Harvesting Ice in Greenwich

Cutting blocks of ice from the river (Currier & Ives - "Winter in the Country: Getting Ice" 1864)

by Jeffrey Bingham Mead
Greenwich Time: 1990

Before the age of refrigeration, ice harvesting was an important business. The Town of Greenwich, like neighboring towns, is blessed with numerous bodies of fresh water, which easily supplied ice for local farmers and households closer to town. Many people here relied on harvested ice until a century or so ago.

Some of the farms in Greenwich featured icehouses, although only a few remain today as relics of a bygone era. These unique structures were often built of stone into a hillside near a pond or stream, which supplied ice during the winter months. Blocks of ice were hewn using large, handheld saws, axes or hooks. Horses were used to transport large blocks of ice to the ice houses. They were packed in sawdust or straw to reduce melting. It was common for half the ice to be melted by late summer. The old sawdust was then shoveled out and use for plant fertilizer – nothing was wasted.

Eric Sloane wrote that "the ice must be frozen to the proper thickness, and the day must be dry and windy so that cakes won't melt and stick together. Two days or so of hard work could fill an average icehouse, which seems a lot more labor than just opening the refrigerator door and taking out ice cubes."

Greenwich high School's football field was, at one time, part of Ten Acres, one of my family's farms. The field was often flooded for ice harvesting and some recreational iceskating by town folks. I've also seen an ice house off Cliffdale Road in North Greenwich not far from the Byram River, and others, perhaps, are still around.

Today we enjoy the benefits of refrigeration technology. Yet in the annals of time, the task of preserving food was a challenge. The image of the iceman going off to frozen ponds and streams in Greenwich with horses in tow to harvest blocks of ice still holds almost a Currier and Ives place in history. Ice making machines would eventually eliminate ice harvesting.

Some antique iceboxes today attract large sums of money as collectors items. Oak iceboxes formerly discarded by farmers – who recycled them for storage – have been brought back for novel uses.

Jeffrey Bingham Mead is a free-lance writer and direct descendant of one of the town's founding families. He grew up in backcountry Greenwich.