The Ice Age on Fresh Pond
When Frederic Tudor created the ice-shipping business out of Boston in the 1800s he had no idea that his risky venture would help a small farming community on the western shore of Fresh Pond become a town.
Tudor had been cutting ice on Fresh Pond for sale in Boston. In 1806 his brig Favorite successfully carried ice from Boston to Martinique, the first shipment of ice to a foreign port. A few years later he boldly shipped ice to Cuba and Puerto Rico. He succeeded and the Tudor Ice Company ice business grew.
By 1825 Tudor was doing well with ice sales but the difficulty of hand cutting large blocks limited his company's growth. One supplier, Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, son of the owner of the Fresh Pond Hotel, harnessed horses to a metal blade to cut the ice. Wyeth's invention made mass production a reality and allowed Tudor to more than triple his production.
Wyeth designed other tools for cutting and handling ice at every stage of the extended process. Snow had to be plowed from the surface of the ice by horse-drawn plow. The area then was surveyed and the boundary lines for the six hundred foot squares marked with a hand cutter. Then came a cutter with two blades; one to guide, the other, a large toothed blade, left a two inch deep preliminary groove The horses drew the cutter back and forth across the ice leaving a grid pattern on the surface.
Another double bladed cutter followed cutting deeper into the surface. Finally, an iron ice plow with adjustable blades cut within four inches of the bottom of the ice. The last step of the process required long bladed saws, long-handled spades and fork bars all worked by hand. Large sections of the huge ice squares were cut away and the men rode them like rafts, breaking off smaller pieces as they floated toward the ice houses.
Ice was harvested in a number of New England ponds for export and distribution throughout the Caribbean, Europe and India from 1826 to 1892. Spy Pond in Arlington and Fresh Pond were among them. Tudor's wharves in Charlestown became very active and Frederic Tudor became known as the "Ice King of New England."
Although the first shipment of ice made by the Tudor Ice Company came from Frederic's father's pond in Saugus, many of the later shipments came from Fresh Pond which was part of Belmont from 1859 until it was annexed to Cambridge in 1880. The Fresh Pond Ice Company was a branch of the Tudor Ice Company of Boston. This branch was managed by Jacob Hittinger and it became locally known as Hittinger's Ice Company.
The expense of hauling ice by horse and wagon from Fresh Pond to the docks in Charlestown was so great that Mr. Tudor secured a charter from the Massachusetts General Court and a railroad was built to transport the ice. The line reached Fresh Pond in 1843 and was extended to Waltham by December the same year.
Without the "ice railroad" to Fresh Pond it is unlikely that any railroad would have been planned for the route and a purely agricultural community might not have become the Belmont it is today.
Belmont won her incorporation in 1859 and Jacob Hittinger became a member of the first board of selectmen. Frederic Tudor died in 1864 without witnessing the decline and eventual extinction of the business which made him wealthy and famous. The last ice was cut on Fresh Pond in 1891 and the ice houses torn down in 1892.
In 1844 Hittinger's Ice Company secured a place in the history of the Boston waterfront by cutting a passage through the ice from the wharf at East Boston to open water through which a Cunard line steamer sailed on the appointed day saving Boston's future as a commercial port.