The warm weather in early 2022 made it hard to believe that as late as 1935 commercial quantities of natural ice up to 13” thick were harvested from a disused clay pit in North Cambridge.
October 11, 1924
In the days before mechanical refrigeration, ice harvested from local ponds was harvested in huge amounts every winter, stored in enormous wooden icehouses, and distributed to households everywhere. The role that Cambridge’s own Nathaniel Wyeth and Frederick Tudor played in developing this industry at Fresh Pond has been extensively documented, but after the City of Cambridge closed the ice houses in 1891 most of Cambridge’s domestic ice – apart from a small amount harvested from the Glacialis, or Artificial Pond, off Concord Avenue – was sourced from Spy Pond in Arlington or from New Hampshire.
Cambridge’s defunct ice industry was resuscitated in 1920 under unlikely circumstances. John B. Johnson, a New Hampshire native, had been making ice cream on Columbia Street since 1911. Johnson purchased 225,000 square feet of land off Rindge Avenue in the fall of 1919 and announced that he expected to save up to $15,000 a year by harvesting his own ice from Jerry’s Pit. He immediately erected a small icehouse (a double-walled wooden building insulated with sawdust) and that winter filled it with 3,000 tons of ice. In 1920 he built a two-story ice cream factory adjacent to the icehouse and closed his Columbia Street plant.
The next few winters were suitably cold, and in 1921 and 1922 Johnson was able to harvest 4,000 tons in each season, filling the icehouse with a conveyor belt at the rate of twenty-six 400 lb. cakes per minute over ten working days. After storing surplus ice outside under tarpaulins for a few seasons, Johnson more than doubled his storage capacity in 1925. Not every year offered suitable weather – at least a few weeks of clear, very cold nights and an absence of significant snowfall – but there were substantial harvests in 1930 and 1934, when up to 70 men and several horses brought in cakes 13” thick. 1935 turned out to be the last harvest, as Johnson fell ill and was unable to keep up with mortgage payments. The business continued in other hands until 1938, when the lender foreclosed. The factory buildings were cleared in 1940. The Board of Health denied a subsequent owner permission to use the pond as a dump, and the Dewey & Almy Co. purchased the property in 1942.
Jerry’s Pit has always had a checkered reputation. Brickmaker Jeremiah McCrehan mined clay at the site until one morning in 1860, when, as his son told the story to the Cambridge Chronicle in 1927, he went to work at the pit and found 4’ of water in it. Some operators that tapped underground springs found it profitable to pump their pits dry, but McCrehan abandoned his mining operation instead. Ice was harvested there for domestic use in 1892, but the Board of Health objected, calling the water “entirely unfit for this purpose.”
The pool is a favorite place for such washing as is done by the foreign element who live in the neighborhood; it is a capital place for drowning stray cats and it is often used in this manner by the festive youth who gambol on its banks and who plash about in its shallows in their bare feet; it is, in a way, the cesspool of that neighborhood, and yet during the coming summer a large number of people will dilute their water with ice cut from its surface.
Cambridge Tribune, May 21, 1892
Jerry’s Pit was a de facto neighborhood recreation center, a site for swimming in the summer and skating in the winter in a neighborhood with few such opportunities. J.B. Johnson’s use of the ice in its manufacturing operation was apparently unobjectionable because it was not sold for human consumption. Johnson permitted swimming and skating throughout his ownership, and in 1927 allowed Cambridge’s Recreation Department to improve the facilities and staff the place with lifeguards. In 1943 the Dewey & Almy Co. built a bathhouse and toilet room at its own expense, which the city operated until the Metropolitan District Commission opened the Francis J. McCrehan Pool nearby in 1960.
Today’s post was written by CHC Executive Director, Charles Sullivan
Sources
Cambridge Historical Commission files
Cambridge Public Library, Historic Cambridge Newspaper Collection
Sinclair, Jill. Fresh Pond: The History of A Cambridge Landscape. The MIT Press, 2009
Weightman, Gavin. The Frozen Water Trade. HarperCollins, 2001