HomeMy WebLinkAbout558"Article taken from the Pickering News, June 29, 1961.
Ice At Bay Once Was Big Business
By W. C. MURKAR
Pickering Township, this year celebrating One Hundred and Fifty years,
finds the majority of its citizens unaware of much of the activity that actually did take place in
this busy area many years back.
A few days ago we overheard ""the ice harvest"" mentioned by some local men.
Few living here today would attach any significance to ice harvesting.
Ice is an article that went out with the arrival of electric refrigerator, but a few still living here
will be able to recall the activity on Frenchman's Bay during the late winter back fifty or sixty
years ago—and earlier.
Simcoe Ice and Fuel Co. is only a name to many today, but to these few still left,
""Simcoe Ice"" provided winter employment for a great many local men, cutting ice,
sometimes nearly three feet thick on the bay here.
Hauling the huge blocks into the storage ice houses which stood at the Bay,
was a sight that attracted the attention of many who went down to the Bay just to see ice
being sawed into blocks, hauled out, and taken away by horse-drawn sleighs to the ice
houses, or—shipped to Toronto, where it was stored.
In addition, local butchers and others who were required to keep a product cold,
or even householders who wanted to have a supply of ice on hand, had their own sawdust
filled ice houses, which were filled each winter with Bay Ice, where it ""kept"" till early the
following summer.
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