Primarily a seasonal industry, ice harvesting provided a second income for farmers, brickyard workers, sailors and river pilots, and others whose main jobs depended on more sultry weather. Most companies counted on seeing 50% of their product turn into water. Operations with well-insulated ice houses and barges managed to keep losses to about 20% of their annual harvest. Historic Mulford Ice House, Falling Waters Preserve (Photo: Courtesy of the Dominican Sisters of Sparkill) Surrounding them were an array of ancillary structures, including tool houses, horse barns and a power house to drive the conveyer or elevator systems. The ice houses were so large and ubiquitous that sailors in heavy fog could plot a safe course by sounding a bell or horn and listening for echoes from the buildings. Big as a football field, the Scott ice house at Little Nutten Hook held five times as much. The Mulford ice house at Falling Waters Preserve stored about 10,000 pounds. The wood-framed ice houses, up to six stories tall and painted a bright white to reflect the sun’s intense rays during the summer, held varying numbers of blocks. The bigger operations utilized moving belts and steam-powered elevators to convey the blocks inside the ice house and hoist them to upper floors smaller businesses relied on muscle power. This same, simple harvesting process took place at all of the Hudson River’s ice houses, the lion’s share located between Catskill and Albany - well beyond the reach of saltwater from the Atlantic Ocean’s incoming tides. Though most of the valley’s frozen bounty satisfied the needs of the New York market - estimated at about 2.5 million tons annually in the 1880s - some traveled as far as the West Indies and South America. Then it would be shipped southward on flat-hulled barges built so their holds sat low in the water, allowing the river to cool more of the ice. It attracted the highest prices in the summer, when demand peaked. Stacked and smothered in sawdust or hay for insulation, the ice could last for months, sometimes up to a year. Plowing the ice at Stuyvesant Landing, 1912. After opening a channel leading to the ice house, the cakes were floated to the shore and conveyed inside. Then using horse-drawn cutters and handsaws, they separated the ice into individual blocks. First, workers traced a grid on the ice, each rectangle measuring about 22 by 32 inches. Harvesting began in January or February, whenever its spring-fed waters hardened to a point where men and horses could stand on it - somewhere between 12 and 15 inches thick. The region’s ice industry actually was born atop the Palisades, at Clarkstown’s Rockland Lake (now a popular state park) in 1831. This profusion of perishables, on top of a population boom in the metropolis, increased the need for keeping things cool and a local supply of ice to make it happen. The opening of this gateway to the West in 1825 facilitated the delivery of a widening array of goods requiring preservation to New York City markets and homes. Ice harvesting on the Hudson owed its existence in large part to the Erie Canal. (Both sites were preserved by Scenic Hudson.) Sparked by the Erie Canal Two exceptions: the foundations of one at Falling Waters Preserve in Saugerties and the shell of a powerhouse critical for operations of another at state-owned Little Nutten Hook in Stuyvesant. Today, few traces remain of these huge, windowless warehouses (“more conspicuous than ornamental,” opines an early 20 th-century guidebook). Rare turn-of-the-century video footage of ice harvesting at Rockland Lake Ground Control: Soil Health and Climate Resiliency.Federal Watershed Protection Legislation.Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act of 2022.Connecting people with inspirational power of the Hudson River since 1963.
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