The Coldest Harvest

By Jerry Schleicher
Published on January 29, 2009
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In large commercial operations, crews of hundreds of men and dozens of teams of horses worked the ice field while more men stacked ice in the icehouse. When the local workforce was inadequate, outside workers were transported in to get the job done.
In large commercial operations, crews of hundreds of men and dozens of teams of horses worked the ice field while more men stacked ice in the icehouse. When the local workforce was inadequate, outside workers were transported in to get the job done.
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The icehouse at Amish Acres Historic Farm, Nappanee, Ind. Situated on the edge of a small pond at the farm, the building features 12-inch-thick walls filled with sawdust, creating a tightly insulated space for ice storage.
The icehouse at Amish Acres Historic Farm, Nappanee, Ind. Situated on the edge of a small pond at the farm, the building features 12-inch-thick walls filled with sawdust, creating a tightly insulated space for ice storage.
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Wharf with endless chain and apparatus for transferring ice from schooner to the icehouse.
Wharf with endless chain and apparatus for transferring ice from schooner to the icehouse.
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This painting of an ice harvest, displayed in the icehouse at Nappanee, depicts what was surely a cold, hard job.
This painting of an ice harvest, displayed in the icehouse at Nappanee, depicts what was surely a cold, hard job.
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A Little Giant ice breaker displayed at Amish Acres.
A Little Giant ice breaker displayed at Amish Acres.
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Used in the ice harvest, ice tongs like these were an indispensable part of every ice deliveryman’s equipment.
Used in the ice harvest, ice tongs like these were an indispensable part of every ice deliveryman’s equipment.
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A variety of one-handed crosscut saws, some measuring 5 to 6 feet or longer, was used to open channels and finish cutting the ice into harvestable blocks.
A variety of one-handed crosscut saws, some measuring 5 to 6 feet or longer, was used to open channels and finish cutting the ice into harvestable blocks.
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The horse-drawn ice plow used sharp, saw-like edges that ripped a deep groove in the ice. It was designed to cut about two-thirds the depth of the natural ice so blocks could be sawed or broken off with hand tools.
The horse-drawn ice plow used sharp, saw-like edges that ripped a deep groove in the ice. It was designed to cut about two-thirds the depth of the natural ice so blocks could be sawed or broken off with hand tools.
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The Ice King ice plow, manufactured by Gifford-Wood Ice Mfg. Co., Hudson, N.Y., came in this wooden storage case.
The Ice King ice plow, manufactured by Gifford-Wood Ice Mfg. Co., Hudson, N.Y., came in this wooden storage case.
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The National Agricultural Center and Hall of Fame in Bonner Springs, Kan., exhibits several ice harvesting implements donated by descendants of George W. Lentz, New Point, Mo. They include this horse-drawn ice marker with 11 cutting teeth, each tooth a little longer than the one in front of it, used to cut the ice to a depth of about 3 inches.
The National Agricultural Center and Hall of Fame in Bonner Springs, Kan., exhibits several ice harvesting implements donated by descendants of George W. Lentz, New Point, Mo. They include this horse-drawn ice marker with 11 cutting teeth, each tooth a little longer than the one in front of it, used to cut the ice to a depth of about 3 inches.

Ice: Today it’s as close as the automatic ice maker in your kitchen. But throughout the 19th century, long before the advent of electric refrigeration, ice was a commodity to be harvested just like corn or cotton.

Frederic Tudor, the son of a Boston lawyer, is credited with being the first entrepreneur to build a business empire out of ice. In the early 1800s, Tudor hit on the idea of harvesting ice from Massachusetts ponds and shipping it to ports in New York, Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans.

The ice trade flourished, and Tudor and his competitors were soon selling thousands of tons of ice to restaurants, hotels and homeowners up and down the East Coast. By the 1830s, Tudor was shipping ice to the Caribbean, England and as far away as Calcutta, India (it took four months for a sailing ship loaded with 180 tons of ice to travel from Boston to Calcutta – but it still reached its destination with 100 tons of ice). By the time the Civil War ended in 1865, icehouses in the Hudson River Valley were harvesting about 3 million tons of ice each winter.

The railroads proved a boon to the ice industry. In 1848-49, the New York & Harlem Railroad was extended from New York City to an area known as the Ice Pond. There, as many as 200 men were employed each winter to harvest and load ice aboard rail cars for the 70-mile trip to New York City. The industry not only provided welcome work for local farmers, but gave them an opportunity to hire out their teams of workhorses as well.

With the introduction of the icebox in the mid-1800s, town folk could buy ice from vendors who began selling ice door-to-door from horse-drawn wagons. But in the years before ice vendors reached rural America, farm families had just two ways to keep food cold during warm weather. If there was a spring on their property, they could build a spring house to store perishable foods such as butter and milk. Or they could build an icehouse to store blocks of ice they harvested each winter from a nearby pond or river.

Farmers often harvested and stored ice for their own use in icehouses built of stone or lumber. The walls were frequently insulated with several inches of sawdust, and sawdust or straw was packed around the ice as it was unloaded. Several icehouses still stand today, including a limestone icehouse and dairy on the historic Jacob Bushong home in the Shenandoah Valley, one at a 125-year-old Amish homestead in Nappanee, Ind., and an historic octagonal wood icehouse on the Croft Farm near Cherry Hill, N.J.

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