that was needed. For the family trade, in 1912, a 100-pound piece of ice was 25 cents. Fifty pounds was 15 cents, and a 25-pound block was 10 cents. Youngsters often followed the ice man around on summer days waiting for the deliveryman to give them small chunks of ice to suck on.

The undisputed “king of ice” was one Frederick Tudor, a Boston merchant. He heralded in the ice business by harvesting ice from a pond in Lynn, Mass., and shipping it to the West Indies. In 1806 he shipped 130 tons of ice on his brig “Favorite” to Martinique. By 1815, he was contracting with Cuba, and in short order he was delivering ice to Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. Tudor was a Boston Brahmin; he made good in part due to his deep networks of family and class privilege, and some would say on the backs of low-wage workers.

By 1847, Tudor’s ice-packed vessels left Boston for the American South, and as far afield as Rio de Janeiro and Hong Kong. By the time Tudor died in 1864, he was worth $200 million in today’s dollars.

The local situation

In northern states like New Hampshire, weeks if not months were set aside for harvesting the ice. Often, it was a community undertaking, with a social aspect not unlike barn-raising. Farms, inns and lakeside dwellers put up ice houses, and before the ponds froze each year, say after Thanksgiving, they removed the pungent, rotting sawdust and replaced it with a new 5-inch layer to await cutting season.

The traditional New England ice house had double walls, with 12 inches of sawdust packed in between. It took two days of hard work to fill an average farm ice house. The process of getting blocks of ice out of the lake was much more complex than than one might imagine. There were dozens of tools required; the ice had to be cleared, scored, scraped, planed and ultimately moved.

It was also a dangerous undertaking. The ice had to be at least eight thick, but the ideal (and the norm) was around 16 inches. The weather had to be dry and windy to harvest, so the ice cakes wouldn’t melt and stick together. After each snowfall, the area designated for cutting had to be plowed off or shoveled, so the snow didn’t become part of the ice and reduce the quality.

Large work horses were used to cut grooves into the ice and score it. Cuts were made parallel like on a grid and between three and six inches. The ice was then cut with a saw. Cutting the ice square was vital for proper storage. The cutters sawed along the lines, but they did not need to cut each individual block. They cut out large “rafts” and then, using an ice pick, floated the rafts down a channel to the loading point. Then, a heavy chisel called a “breaking off bar” was jammed into the pre-cut grooves, breaking them apart.

Once the “cakes” were broken apart, they floated freely in the water like a herd of flat, rectangular icebergs, each more than a foot thick and weighing as much as 300 pounds. Both men and horses wore cleats on their shoes for gripping. Horses wore special harnesses so that they could be pulled out of the water in case of a breakthrough.

Cheshire County is blessed with lots of lakes and ponds, and many of them harvested ice. In Nelson, for example, Center Pond, Lake Nubanusit and Tolman Pond all were the scene of ice cutting in the dead of winter. In addition to the property owners’ ice houses, freelance ice cutters – who worked for $2 a day – also kept ice houses on each of these ponds.

In Rindge, Pool Pond was harvested and the ice loaded onto railroad cars at West Rindge to be transported to Massachusetts on the Boston and Maine Railroad. In Fitzwilliam, there was harvesting at the north end of Laurel Lake at Sandy Beach. There was also a big commercial house on the east side of the lake, and the largest icing concern was where the Fleur de Lis’s dock is now.

The Fall River Ice company used the back side of Sip Pond as well; the Boston and Maine Railroad had a spur line there so they could haul ice to Boston. In Chesterfield, Lake Spofford was the main ice source for much of the town. The Pine Grove Springs Hotel on the lake had the tallest and largest ice house.

Doubtless there were many more ponds used for icing, and they also harvested the Connecticut River. In an issue of the March 1945 Monadnock News, out of Dublin, it is noted that “Art Worcester has finished cutting ice on the [Dublin] lake and reports that it was between 16 and 19 inches thick. He has been over at Thorndike [pond] and the ice there is 21 inches thick.” There were several ice businesses on what is now Dublin Lake, near the site of the old first meetinghouse.

These were side businesses, similar to the business of procuring your firewood; you would ring up someone who did that.

By the dawn of the last century, harvesting, storing and delivering ice to customers in Keene was a well-established, staple business. In 1871, Richardson and Pratt, at 52 Roxbury St., was offering to furnish ice washed and put into the refrigerator at reasonable prices. A 100-pound block of ice cost 35 cents. The reservoir pond at Robin Hood Park was the locus of a large ice harvesting operation. Also, Wilson Pond on Arch Street was the home of the Bent family’s ice business for many years.

In 1909, the Keene Ice Company was created; the city’s three ice dealers decided to form one corporation. The idea was to decrease duplication of delivery teams and routes and to cut losses due to uneven weight standards and price variations. By 1910, the new company took the cash away from the deliverymen and had customers purchase coupons ahead of time. Books of coupons were sold to consumers, who tore out the coupon upon the actual delivery of the ice.

The ink was barely dry on the new corporation when accusations of trust monopoly and price-fixing were hurled by irate letter-writers to the Keene Sentinel. Shortly thereafter, 19 ice-cutters went out on strike. It’s not clear what happened after that, but the city seems to have gone back to individuals delivering ice again.

