ch winter cut the ice from ponds and lakes and floated it to the icehouses—were a fabulous race, akin to the river men and lumberjacks of the time. In mid-century the ponds around Boston employed about a thousand of them; in the whole of New England there were perhaps as many as ten thousand. Their salaries commonly included room and board, and since there were only about twenty or thirty days out of the year suitable for cutting ice, the gathering and managing of work crews must have been a problem.
The work itself demanded a variety of skills. Where the ice was covered with snow, the first step was to scrape it off with a horse-drawn snow plane. Next the area to be “harvested"—in the larger ponds, a huge square six hundred feet on a side—was surveyed and its four boundary lines marked out with a hand cutter. Then came a cutter with two runners forty-four inches apart; one blade was a guide plane, the other a large-toothed edge which made a preliminary groove two inches deep. This implement crisscrossed the ice, tracing a gridded pattern on the surface. It was followed by another twin-bladed cutter that cut more deeply. Finally came an all-iron ice plow, its blades adjustable to within four inches of the bottom of the ice. The final cutting was done with hand tools—long-bladed saws and long-handled spades and fork bars. Large sections of the six-hundred-foot square were cut away, and the men rode them like rafts (see picture above), dividing them into smaller pieces as they floated toward the icehouse.
Modern refrigeration killed the natural-ice business, of course. It spelled the doom of the family icehouse as well, but a few of them are left, and the pleasure of using one’s own clear pond-water for chilling a summer drink has not been entirely lost. In Vermont there are even a few ponds that produce enough natural ice to maintain small commercial icehouses, and enough high-school boys and antiquarians can still be found to bring in the harvest for them. The horses that pulled the plows, planes, and cutters are, alas, gone, but the men and boys who work the ponds know the thrill of striking a scored sheet of ice with a chisel that rings in the winter air and cuts clean and sharp.