thoreau: the ice men

…He became fascinated with the phenomena of the pond. In the spring of 1846, before the ice broke up, he surveyed carefully the size and depth of the pond. He cut holes in the ice and charted his findings with a cod line and pound-and-a-half stone, a compass, and a chain. Native Concordians had sworn that the pond had no bottom, but he quickly put an end to their stories and proved that Walden had a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though an unusual depth. When, a century later, a trained limnologist checked the pond with the latest complex instruments, he was astounded to learn how accurate Thoreau’s findings had been.

---1. Henry David Thoreau.  Walden Pond, manuscript survey (ink on paper), [1846].  No. 133a in CFPL Thoreau survey collection.---click image for source...

—1. Henry David Thoreau. Walden Pond, manuscript survey (ink on paper), [1846]. No. 133a in CFPL Thoreau survey collection.—click image for source…

In February of 1847 Frederic Tudor, the “king” of the New England ice industry, took over the pond for a time. He and his former partner, Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, had quarreled. For years they had garnered huge profits by cutting ice near Boston and shipping it to warmer climates ranging from New Orleans to Calcutta. Now Wyeth gained control of the ice cutting rights on most of the ponds they had been using. Rather than give in, Tudor moved farther from his base and purchased the rights to Walden Pond from Emerson and the Fitchburg Railroad.

Shortly afterward, a hundred Irish laborers and their Yankee supervisors began coming daily from Cambridge on the railroad. They often harvested as much as a thousand tons a day, stacking it up in a pile thirty-five feet high, banking it with hay, and covering it with boards. Thoreau was delighted. Here was one commercial venture that could do no harm to his pond or his woods, and the ice cutters, he thought, were a merry race, full of jest and sport. When he talked with them, they good-naturedly invited him to help saw the ice and, when the men fell into the water- which they did frequently- he invited them to use his cabin for a warming hut. ( to be continued)…

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