North Country at Work: Ice harvesting on the St. Lawrence
Thomas Mitchell was born at Thousand Island Park in 1913, and spent all his life on the St. Lawrence River.
Oct 18, 2016 — Thomas Mitchell was born at Thousand Island Park in 1913, and spent all his life on the St. Lawrence River. <br /><br />Each winter, communities up and down the river plowed, cut, and stored ice to sell and to use during the summer months. Thomas's father filled the ice house, and Thomas did the same starting in the 1930s. In this North Country at Work story he remembers the three-day ice harvest, and how it changed as new technologies came along.
"I was always on the four or five men [team] that got up at five o' clock in the morning and got on the ice long before daylight. We had to saw that last four inches that wasn't sawed by the horse plow."
Next they lifted the ice cakes out of the river and onto sleds drawn by horses. The sleds took the ice to be loaded into the town ice house, which was doen using a series of slides. Thomas Mitchell remembered one of the toughest jobs was standing at the top of the slide system, grabbing the ice cake, and quickly slinging it back into the ice house.
"You had these tongs and you grabbed these cakes of ice, and they weighed at least 500 pounds. A little guy like me, hell, the cake would throw me around. You had to be a strong, powerful man. It's some hard tough job."
But the trade changed as new technologies came in and replaced the classic horse plow.
"As time moved on, they got new ideas about plowing this ice field. Drury Reed was the first one to come up with the invention of a gasoline ice plow. He had an old saw, it was an old buzz saw, and he hooked it onto a Ford motor. He had it on wheels. It made plowing the field 1/3 to 1/4 faster than it was by horse. That was the end of the horse drawn saws. And then they started trucking the ice instead of coming in with a team and sleds."
He said there was no problem with the trucks - except that the men lifting the ice up onto the truck beds had to lift it nine inches higher, which makes quite the difference. He expressed considerable relief that ice harvesting only lasted a few days, because it was such an exhausting task.
"This went on all day long. It was one of the toughest jobs on the park."
The audio for this piece came from Thomas Mitchell's grandson, Tom French, who authored River Views: A History of the Thousand Islands in 3-D. Tom also created the online oral history website River Stories from his grandfather’s recordings. For more work stories from the North Country At Work project, check out ncpr.org/work.
This story is from NCPR's North Country at Work project, exploring the working lives and history of our region. To see all stories and our photo archive, check out the new ncpr.org/work website.
