Reviving the Lost Art of Ice Cutting

Steve Taylor
New England Correspondent

SUTTON, N.H. — Hundreds of people bundled up against the January cold clambered out onto the frozen surface of Kezar Lake Sunday to watch ice being harvested the way it was done all over northern climes back before electricity and modern refrigeration came along.

Time was when ice harvesting was a major industry across New England and New York State, utilizing thousands of farm hands and teams of horses to fill ice houses perched around ponds and lakes and to load onto rail cars for shipment to urban markets to the south, and even by ship to as far off as Florida and the Caribbean.

It all went away when the technology of refrigeration was perfected enough to give households, restaurants and businesses reliable means to keep perishable products chilled. The ice man who made home deliveries to the kitchen ice box lost most of his business in the period between World Wars I and II, although by then cutting naturally frozen ice from waterbodies had been largely supplanted by ice manufactured mechanically using brine or ammonia as the refrigerant.

Muster Field Farm, a museum farm dedicated to preserving old ways of rural life and specimen buildings and tools from olden times, sponsors an ice cutting day every January at nearby Kezar Lake in Sutton. This year’s event drew an enthusiastic crowd to watch the process and to also be entertained by a sled dog team and Model T Ford snow-travellers offering rides across the frozen lake.

To start the ice harvest, loose snow is pushed away to reveal the ice surface, which this year had a cap of about two inches of rock-hard snow that had previously thawed slightly and then refrozen during a string of recent nights with sub-zero temperatures. Then the surface is scored with an engine- powered circular ice saw, one of a few still in existence, into rectangles 16 by 32 inches.

Hand saws finish the cuts, and blocks are shoved apart using a long-handled spade-like tool called a “devil’s pitchfork.” Then the blocks are maneuvered along to a narrow channel where they can be grappled and hoist out of the water onto a truck bed. The hoist consists of a long beam balanced on a tripod, with a heavy tongs on one end of the beam and a rope on the other, which is pulled down to lift the blocks up.

It’s all a very simple process, one perfected centuries ago when people began to understand the benefits of keeping food commodities chilled. In its heyday in the late 19th century the ice harvesting business adopted a degree of mechanization when chain conveyors lifted blocks out of the water and moved them up into waterfront ice houses or onto wagons for transport to rail sidings.

But for the most part it was an enterprise that relied heavily on hand labor and was always haunted by the fear ice adjacent to cuts would crack and send workers plunging into the cold water.

The ice that the Muster Field Farm crew was cutting this year was 16 inches thick, a depth that made for blocks weighing an ideal 250 pounds.

From the lake the blocks were hauled about a mile to Muster Field’s vintage ice house, where they were packed in pine sawdust. The insulating value of the sawdust will assure that the blocks will appear almost exactly as they did the moment they were pushed up the chute into the ice house on Jan. 24.

Next summer blocks of ice will be pulled out of the ice house for use during events at Muster Field Farm. The primary purpose will be to make ice cream, again in the old-fashion manner with hand-cranked freezers packed with ice and rock salt.