Chester B. Kendall (? – 1927)
Initiator of Ice Harvesting On Crystal Lake

By the end of the nineteenth century, ice cutting was developing as a major enterprise on Crystal Lake. The man responsible for initiating this industry was Chester Kendall. Kendall was born and brought up in Hubbardston where he later drove coach for the stage line connecting Hubbardston with Gardner. He moved to Gardner during the 1870s and opened a fuel business. By the following decade, Kendall had expanded his business to include ice cutting. The operation on Crystal Lake was in full swing by 1900 when a new ice house, which could hold 20,000 tons of ice, was built on the northern shore of the lake.

Harvesting ice on Crystal Lake was a three-week undertaking which usually started in January. However, during a mild winter the project might not start until March. Work began when the ice reached a thickness of 13 inches. A crew of about 125 men from the Gardner area was involved. The workers from out-of-town lived in a boarding house at the lake. The men worked anywhere from 10 to14 hours a day and were paid 20 cents per hour. Less skilled workmen were paid 17½ cents per hour.

The work itself demanded a variety of skills. Where the ice was covered with snow, the first step was to scrape it off with a horse-drawn plane. Next, the area to be harvested was surveyed and marked off with boundary lines. Then came a horse-drawn two-blade cutter. One of the blades was the guide plane; the other had a large-tooth edge which made the preliminary cut. This implement criss-crossed the ice, tracing a grid pattern on the surface. It was followed by another horse-drawn blade which made a deeper cut. Final cutting was done with hand tools. The use of horses and hand tools continued until the 1920s when they were replaced by trucks and power saws.

Large sections of ice were cut away from the “field” and floated towards the ice house. These sections were called “floats” and could weigh up to 40 tons. The workers rode the floats like rafts while cutting them into smaller sections as they approached the ice house. The final pieces of ice were planed down into 250-pound cakes. The planing process resulted in a huge pile of waste ice up to 60 feet high. In later years, pumps were used to flush the ice shavings back into the lake.

When a day’s work was completed it was extremely important to keep the part of the lake that had been harvested from refreezing. To accomplish this, men were hired to keep the water circulating. This was done by either using a row boat or having the men pull a float of ice back and forth. If the water froze by the next morning the men weren’t paid!

In the ice house, cakes were packed two inches apart so they wouldn’t freeze into one mass. The planing process left one side of each cake grooved to prevent them from freezing together when they were stacked one upon another. As each of the 10 storerooms in the ice house was filled, the ice was packed with straw and the room boarded up until the following summer. Loss due to melting was usually less than 10 percent.

Some of Kendall’s ice was sold locally but most of it was shipped to out-of-town buyers. At first, each 250-pound cake sold for $1.25, but in later years the price rose to $10. Freight trains of up to 40 cars were loaded right at the lake. It took only 10 minutes to load a freight car. The ice was then shipped to meatpackers or dairy plants, such as Swift and Hood, or to fish-packing industries in Newport Rhode Island.

Chester Kendall continued harvesting ice on Crystal Lake until his death in 1927 when the business was taken over by his son Ernest. The last ice harvest on Crystal Lake was in the winter of 1940. Five years later, the large ice house was torn down. A local enterprise that had existed for over half a century was now replaced by the technology of modern refrigeration.