Ice Harvesting and How it Changed Food Storage with Dennis Picard

Part of our Monday night lecture series: Culinary Incidents: Historical Explorations of Food and Culture in the Pioneer Valley.

The commercial harvesting of ice from New England’s ponds and lakes for export began in the first decade of the 19th century.  By the end of that century ice harvesting was the 9th largest industry in the United States employing tens of thousands of workers in New England alone and producing hundreds of thousands of tons of block ice annually.

Dennis Picard has been demonstrating the ice harvesting trade for more than a decade at museums and environmental education centers.  He will display some of his antique tools of that trade including several invented here in Massachusetts.  He will share the interesting tale of this once massive enterprise that is now fading from our collective memory. Admission $7 / $5 members