If all goes according to schedule several days from now, a team of people will walk onto the frozen surface of Squam Lake in Holderness, New Hampshire and put saws to work. They’ll spend the rest of the week cutting as many as 3,600 blocks of ice before hauling the harvest — 200 tons of it — to specially prepared storage sheds.
As the year goes on these 120-pound blocks will be used to fill ice boxes in cabins at the Rockywold-Deephaven Camps and also provide refrigeration at a local farm.
Ice harvesting on Squam has been going on for more than a century, starting back when natural ice was the only means of refrigeration.
Ice harvesting was common in many northern parts of the nation to serve both local needs and those of customers far, far away. And what a business it was! I’ve seen records from Milton, New Hampshire where ice harvesting in the 1850s was busy enough to fill 50 rail cars a day rolling off to other parts of the country during warm months.
The industry was big enough nationally to support its own trade journal: The Ice Trade Journal, later renamed Refrigerating World after electrical refrigeration came along.
Most of that is just a memory now – except at the Rockywold-Deephaven Camps and at a few other spots, another being the Thompson Ice House Harvesting Museum in South Bristol, Maine that’s scheduled its harvesting this year for February 26. The yield will be used to make ice cream at the museum’s annual ice cream social in July, and also for use by local boaters, campers and hunters.
Ice harvesting traditions are also kept alive at other places, according to the blog Alcademics (“Cocktails, Spirits, Science and … kind of a lot about ice”).
Here’s a fine set of photos and video clips from Maine that show how the work was done.
Those traditions date to a time when harvested ice meant a lot economically: it boosted the expansion of such industries as dairy and beer distribution after railroad lines were laid down, and for the same reason helped farmers in the Midwest and West access Eastern markets.
In fact, ice harvesting isn’t entirely a thing of the past. It’s merely taking on new forms that our ancestors wouldn’t likely have imagined, a recent example being iceberg harvesting, aimed at supplying fresh drinking water, not keeping things cool.
How long that newer use of ice can go on is a question that’s bigger than ice itself, given recent reports of glaciers melting and seas that are moving in a warming direction.