Ice Harvesting — An Age-Old Tradition

A crew from Rockwell Deephaven Camps maneuvers blocks of ice on Squam Lake. (Tom Caldwell Photo)

In the days before refrigeration solved the problem of keeping foods from spoiling, people used to harvest frozen water from ponds and lakes and store it in insulated “iceboxes” or ice houses to keep it from melting. Old-timers still sometimes call a refrigerator an icebox, but the term is slipping away as people lose track of how important ice storage used to be. Entire businesses were built around the ice harvest, but today it is almost a lost art.

The Remick Country Doctor Museum and Farm in Tamworth, whose mission is to teach the values and significance of the country doctor’s medical practice and agricultural way of life, has held ice-harvesting demonstrations through the years, but recent warm winters have interfered with those plans and Dawne Gilpatrick, the museum’s marketing coordinator, said there will be no ice-harvesting this year.

One holdout is Rockywold Deephaven Camps in Holderness, where ice-harvesting remains an important tradition. In late January, ice-harvesting took place as it has every year since the late 1800s.

When Rockywold Deephaven Camps purchased seven refrigerators as the first step in phasing out its ice boxes in the late 1960s, camp guests objected. During an interview in 2015, Norm Lyford of Ashland, who had helped with the ice harvest for 72 years, recalled, “The campers objected. They didn’t want [refrigerators]. They liked being able to take an ice pick and chop the ice off, and they said they wouldn’t come back again unless they got the iceboxes back.”

That camp relented.

It takes 3,600 of the 15.5-inch by 19.5-inch by 12-inch-thick blocks of ice, each weighing about 115 pounds, to supply the cottage ice boxes in the summer. That is more than 200 tons of ice to be harvested, moved, and stored — 2,000 blocks in the Rockywold Ice House and about 1,600 blocks in the Deephaven Ice House. The ice is insulated by sawdust to keep it frozen until it is delivered to the antique iceboxes in each cottage. It is not unusual to have some ice still sitting in the ice houses after the last guests have left in September.