By JAMES BREIG of The Troy Record
In the 21st century, two of the big harvests in New York State are of grapes and apples. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, ice was a big “crop” along the Hudson River.
The frozen water was harvested and placed into storage sheds for use in the summer, especially in New York City. Its growth through immigration had increased the demand for ice to refrigerate foods.
A measure of the size of the harvest can be found in the Jan. 28, 1879, issue of The New York Times in a story titled “Reaping the Ice Harvest: An Unusually Large Yield from the Hudson River.” The story estimated that three million tons of ice would be taken from the Hudson.
The harvesting had to be done north of New York City because the river there contained too much salt, which inhibited freezing. The shoreline between Poughkeepsie and Troy, on both sides of the river, was a key stretch for taking ice, work that was often done by farmers while their fields lay under snow.
The Times remarked that the ice being stored in 1879 was “thicker” and “of better quality” that previous harvests. Working on the frozen river were thousands of men — and even boys who handled teams of horses to transport the blocks of ice. Their pay ranged between one and two dollars a day.
At Schodack, the Knickerbocker Ice House employed nearly 250 workers to cut and store 65,000 tons of ice. There were ten storehouses in Stuyvesant, and more than 1,200 men kept them stocked with upwards of 132,000 tons of block ice.