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WESTBOROUGH, Mass. – The Westborough Historical Society is talking cold, hard facts about the process of procuring ice at their event “The Challenges of Ice Harvesting.” On Monday, Jan. 30, Ken Ethier will describe the precise, and often dangerous, process of procuring ice in the 19thand early 20th centuries.
The program will be held at 7 p.m. at the Westborough Historical Society’s Sibley House, 13 Parkman St. Ethier will display antique ice harvesting tools and describe the cultivation of the ice field, harvest scoring and cutting, and transport.
Keeping food cold in hot weather had been a major challenge until Frederic Tudor of Massachusetts provided one answer in 1805. He began the natural ice harvesting business by shipping ice to the West Indies. Demand for New England ice grew across the world until the ice harvesting reached its height in the 1880s.
At that time, Westborough’s ice man, George Rogers, and later Mason Taft, provided ice for local homes and dairies by their harvesting and storing the natural ice of Lake Chauncy. Each winter, when the ice was thick enough, the ice harvesters would cut and store the cakes of ice into three ice houses beside the lake. Two of these ice houses were on the Lyman Street shore and one on Chauncy Cove.
Taft became the town’s ice man after 1910, when he bought the ice harvesting rights of Lake Chauncy from Rogers. He owned a farm on the northeast corner of Lyman Street as well the ice houses and three ice wagons. When his horse-drawn ice wagons rumbled up the street in the summers, housewives posted a card in the window indicating how much ice to deliver to their ice boxes.
Ethier became interested in the ice business after interviewing ice harvester Carlton Thomas, who worked for Auburn’s Thomas Ice Company 70 years ago. A lecturer on many subjects, Ethier is a member of the Auburn Historical Commission, a board member and past president of the Auburn Historical Society, and a board member of Waters Farm in Sutton.
The event is open to the public.
