The ice harvest business, it was a big deal.

We think of corn as a moneymaking crop, Well, ice was not only that, but it was also a major means of employment for the farmer, or the rancher, and it kept things moving and alive.

Back in the late 1800s, ice harvesting was done by anybody that had a body of water, from a farmer with a pond to large operations on lakes or even rivers.

The goal was to be able to transport perishable goods, meats from, say, Kansas City to New York.

And the only way to do that was by having ice-cooled boxcars that were specially designed to maintain the coolness of the perishable good.

In the past, during the peak ice harvesting era, it would be -10 to -20 degrees almost every night from the peak winter months ending around the 1st of February.

They were able to get three ice crops, and that was shipped by rail to other locations in the country.

The ice would be on the ends of the car filling the space here, this whitish area, on both ends.

You're aiming to get to a 24-inch thickness of ice.

Once that was formed, you would be ready to harvest.

And you would cut long, parallel grooves with what they called an ice plow.

It was driven or hauled by a horse.

[horse snorts] Once you had a lot of these parallel grooves across the lake, then you would crosscut it again, and that would form your blocks.

Its kinda heavy.

Now, once you had a 75ft by 24ft float, you could actually use a tool to pull it over to what they call a spudding area.

So ice pike and spudding bar.

The individual cakes of ice would be split off and then sent by conveyor up into the ice house for storage.

And that was the original ice house that these two English gentlemen, constructed to try to see what they could make from harvesting ice on Palmer Lake.

You would separate those layers with 12 inches of sawdust.

Sawdust, if it's dry, is an excellent insulator.

So it there was no danger of them becoming one huge hunk of ice.

The ice harvesting business, it was still in full swing during the Great Depression era.

We could keep maybe, 10 to 15, 20 people, busy for two or three months of the year.

in the wintertime.

And they were all locals.

And they were ranchers or potato growers.

And at Monument Lake, they could hire as many as 50 people three months out of the year, sometimes more depending on the workload.

Slowly but surely after the 20s, mechanical means of keeping things cool gradually took over, and ice harvesting slowed down quite a bit.

There just wasn't the need anymore.

So ice harvesting, at least on Monument Lake, did not stop until 1943.

Ice harvesting played a vital role in the history for Palmer Lake.

Just to keep food on the table, it would have been one means of doing that.

Ice was a luxury item, and it made your life as a pioneer much easier.