A six-foot-long steel saw, its blades as large as sharks’ teeth, slides into frozen water. Iron tongs gape two feet wide before they seize an ice cake that glistens like a giant fish. While these tools once fueled a massive New England industry, they will be back in action this month for a much different purpose.
Mark your calendars for this year’s ice harvesting demonstration at WinterFest in Easthampton. The 13th annual family-friendly festival to raise money for the maintenance of Nashawannuck Pond will culminate on Feb. 14. when Westfield resident Dennis Picard will take the ice at noon.
A longtime historian and seasoned ice harvester, Picard will lay out his implements and, weather permitting, slice into the ice and give onlookers a turn with the saw. With a captivated audience, he’ll delve into the history of ice harvesting, an industry that once provided tens of thousands of jobs to people in the Valley when “cold” was a commodity.
The director of Storrowton Village Museum in West Springfield for 27 years, Picard said that ice harvesting comes down to the details.
“You don’t put the saw in and take two strokes and walk away,” he said. “The ice trade is all the minutiae that goes along with it.”
A cool business
In the Valley in the early 19th century, “There was not a body of water that was not harvested for ice,” Picard said. But the industry actually started in Boston, where a prominent family, the Tudors, developed up a cool idea for a business.
According to “Frederic Tudor Ice King,” a biography written for the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1933, the Tudor family was celebrating at a family wedding in 1805 when William Tudor joked that the ice on one of their ponds “might be harvested and sold in the Caribbean.” His brother Frederic, who insisted that the very serious idea was his, immediately bought a journal that he called his “ice house diary,” where he’d record his business experience for the next 16 years.
The brothers had recently traveled to Cuba in search of a cure for their oldest sibling, who had fallen ill and passed away upon their return. Picard said that Frederic Tudor’s experience in warmer climes is what inspired the idea to “sell cold,” or to profit off of the luxury of ice. Following an outbreak of yellow fever, said the historian, doctors using ice to lower people’s fevers helped the idea’s potential to crystallize around the world. By the late 1830s, Frederic Tudor was one of the country’s first millionaires.
How it worked
In western Massachusetts, after the local mills on the Mill River had shut down by 1902, Edward S. Puffer slid right in to the ice harvesting industry. “One source said his motivation was to provide employment to replace what the river could no longer provide,” said Margaret Orelup, the consulting historian for the Mill River History Project, which is sponsored by the District One Neighborhood Association in Amherst.
In 1910, Puffer created the E.S. Puffer Coal, Ice, & Wood Company at Puffer’s Pond, a 12-acre body of water then owned by two different people. Puffer arranged to give free ice to both men for the right to cut cakes from the pond. During harvesting, up to 50 men worked for six weeks on what is today’s beach.
The process began by drilling a hole in the ice with an auger and inserting a measuring rod. “Ice two inches thick will support a man, four will support a horse, and five will hold up a wagon,” Orelup wrote in an essay for the Mill River History Project. “When the pond was frozen deep enough, the first step was to mark out a grid by plowing grooves into the ice,” so the cakes would be cut uniformly.
The standard dimensions of the blocks at Puffer’s were 22-by-22-by-12 inches.
Henry David Thoreau, who famously lived on Walden Pond in Concord for more than two years, wrote in “Walden” about witnessing 16 days of ice harvesting in 1846, likening it to watching men farm the land. One hundred men swooped “down on to our pond one morning, with many carloads of ungainly-looking farming tools — sleds, plows, drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes.” They “hauled up the virgin mould itself,” or a singular ice cake, “with a particular jerk” and dragged multiple cakes on sleds to the shore, where they were loaded “on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, onto a stack … and there placed evenly side by side and row by row.”
A good day yielded 1,000 tons of ice from one acre of land.
In “Riverside, Life Along the Connecticut in Gill, Massachusetts,” Jennie Williams Bardwell also noted the likeness between farming the earth and the ice, writing that the Connecticut River “yielded an annual crop of ice for domestic and commercial use,” and that “close to 8,000 tons of 14-inch cubes were harvested by Greenfield Ice and Trucking Co.” in 1811.
Block party
Terry Shotland, a former board member of the Longmeadow Historical Society, reported that the Leveille family owned an ice business in town in 1900, where the ice was harvested from the pond now located within the Longmeadow Country Club. And in Easthampton, there were two or three ice houses on Nashawannuck Pond, said Beth Tiffany, treasurer of the Friends of Nashawannuck Pond, which hosts WinterFest.
“There was a conveyer that would go to the land and a barn that they would store the ice in, where it would be layered with sawdust to keep it cool,” she said. “Then people would buy blocks of ice.”
The ice was transported by railroad, but the business dwindled by the 1950s due to the advent of refrigeration and the increasing pollution in fresh waterways.
Of course, this is all just the tip of the iceberg. Learn more at WinterFest — and even harvest your own block of ice — which Picard said some people choose to take home with them. He’s there for the demo, he said, but he’s not responsible for transport.
Learn more about WinterFest at nashawannuckpond.org/winterfest.
Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.