Southwick's Ice Industry: The Berkshire Ice Company (Part One)
The Knickerbocker Ice Company of New York sent a gang of men to Southwick Ponds in January 1871 to harvest ice for the New York market, primarily New York City. Workers loaded the ice directly into train cars on the Canal Railroad's New Haven line, which had recently added a new turnout to the ponds. Knickerbocker paid the railroad $900 per week for freight service, the ice crop being so good it was worth the expense. Once the ice arrived in New Haven, laborers placed it on the company's barges for transport to New York City. Knickerbocker took some 400 tons of ice from Southwick Ponds daily, equivalent to roughly 40 train cars per day. (Previously, Knickerbocker utilized the Boston and Albany Railroad and transported ice to the City via the Hudson River.)
Knickerbocker built an ice house with the capacity of storing 50,000 tons of ice on a 15-acre tract at the south end of Southwick Ponds in 1874. It was called the Railroad Ice House. (The New Haven and Northampton Railroad purchased the land.)
The Berkshire Ice Company took over Knickerbocker's ice harvesting operation at Southwick Ponds in 1879-80. Four other ice concerns on Congamond Lake reportedly consolidated under the control of Berkshire Ice in 1903. In October of that same year, Berkshire Ice started constructing a monster ice house, which took about one million feet of lumber.
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| The Railroad Ice House (the smaller structure to the left) |
Some ice cutters in the employ of Berkshire Ice in the winter of 1913 were making $25 per week. They worked from 7:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M., seven days a week. The money was so good that the laborers could afford to take the entire summer off without working should the ice harvesting season be extended by six weeks. (When Windsor, Connecticut officials wanted to know why so many tramps were coming through their town, they found that most were heading to Southwick to work for the Berkshire Ice Company.)
Drunken brawls among the workers became commonplace. Occasionally, a laborer would turn up dead in his hotel room, along the railroad tracks, or in the lake.
On the morning of January 28, 1904, several Berkshire Ice Company laborers got into a drunken row. That evening, one of the laborers, a poorly clad young man, about 30, who had been drinking all day quite heavily, was found dead in his hotel room. There was no evidence of foul play, but the medical examiner thought it best to perform an autopsy, which showed the man had heart trouble, believed to be induced by alcoholism.
Authorities arrested three ice cutters in Southwick on charges of drunkenness in 1913. The trio pleaded guilty in court on March 4, and the judge fined them $6.00 each. (Because it was such a common problem, the court used to sentence drunk ice cutters working on Congamond Lake to 30 days in the House of Corrections, but with a substantially reduced number of drunken convictions over the winter and the ice-cutting season quickly coming to a close, the court decided to impose fines instead.)
Ice harvesting was a dangerous business, and accidents and employee deaths were not all that uncommon.
A fourteen-year-old boy hoisting ice for Berkshire Ice was seriously injured in February 1892 when he fell 35 feet from the staging area to the ice below after a pulley broke.
A gang of 28 men from Granville went to work for Berkshire Ice in January 1905. But only 12 remained to finish the entire four-week harvest; the others were either too tired and quit or were injured on the job.
In February 1906, a train killed a man in Connecticut when it ran over him; the locomotive's wheels cut off his head. Found on his body was his employment card showing he worked for the Berkshire Ice Company.
When Curtis Babb lent a boat to the Berkshire Ice Company to move ice from Congamond Lake to one of their ice houses on February 27, 1909, one of the ice cakes struck Babb's boat, causing it to list and dump the engine overboard. It sank in 20 feet of water.
Carlo Cetarrio had only been employed with the Berkshire Ice Company for about 2-weeks before an ice storm forced the cancellation of work on Saturday, January 15, 1910. Not having to go to work, Cetarrio walked to the railroad tracks near his boarding house. Next to the tracks were some railroad ties. He picked up one of the heavy railroad ties, placed it over his shoulder, and headed home. Along the way, he slipped on some ice and fell, causing the railroad tie to strike him in the head. He lived for a minute or two before passing on. Authorities believe he was stealing the railroad tie to use it as firewood.
