There is a good chance that when you read this title “Ice Harvesting”, you may begin to wonder: what does ice harvesting really mean? How or why would you harvest ice? Ice is found conveniently inside our refrigerators. If we need a big bag of ice for a party or picnic, we can get it at our local grocery store. How or why would anyone attempt to harvest ice?
As all school kids know, ice is simply frozen water. If we go back in time to the 1930s and 1940s, the term refrigerator was just coming into the American vocabulary. This modern piece of kitchen equipment started to replace the familiar wooden icebox that was found in most homes. These iceboxes typically used lake ice into the 1940s.
Before refrigeration, all ice came from lakes and rivers that were located in the northern climates. The Brighton area with its fifty surrounding lakes became an important source for providing ice to the large commercial ice suppliers located in Detroit and Toledo. Railroads located next to lakes and rivers allowed huge blocks of ice weighing up to 300 pounds to be transported to the major cities.
The CoBACH Center exhibit will feature a media collection of old photos and vintage movie footage from the harvesting process in the early 1900s. The practice of ice harvesting relied on rugged men who would cut the ice into large slabs using handsaws and in later years horse-pulled ice sleds with saw mounted on the underside. The exhibit includes a variety of hand saws and horse-drawn saws that were used to score the ice with parallel grooves prior to the ice cutting sleds that cut deep grooves which allow the workers to hand-fracture the ice.
This exhibit is a must see! You will not see this equipment or learn about the difficult job of ice harvesting when you visit Greenfield Village. Ice harvesting was one of the ten largest industries in the United States at one time. Most of this vintage equipment and media is on loan from the extensive collection of the Knowlton Ice Museum of North America located in Port Huron, Michigan.