Dale's recent post about ice cutting chainsaws brings back memories about how my family harvested ice during the 1940s and 50s.
My family was in the retail and wholesale ice business in North Eastern CT. from about 1910 until the early 1950s. They cut 300 lbs blocs of ice off of the local lakes and ponds and stored them in ice houses to be sold during warm whether. From about 1940 they used power saws to cut ice off the lakes. They dragged these specially made gasoline powered circular saws out on to the frozen lakes to cut the ice into blocks, which they then floated to an inclined conveyer called an Ice Run, which pulled the blocks of ice into the top of the ice houses on the lake shore for storage. These power ice saws had a two cylinder engine on a set of skids with a handle like a baby carriage at one end and a long arm with a 36 inch diameter, chain driven circular saw blade at the other end. Two men would pull these saws handle end first across the surface of the ice in a grid pattern, cutting the ice to a depth one inch less than its thickness. The cuts were then finished with hand saws that had a 5 foot blade with a tee shaped handle at the top. The blocks were then guided along a channel with long handled ice pikes to the shore and stored in the ice house, or fished out of the water and loaded on to trucks to be stored else where. Paul Franklin