Charles Fowler, a brakeman who worked for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company, was run over by a train in the switching yard of the Berkshire Ice Company on August 1, 1910; he died on August 4. Fowler was at the end of a stopped freight car when it got struck by a train car loaded with ice. An inquest blamed the railroad for Fowler's death as the ice car had a defective brake beam and should have been taken out of service until repaired.
On September 16, 1910, Alfonso De Giacomo lost his balance while stationed high up on an ice-loading conveyer. He fell some 35-ft. to the ground below, his body slamming into a steel crossbeam on the way down, fracturing his skull and killing him. (Berkshire Ice paid $400 to his heirs in 1914 to settle a wrongful death lawsuit.)
An employee died after falling down a flight of stairs at one of Berkshire Ice's boarding houses on November 1, 1920. His body was discovered in a narrow hallway by a porter.
Events leading up to and surrounding an ice cutter's death were not always obvious.
Nelson Babb discovered a body fully dressed in winter clothes floating in the lake as he rowed across Middle Pond on May 18, 1911. The only clue to the dead man's identity was a brass tag in his possession. The identification tag, stamped with 976, showed that the Berkshire Ice Company employed him; however, the company had not received any reports of their laborers missing from the previous winter's harvest. (A laborer's name often remained unknown because the company only knew them by the number they were issued when hired.)
Berkshire Ice started constructing a new ice house in the fall of 1911. On November 10, an iron truss weighing several tons fell and crushed a worker's foot. And on November 27, a carpenter was about 55 feet off the ground when he lost his footing while reaching for a board. Directly below him, about 10 feet down, was a beam, and as his body flew past it, the hammer in his hip pocket got stuck on it, suspending him 45 feet in midair. He eventually made it safely to the ground. After surviving such a scary ordeal, he refused to sell his lucky hammer, regardless of price.
Three ice cutters were working on the ice the night of March 1, 1913, when they lost their way in the thick fog and accidentally walked into open water. Upon hearing their cries for help, Arthur Brown, the winter caretaker of Babb's Grove, grabbed a lantern and a hook and, thinking he was walking onto solid ice, walked into open water. He resurfaced under the ice. Two of the ice cutters were rescued. Mr. Brown's body was found the following afternoon.
Sometimes finding a body would take days, weeks, and even months. That was the case on April 20, 1913, when some people gathering mayflowers found a man's body floating in Middle Pond. They notified authorities, who towed the body to shore. (The badly decomposed body may have been the ice cutter who drowned on March 1.)
One of Berkshire Ice Company's ice cutters, known to the company only as a number, went missing on January 23, 1915; his body wasn't recovered until August 12. (It is believed that his identity remains unknown.)
Employees weren't the only ones injured or killed or facing near-death experiences.
Berkshire Ice bought horses at the start of each ice-cutting season, and when the harvesting was complete, they sold the ones who survived. (In late December 1910, Berkshire Ice had 53 horses in their barns; in January 1914, they had 65.)
Sometimes, under the weight of its own body, a horse would break through the ice and drown. The horses (and laborers) faced a risk more common than thin ice: stepping into holes left by people ice fishing. But the company's concern for the safety of its employees may have been nothing more than a red herring because Berkshire Ice's biggest problem surrounding the ice fishermen was seemingly the holes they left in ice already marked for cutting by the company. The fishermen's interference created significant delays in harvesting ice, thus driving up the company's expenses.
To combat this costly problem, Berkshire Ice petitioned Southwick selectmen in October 1911 to hold a special town meeting to vote on closing Congamond Lake to all fishing during the winter months, from December 1 to May 1.
During this time, Berkshire Ice had just completed a mile-long railroad spur connecting the main track to the new ice house they had just built. (It took an estimated 200 hundred train cars hauling 1,000,000 feet of lumber to build the ice house. According to the plans, it was 350 feet long and 234 feet wide. It was built to house 60,000 tons of ice, bringing Berkshire's total ice capacity to a 220,000-tons.)
Congamond Lake closed again to winter fishing in 1915, as it was for several years prior. In voting to close the ponds, selectmen again sided with the Berkshire Ice Company, then the town's biggest taxpayer, saying fishing interferes with ice harvesting.
Southwick's Ice Industry: The Berkshire Ice Company (Part Two)