Back in Boston, by 1847, Frederick Tudor was exporting 75,000 tons of ice from Boston. Most of it was cut on nearby Fresh Pond, but his operations began to spread further out from Boston, and soon, into New Hampshire’s lakes and ponds. Indeed, by the late 1840s, Thoreau’s own Walden Pond was soon to become a hub of activity once the ice froze. Writing in “Walden,” Thoreau said his peace was disturbed once 100 Irishmen “Came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice,” bringing with them “many carloads of ungainly-looking farming tools – sleds, plows, drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes.”

“Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay, and Calcutta, drink at my well,” Thoreau grumbled.

By 1858, the Tudor Company had expanded its operations to Milton, N.H. During the heyday of the ice industry, around the 1890s, the undisputed capital of ice-harvesting would have been in Milton, at Milton Three-Ponds. Once the Portsmouth, Great Falls & Conway railroad reached Milton in the 1850s, the stage was set.

Depending on the year, there were between five and 10 major ice companies, all from Boston, clearing Three-Ponds and shipping by the ton to Boston. While Milton was by far the largest, some of these Boston companies also pulled from ponds in Sanbornville, Brookline, Weirs Beach and Newton. The companies purchased or leased pond access rights, which meant shorefront properties on which to build their ice houses. They would fill these houses to the brim, for shipment later in the year. The railroad freight cars held 30 tons of ice per car.

Five companies dominated the industry in Milton: the Boston Ice Company, Downing Ice Company, Lynn Ice Company, Marblehead Ice Company and Metropolitan Ice Company. In 1894, for example, the Boston Ice Company harvested 450,000 tons in Milton alone. The ice houses they built – or “getting up a frame for a stack” – were insulated on the sides with sawdust a foot thick, and with salt-marsh hay piled on top. Some of them were tremendously large, and all of them were located along the railroad line on the western side of Three-Ponds.

The ice houses were prone to catastrophic fires. The Boston Ice Company lost 12 houses in a 1902 fire. Seven years later, that same company suffered another large fire, which was thought to be started from sparks thrown from the smokestack of a passing locomotive. The loss was 13 ice houses, a barn and four freight cars owned by the Boston & Maine Railroad. The loss was placed at $100,000.  Literally every ice company suffered a fire up until the 1940s, and some of these conflagrations threatened the town and the cottages around the lake.

Harvesting huge quantities of ice required quantities of workers, and this work was considered dangerous and extremely difficult. Often the men who showed up were drifters from river life or lumber country. Salaries included room and board, but they had to bring their own bedding, as they tended to rip up blankets for makeshift socks and undergarments. Working conditions were always wet and freezing; the men wore heavy boots made specially with heavy soles embedded with spikes.

In 1905, a Marblehead Ice Company gang reported temperatures in Milton to be 35 degrees below zero, with gale-force winds. Besides the risk of falling through thin ice, other industrial accidents occurred, as well. For example, the Feb. 12, 1892, issue of the Farmington News reads, “Wednesday afternoon, at the Union Ice house, the chains by which the ice is conveyed, broke, and Everett Brown commenced to repair the break, when the engine started, tearing out the calf of his right leg.”

In 1920 labor agencies in Boston were advertising for 150 men to harvest ice in New Hampshire. The pay was $5 to $8 a day, with fine boarding conditions and with railroad fares advanced. By all accounts, the ice harvesters were a roughneck crowd made up of a lot of itinerant workers.

The working conditions were no better for the horses employed in the ice harvest. They seem to have been bought for the ice season and then sold off immediately afterwards, as nobody wanted to feed horses for the other three seasons of the year. Many horses were also lost from falling through thin ice.

The ice industry was obviously dependent on the vicissitudes of weather. It had to be cold enough. Sometimes this didn’t occur until February. It had to be consistently cold enough for long enough for a sufficient depth of ice to form. Weather that was cold, then warmed up, and then cold again was problematic for ice. All kind of debris could blow onto the ice and contaminate it, and then get iced over. With smaller quantities harvested during poor-weather years, the price would go up, in accordance with the laws of supply and demand.

In 1914, the Board of Health in Massachusetts became concerned about the quality of ice people were consuming. With the population exploding, perhaps Tudor’s Fresh Pond wasn’t so fresh anymore. At any rate, all the ice-producing ponds were required to submit reports about their ice quality. New Hampshire appears to have been unburdened by any regulatory impetus at this distance.

Rapid decline

With the advent of the modern refrigerator in the late 1920s, the ice industry as a driving economic force made a hasty retreat. It took less than five years to ruin one of America’s staple industries and send the ice-cutter into oblivion. It’s hard to find an old ice house nowadays, too. Most of them fell down in the 1940s and 1950s. The few holdout ice men were removed from the directories by the early 1960s in New Hampshire.

There are a few towns around New England where they still harvest ice the old-fashioned way out of antiquarian impetus and as a community event. Rockywold-Deephaven Camp on Squam Lake does this annually, and the residents of South Bristol, Maine still do this on Presidents Day weekend.

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