Stillwater On Ice

The last community ice harvest at the west end of the Stillwater Reservoir occurred on Jan. 12 and 13, 1953. Later that year power lines finally reached the community and folks switched to electric refrigerators and freezers. Until then, refrigeration was provided by ice harvested from the flow. 

The two largest consumers of ice at Stillwater were the Stillwater Hotel and the Rap-Shaw Club. Both had large ice houses to fill. The 1953 ice harvest was a coordinated effort by these two institutions. The Rap-Shaw team was directed by the club steward, Herbie Nye, and included members Rex Baxter, Frank Leet, Harlan Wheadon, Dick Welliver, and guest Tom Root, Baxter’s brother-in-law from Ohio. The hotel team was led by Emmett Hill, the hotel owner, and included Denny Boshart, Bob Griswold, as well as one or two other unidentified Stillwater residents.

 

Ice harvesting was simple, cold, hard work. First, the surface of the ice was cleared of snow by hand shoveling, then the ice was marked and the long cuts made with a special power saw. In this case the ice saw was a homemade rig owned by Herbie Nye powered by a car engine and using a large circular saw, probably from a sawmill.

Next, the shorter side cuts were made by hand with special ice saws. 

 

The blocks were then broken free with long metal rods, and floated down a channel to an edge where a vehicle waited.

 

The ice was about twenty-two inches thick in 1953. The blocks weighed 100 to 125 pounds each. They were pulled onto the bottom of a custom hoist on a portable frame and raised to where they could be shoved into a vehicle. Here it was Rex’s Pontiac.

 

Finally, the blocks were hauled to the ice house, pushed inside along a wooden ramp, then covered with sawdust or straw for insulation. 

The ice that winter was more than thick enough to easily support the workers and their vehicles.

Emmett Hill brought his red 1950 Chevy pick-up truck. Emmett was the area’s Forest Ranger as well as the hotel owner, and the red pickup was his official ranger truck supplied by the state. Herbie Nye brought his 1925 Model T Ford snowmobile. It seems certain that this vehicle was the one once owned by the Stillwater dam keeper, Carl Rowley. More about the Rowley snowmobile can be found in my post of 02/18/25, see

https://beaverriverhistory.blogspot.com/2025/02/carl-rowleys-snowmobile.html. I have not been able to determine the owner of the second Model T seen in the photos. The brand new 1953 green Pontiac Chieftain station wagon was owned by Rex Baxter who drove it to Stillwater from Elmira by way of Utica, where he picked up Tom Root at the train station.

 

Tom Root was a serious photographer. On this his first visit to Stillwater, he brought along his “Stereo Realist” camera. That camera made color slides that looked passably three dimensional with the use of a special viewer. Years later after Tom and his family became Rap-Shaw members, he wrote the account on which this article is based. The now fragile stereo slides he took still exist in the Rap-Shaw Club archive along with digital scans carefully made by Industrial Color Labs of Syracuse.

 

Additional research on the identities of the 1953 participants was provided by Stillwater summer resident Dennis Buckley and by Lowville resident Michelle Kelly, grand-daughter of Emmett Hill. Old-fashioned ice harvesting can still be witnessed in mid-winter at Raquette Lake and at Saranac Lake the week prior to Winter Carnaval as they build the ice palace. It is rumored that Herbie Nye’s power ice saw still exists. If that turns out to be true, it will be the subject of a future post.