The natural ice industry was an important trade in the Poconos a hundred years ago. Before the days of electric refrigerators, the Poconos’ frozen assets were regularly delivered by the iceman to chill household iceboxes as far away as Philadelphia and New York City.
We dressed extra-warmly for this morning’s ice-capades on Tobyhanna Millpond #1, which was originally dammed for the logging industry in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1895, the Pocono Mountain Ice Company leased the lake and built its first icehouse. Double walls of thick hemlock boards filled with sawdust kept the ice, covered with straw, insulated all summer long.
Although commercial ice operations at Tobyhanna ceased long ago, today’s smaller-scale efforts continue the tradition of harvesting the abundant natural resource.
Much like in our great-grandfathers’ days, ice plows and handsaws are used for cutting the ice into cakes about two feet square, which are pulled with a pike through a channel cut in the pond to the base of a conveyor. Four cakes (each about 14 inches thick in today’s harvest) are lined up at the bottom of the ramp; an ice hook, bit into the last cake, connects to a stout rope leading up the wooden ramp, around two pulleys, to a one-horsepower enabler at the other end. I watch, amazed, at how easily the great draft horse pulls the thousand pounds of ice up the conveyor to the roof of the icehouse; there men with pikes tip the blocks down another ramp into its cold interior. Others shove and stack them into place until the place is filled bottom to top, with about 50 tons of prime Poconos ice.
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