Our Hometown
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Harvesting the ice We slip and slide on it We cool our drinks with it We cool our food with it
Hastings Smith of Marion, New York formed a large pond with an ice house adjacent, providing ice used by Hessler Egg Company to cool eggs, also distributing ice to residents. The Smith ice pond and one of Hasting Smith's 7 daughters Cassie, changed ownership to William Howell, one by title and the other by marriage The residential ice box became a fixture in most homes until Frigidaire's electric ice box put an end to the ice age... another nostalgic era fades away. Bill Howell expanded the ice house to about 95 by 30 feet and 30 feet high, enlarging the pond to about one acre and at one time making a second pond One of the ice making procedures was to keep the ice surface free of insulating snow, making black ice which was considered most desireable. A 2-inch thickness of black ice will support a man, (or woman) or a half dozen dogs. Bill Howell hired as many as thirty men at a time to take advantage of prime conditions for harvesting and storing the tons of ice needed to supply residents of Marion as well as railroad cars transporting produce to far-off markets. Bill hauled ice by truck from his ice house to a railroad siding alongside The Marion Cold Storage just off Buffalo Street where the railroad cars were placed to facilitate loading produce as well as ice. Bill devised an elevator mounted on a Model T Ford chassis. It was an ungainly, top-heavy monster which carried the cakes of ice to the ice hatches at either end of the car, which in total held several hundred pounds of ice. Ice harvesting was a labor intense procedure requiring careful planning. Snow accumulation was removed with a horse drawn six-foot wide scraper. The ice needed a minimum thickness of one foot to support horses also used in scoring the ice field into a checkerboard of deep grooves. (Photo #1 shows the horses being used to mark the ice for cutting, on Smith's Pond.) After marking the ice cake sizes by scoring the ice surface to a depth of about eight inches the individual ice cakes would be separated either by use of a six-foot long coarse-toothed hand operated ice saw or, in later years, a heavy gas powered saw. The ice cakes were sized to about two by three feet, the depth determined by the thickness of the frozen pond, usually about fourteen inches. A channel was cut in the ice leading to the base of an endless chain link conveyor which elevated the cakes to the proper level of the ice house where workers would propel the cakes with pike poles and ice tongs along steel topped skids into the storage chamber where the cakes were upended onto their sides allowing for easier removal. (In Photo #2, you can see the men poking the ice up the run, into the ice house.) (Photo # 3 shows men floating ice blocks toward the run.) Sawdust or hay acted as insulation about the inside of the ice house chambers. Debris imbedded in the ice was to be avoided, for as the ice melted in the home ice box, debris clogged up the drain from the ice chamber which then would overflow onto the kitchen floor which in turn, irritated the house wife, straining her relations with the ice man. The delivery of ice to individual homes was an event which was anticipated by youngsters, who crowded about the ice wagon for shards of ice handed out by the friendly ice man. A good rapport usually existed between the house wife and the ice man, who carried news items from house to house on his route. Stories abound of these friendships. Ice customers displayed a sign in the front window as to the amount of ice needed, though the ice man usually knew their requirements. Delivery in early times utilized horse drawn ice wagons. The horse would follow the route, stopping at each home, much as the milk wagon horse did. Fred Lookup was one of Bill's ice men. Ted Adriaansen and Mike Johnson also worked for Uncle Bill Howell. Every community supported a source of ice man-made mill ponds, lakes, streams. Miller's Mills is one community still recalling age-old ice harvesting. Millers Mill's Grange sponsors a festival of ice harvesting as it was in olden times. Hundreds of spectators gather to watch ice harvesting usually in the month of February. Then in August, they sponsor an ice cream social using ice harvested that year. Carolyn Adriaansen, Town of Marion Historian, to whom I am indebted for much of the historical archival information referred to in this article is presenting a program about the ice industry. The ice program will be at the Marion Museum above Marion Town Offices Main Street, Marion. Copyright
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2005 |
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