Getting back to the lake, block ice for summer refrigeration purposes was a necessity in those days. In rural areas such as ours, residential use was a small part of this endeavor, although the icebox was the sole kitchen cooling mechanism in the Vermont part of my life. The major consumer by far was the dairy industry: Vermont’s 10,000 mainly small farms – ours was one – needed the ice to cool down and keep cool for preservation purposes its milk production. For this purpose Missisquoi Farm had an ice house, cheek by jowl with the milking barn, located where the pool complex is now situated. Midwinter each year ice was harvested perhaps 100 yards or so west of where the Tyler and Point cottages stand. A hole was chiseled in the ice and then parallel cuts were made by saw by hand for 100 feet or so. The saws were similar to crosscut saws and the standing joke was who got to saw from the underwater portion, but these saws had a handle just at one end and were a one man (per line of cut) proposition. Once the horizontal cuts had been made, cross cuts followed, leaving rectangular chunks weighing 80 pounds or so. These were pulled from the water with tongs and slid up a ramp onto a truck bed or other conveyance to the icehouse. Our icehouse was a wooden insulated structure with a bed of sawdust. The slabs of ice were layered in, one layer at a time, with more sawdust between and on top of each block until the icehouse was full. Because of the insulation and the proximity of all that ice, even in the hottest August weather the ice remained intact as chunk by chunk it was removed, hosed down to remove the sawdust, and placed in the tank where the 44-quart milk cans were kept prior to transportation to the creamery in Swanton. If you have fished in northern Quebec and Labrador, you would have seen such icehouses still in use – in places without electricity or where the cost of fossil fuels to produce it is prohibitively expensive.
The men who cut the ice were specialists and they wore cleats on their boots for good reason. A film of water on ice is extremely slippery, and falling into 32 degree water in below zero weather with a wind blowing was no one’s idea of fun. While I was watching this operation one winter, my cocker spaniel, Rexy, fell in. Someone hauled Rexy out and I remember a run with the dog to the house to thaw him out.
To be continued.
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