Ice Cutting

by Frank O'Brien

(from his book, "Frank, The Cows Are Out")

     Before the days of mechanical refrigeration came about, it was common practice for us to "put up" ice in the winter. Almost every farmer had a pond and also a building to use for an ice house.

       We were lucky, we did not need a pond as there was a bridge over the creek in front of our house and a nice deep hole under it which was good for swimming in the summer and a fine place to cut ice in the winter. Any sturdy shed would do to put ice in and size depended upon how much ice you wanted to put up or needed to put out through the hot weather.

       As I recall, the blocks of ice were about 2' x 3' and the thickness depended upon how deep the water had frozen. I believe it needed to be at least ten inches thick. The average farmer, like my father, had what we called an ice saw. This saw was about five feet long with sharp teeth about one inch high and about one inch between the points and had a handle on one end. For large cutting jobs where railroad cars or big ice houses were to be filled, the contractor could buy specially made sleds that could be pulled by one horse. It had a saw for each runner, two feet apart with a marker two feet over, that ran along the side of the previously cut side. Then the standard saw, which I described first, was used to cut the three foot blocks which the horse sled had cut into six inches deep earlier. A big iron chisel was dropped into the slot and the block was pried apart easily. Big tongs that could open up to two feet were used to pull the cakes of ice out of the water. There were smaller tongs of several sizes made that were used by the ice man who put the ice in the ice box in your kitchen. A pike six or eight feet long with a sharp point on one end and a hooked point below the straight one allowed a person to push the floating cake of ice away from him or to him so that he could reach it with the tongs. A neighbor, Charlie Hosmer, used to work on the Andover Pond, where ice was loaded onto railroad cars as well as farmers sleds years ago and he said that it was not only hard work but you were wet most of the time and your clothes would freeze on you.

       Before the ice is put into the ice house the floor is covered with several inches of sawdust, then a layer of ice is put on the sawdust with the blocks about six inches from the side and an inch space between each block. Then an inch or two of sawdust is used to cover the first layer of ice and so on for each subsequent layer of ice until the building is filled. Then the top layer is covered with six or more inches of sawdust to keep the heat from penetrating the ice and thawing it. When some ice is removed, the remainder is carefully covered.

       Every milk plant had a huge ice storage shed maybe 100' long, 60' wide and 30' or more high. They were always on a railroad siding so that the ice could be brought in by rail in case there was not enough ice available locally.

       There would be an elevator to raise the blocks of ice as each tier was filled in.

       The railroads did a big business hauling ice from nearby ponds that bordered the tracks and often ponds were built every few miles along the tracks when possible as the rails approached the towns and cities. There were buyers and sellers of the ice and like any other product, the Erie, in this area, was paid for transporting the ice to a specific destination. I suppose when railroad car loads were shipped, it was relatively cheap per ton. When I mentioned about shipping the ice to a friend he said that the ice was not packed in sawdust when shipped only a few miles to its destination as the weather was below freezing anyway.

       There were two big ponds in Allegany County that I knew about. One was in Andover and one near Cuba. I recall ice being unloaded from the freight cars into a big icehouse in Scio when I was in high school back in the early thirties. It was next to the Borden milk plant. Both were owned by the same people. There must have been a lot of warm milk in the warm winter of 1890's when the ponds did not freeze.

       I read in a local paper printed in 1901 that 980 cars of ice were shipped from the Andover pond by February. That was just one pond. Often big ice houses were built on the edge of a pond where ice could be stored and hauled out to surrounding towns in the warm weather and sold for a good price of 25 cents for 25 pounds a block.

       Ice was shipped to India and to South American countries in the middle of the last century. It was packed in the ship just as one would pack it in an icehouse and the shippers would only lose about a third of the ice after it was transported thousands of miles away. But the people had to be educated on how to handle the 20 to 50 pond chunks from melting in the hot sun while the ice was being carried home to be put in their ice boxes.

       Ice boxes consisted of an insulated cabinet about 30" wide and 4' high with two doors on it. The smaller door on top was where the ice was stored and a larger lower door had shelves inside just as our refrigerators are fixed today. As the ice melted it cooled the air which circulated into the food compartment and kept the food from spoiling. There was a pan in the bottom of the refrigerator to catch the water. The iceman would come twice a week to replenish the ice supply as the chunks of ice would be all melted away in 3 to 4 days.

       Some households did not have an icebox but a screened box, smaller than a regular ice box and it was kept in the cellar where the temperature was always at about 50 degrees in the summer. That worked for milk and vegetables but meat had to be salted or canned to keep it from spoiling in the hot weather.

        In 1890 there was a mild winter and the water in the ponds did not freeze, consequently there wasn't any ice to cut. The ice houses could not be filled anywhere, either the commercial ones or the little ones on the farm. I have heard my father talk about that winter but with me being young I didn't quiz him on how the farmers cooled their milk. For a farmer, the ice house was kept for the main purpose of keeping the milk cool as well as an occasional batch of homemade ice cream for the family. It must have been a disaster for the milk plants and the meat packing plants.

       Farmers depended on cold winters where the ground would freeze. With the normal amount of snowfall, they could cut and skid logs and haul them out of the woods on sleds a lot easier than they could on high wagons in the deep mud. When the ground was frozen hard and the sleighing was good, the farmers could haul much bigger loads. Today the ski resorts can't have skiing if the weather remains above 25 degrees. Below that temperature if there isn't enough natural snow, they can make artificial snow if they have the snow making equipment.

       The warm winter of 1890 gave a big boost to mechanical refrigeration as it was just coming into use at that time. The meat packers soon equipped their plants with the ice making machinery. All the companies had big steam boilers so a steam engine would be used to run the refrigeration equipment and later on when all the plants had a source of electricity, big electric motors ran the machinery.

       Electricity did not come to the farms until the late twenties and early thirties. I remember getting the electric in August of 1929 and how we enjoyed turning all the lights on that first night. The first electric appliance we had was a washing machine as my mother had to do the washing for a big family. Our refrigerator came next and then an electric iron. We didn't get a milk cooler for some years as our cold water was adequate for cooling milk with some ice.

       There was no worry about a warm winter in 1917, the year I was born, according to an old timer. He said that it was so cold that winter that the men couldn't cut ice under the river bridge as it was frozen too thick. When the ice is over a foot thick it's hard to saw and the ice tends to run at an angle so the blocks don't end up with square corners. This makes it hard to pack the blocks tight when they're put in the ice house.

       I have a reprint of the Frick Manufacturing Company catalog showing a train load of refrigeration equipment they made, being shipped to a meat packing company in Kansas City.

       I don't think the milk plant in Scio ever put in refrigeration equipment but stayed with ice until they closed in 1935 and combined their facilities with a more modern plant they operated seven miles away.