STOCKBRIDGE — Dennis Picard has spent the better part of 25 years writing and lecturing about the ice-harvesting industry in the Berkshires and beyond. For a little more than a decade, he has spent Presidents’ Day Weekend at Hancock Shaker Village, cutting and harvesting ice on their reservoir to fill the ice house, the first of which dates to 1844, the existing brick version to 1894.
Two hundred years ago, the local ice season began in mid-December, when blocks of ice (called cakes) were grappled with tongs and hauled off local ponds on sleds pulled by oxen or draft horses; cutting ice in February, eight weeks beyond the winter solstice, was practically unheard of. These types of tales — as well as ice sculptures carved by regional artists and an exhibit about the Ice Glen and the ice harvesting business in and around Stockbridge — will be told on Saturday, Feb. 20 at the Stockbridge Library Ice Festival. Picard will also be on hand to narrate and give life to the tools and artifacts in the Library’s collection that relate to the ice industry.
“Probably the most important thing to understand about the ice industry — that most people can’t imagine when they think about it — is that it started as an international trade,” Picard told The Edge in a recent phone interview. The original point of cutting ice — first in Massachusetts, then New England in general — was to send it to areas that did not have ice of their own: the Caribbean, South America, England, Australia, China, and India, a locale Picard calls, “one of the biggest markets … and very happy for ice coming from New England.”
Around the time of the American Civil War (1861-1865), the industry began convincing people that the way they had preserved food and eaten it, for several hundred years, was not what it could be. “You could have food ‘out of season,’ if you will, which was possible through ice,” Picard explained, citing an increase in the amount of ice being cut locally and a decrease in the exporting of it overseas. Hence, the commencing of the Berkshires ice story.
“Once you get this domestic trade going, you end up with very large centers of consumers,” Picard said, in a nod to New York City, where the bustling metropolis was using 3 million tons of ice a year (meaning 300,000 pounds a day or more). With transportation topping the list of expenses, companies like the Knickerbocker Ice Company — one of the largest on the East Coast — began harvesting ice right from the Hudson River. But, as urban populations grew, pollution made ice harvesting in cities less possible.
Berkshire County, cited for its proximity to the city while being “further afield” and “border[ing] on their normal territory,” was one of the first places scouts landed. Picard detailed how the Knickerbocker Ice Company would come to the Berkshires to “rent your pond,” which meant paying for the rights to take your ice away to storage facilities in New Jersey and Connecticut. Come summer, if it was needed, it was delivered to New York City via barge.
“Any [locales] close to a transportation center, such as a railroad line or spur track, became high-demand ponds,” Picard said. Eventually, more and more locals began looking for ice, especially if they were leaving general farming behind for more specialized operations. Dairy farming, for instance, required ice; for every cow you milk, best practices call for a ton to a ton-and-a-half of ice per year to be put away. A farmer would cut their own ice and pack it away (in a moderately sized 15×17, 1.5-story tall ice house) for use in the summer “to cool the milk, to separate the cream, to make butter and cheese — where the profit was.” By the end of the 19th century, ice was being used locally and domestically “in the home, a tenement, a hotel, a florist, a butcher shop, or a general market … those are all people who buy ice,” Picard said, during a season that runs from June to October.
And is all ice created equally? “The industry standard was one foot thick of clear ice,” Picard said in a nod to the layers in natural ice that can be read in much the same way one might read rings on a tree. The ice reflects an entire season; rainy days, windy days, and snowy days all create different layers and crystals. “The clearer the crystals — the more like a piece of plate glass in a window — the more dense the ice is, and the more dense the ice the higher the refrigeration quality,” Picard said.
What you don’t want? “Milky glass, due to an early snowstorm in December, has very low refrigeration quality.” Which is why the foreman for any given ice company would travel around and chop holes in the ice to monitor thickness and quality. When the timing was right, the company would hire a crew of day laborers — comprised of out-of-work railroad hands or millworkers from a mill whose wheel was frozen in winter — who still needed to come up with room and board at the tenement. It was one of the trades that paid cash wages, “and it became pretty customary to get a [hot] meal at the end of the day,” Picard said, sharing the path his grandfather took as a teenager in the Keene, N.H. area.
Want to know if ice was sold by size or weight? Or do you have your own questions for Picard? Meet him on the lawn of the Stockbridge Library on Saturday between 10 a.m.–2 p.m. There, he will tell you even more about the centuries-old industry that began in 1810, the tail end of the “little ice age.” He’ll have the literal tools of the trade — many of which started off as woodworking tools, such as the two-man crosscut saw and axes — and lots of knowledge to share (ask him about the innovation of the ice plow!)
A historical exhibit, featuring a collection of ice harvesting tools donated to the Stockbridge Museum & Archives by descendants of the Scheneyer Ice Company, a Glendale business that operated from the late 19th- to mid-20th century. There will be make-and-take crafts for kids, and ice sculptures from David Barclay (a Northampton-based winter enthusiast who enjoys carving animals), Dave Rothstein (an internationally acclaimed snow sculptor who has traveled the globe spreading the gospel of the “winter arts”); and Bill Covitz (an award-winning sculptor known for creating ice instruments on a mountain top in Norway).
Note: Dennis Picard has been demonstrating the ice harvesting trade for more than 25 years at museums and environmental education centers. The Westfield, Mass. resident is a frequent speaker on the ice industry for libraries, museums, and universities. He has written articles about aspects of the “cold water trade” for periodicals including “The Homesteader,” where he examined the realities behind the harvest in Monroe, N.Y., as depicted in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novel “Farmer Boy.” Picard was a consultant for BBC4’s production of “Absolute Zero,” as seen in the U.S. on PBS’ NOVA series, staging an ice harvest and serving as an on-air commentator.
