When I was a youngster on the farm near Dunchurch, the year’s second crop — after my father’s annual harvest of sawlogs was hauled from the bush and just before maple syrup season — was ice. Big blocks of the stuff, were sawn from the surface of nearby Whitestone Lake and stored for summer use in the icebox in our summer kitchen.
Unknowingly, we were exploiting an admirably “green” source of cooling energy. But it was hard work, and as one of a dwindling number of folk who can claim to have done it, the editor of this publication fingered me to write a story about this once common winter chore.
Harvesting lake ice for refrigeration became big business in the northern United States and Canada in the closing decades of the 19th century. Ice was moved by the trainload to cities, and even by the shipload to tropical climes. Lake Simcoe thus kept Toronto cool and supplied with ice cream in summer, while “blue ice” from the crystal-clear waters of the Big Sound did likewise for Parry Sound.
My personal ice-harvesting experience was limited. We might have hauled as many as a hundred 75-pound blocks from the lake in a season, and stored them in two icehouses, our own and that of a summer cottage at the lakeside. We cut the blocks with the same crosscut saw my dad used in the bush, minus one handle. In early times, the two-man pit saw was similarly modified to cut ice. Sawing lumber with a pitsaw, one man stood above the log, the other beneath. When a specially designed ice saw came on the scene, it resembled a pitsaw with larger teeth and one missing handle. Thus was the ice-cutter’s old saw (sorry), “Gee, the poor fellow on the other end must be getting cold!”
As ice harvesting grew as an industry, refinements were made. A horse-drawn “ice plough” was introduced to rut deep grooves in the ice for the sawyer to follow. Finally, gasoline-powered circular saws relieved at least a few sawyers of their tedious task.
But for the most part, the tools of the trade remained few and simple. Aside from the saw, these included a snow shovel, a set of tongs for lifting the blocks clear of the water, an ice chisel for chipping and prying, and a pike pole for shepherding floating blocks to the fellow working the tongs. A horse-drawn sleigh hauled the harvest to its destination.
Storage facilities consisted of windowless icehouses, hardly bigger than a utility shed, for a summer cottage, or cavernous, barn-like affairs for ice merchants supplying a town. Typically, icehouses were double-walled, the space between filled with insulating sawdust obtained free from the nearest sawmill. More sawdust covered the floor, usually earthen, and another six inches to a foot of sawdust separated the growing mound of ice from the walls. The blocks were placed as tightly together as possible, and snow was rammed into any remaining spaces. Finally, the harvest was put to bed beneath a thick top blanket of sawdust.
The ice harvest happened in late February or March, when ice was thickest. What was wanted was “blue,” or transparent ice unsullied by layers of opaque “slush” ice. Inland lakes froze over at the beginning of December and were subjected to periodic snow squalls off unfrozen Georgian Bay, hence their ice tended to be slushy. Georgian Bay and the Big Sound sealed over later and rapidly froze to a depth of 18 to 24 inches in the midwinter cold, yielding ice of a better quality.
Joe Johnson was one of many men who put up ice for cottages on the Big Sound. His son Ken, a long-retired Parry Sound school principal, describes the approach his father took to the job after chopping a starter hole through the ice:
“He was very particular,” Ken remembers. “In order that the blocks of ice would be properly shaped, he made a big [carpenter’s] square from lumber, well braced, which he used for marking the strips of ice which were subsequently cut into blocks. The initial long strip was cut making sure the block was a bit narrower [at one end]. When it was cut loose with a chisel, it was floated back into the hole and sawn into blocks.”
Now, with a long narrow trench of water opened up, cutting along a series of lines intersecting at right angles could begin. The late Lyle Jones of Parry Sound was another Big Sound ice harvester.
“There was hardly a man around the shore in [the 1930s] who didn’t have a finger in putting in ice,” Lyle told me. If an expanse of glare ice wasn’t handy to the icehouse, he shoveled an area free of snow then proceeded as Ken Johnson described. As the crosshatching cuts were made, one by one, blocks of ice floated free, ready to be plucked from the water and loaded on a sleigh. Sawing was exhausting work so the crew took turns, handing over quickly, for a saw left standing in the cut for an instant might freeze in and have to be chopped out.
There was a knack to lifting a hundred-pound block of ice clear of the water.
“You had to shove it down [first] to get the bounce,” Lyle explained. “If your feet slipped, in you went, because you couldn’t get the tongs off quick enough.”
One day, one of Lyle’s crew slipped over the edge. He was hauled out, stripped, and thawed out beside a roaring bonfire set in the lee of the icehouse.
Filling the icehouses of Parry Sound’s ice merchants was a huge operation involving an army of workers. Lyle Jones remembered that Captain John ‘Jack’ Dube, master of the legendary steamer Midland City, and later with Canada Steamship Lines, at one time oversaw this work, a natural job for a Great Lakes ship’s captain with off-season time on his hands.
Using lake ice as a cooling agent is now largely a thing of the past, and its passing is not entirely to be mourned. For starters, yawning holes left in the ice were hazardous enough in earlier times, and nowadays would be death traps for snowmobilers. Another thing, lately, thanks presumably to global warming, the Big Sound has remained open later in the season, resulting in thinner ice. Once, a few winters ago, it never did entirely seal over.
Today, ice cutters like Joe Johnson and Lyle Jones would reap a slimmer harvest, and the cottager and householder would have to settle for an inferior product.
So give your electric fridge a big, grateful hug.
