{"id":9659,"date":"2014-03-13T20:07:36","date_gmt":"2014-03-13T20:07:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/?p=9659"},"modified":"2018-02-07T17:17:35","modified_gmt":"2018-02-07T22:17:35","slug":"ice-cutting-on-bunnell-pond-beardsley-park-1932-1939","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/films\/ice-cutting-on-bunnell-pond-beardsley-park-1932-1939\/","title":{"rendered":"Ice Cutting on Bunnell&#8217;s Pond, Beardsley Park, 1932-1939"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/uwnhvlaN3tk?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Ice Cutting<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201cIce Cutting\u201d was produced for a local Bridgeport Company, The Southern New England Ice Co., which was already over 100 years old at the time the film was made in the 1930\u2019s.\u00a0 The film depicts an activity that was once essential to city and rural life but today has been replaced by commercial ice production and modern refrigeration.\u00a0 The ice harvesting industry reached a high point in the United States in the late 1800\u2019s when the U.S. was exporting thousands of tons of ice a year. Due to the manufacture of modern refrigerators for household purposes and industrial ice production, the practice of ice harvesting was actually drawing to a close in the 1930\u2019s, but the techniques were still widely known throughout the Northeast at that time.\u00a0<!--more-->Northeastern ice companies procured ice from local ponds, lakes, and rivers, insulated the ice blocks in sawdust and straw, stored them in ice houses, and eventually sold and delivered them to individual households and businesses by horse drawn wagon or truck.\u00a0 Cutters used specially devised saws, poles, and hooks to cut and procure the ice, then moved the blocks through channels, onto ramps and chutes, and then into ice houses for storage or wagons for transportation.\u00a0 Farmers and other seasonal workers often provided the labor.\u00a0 Even children performed the essential tasks of clearing snow from the ice (clear ice is slow melting) and cleaning up after the horses.\u00a0 A February of 1929 \u201cBridgeport Post\u201d newspaper article reporting on the start of the ice harvest notes that over 200 men would work to cut 60,000 tons of ice from a pond in Bridgeport\u2019s Beardsley Park<\/p>\n<p>It is interesting to note that \u201cIce Cutting\u201d was filmed during a transitional period for the ice industry that reflected larger changes in manufacturing and domestic life in the United States.\u00a0 Refrigerators were becoming more prevalent in American households. Yet many people were still using iceboxes and thus required ice delivery.\u00a0 But even for this domestic application, manufactured ice was becoming the norm.\u00a0 Purity of product and consistency in availability had become a concern.\u00a0 Many of the bodies of water used by ice companies for harvesting had become too polluted to produce clean ice.\u00a0 The Southern New England Ice Company opened its new plant to the public in 1941 with great fanfare and called its facility the \u201cmost modern in the country\u201d thanks to special water agitators that purified the water as it froze. (\u201cTimes-Star,\u201d May 2, 1941)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 An April 30, 1941, \u201cBridgeport Post\u201d article on the Southern New England Ice Co.\u2019s modern plant exclaims:\u00a0 \u201cPackaged Ice is Industry\u2019s Way of Keeping up With Modern Age.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 The article explains the prevalence of packaged goods in all households and the need for conveniently packaged ice and consistent product.\u00a0 In a seeming reversal of today\u2019s consumer\u2019s trends, manufactured ice had become associated with cleanliness, science, and modernity, preferable to anything culled \u201cfrom nature.\u201d\u00a0 There may also have been other changes occurring that spurred the use of manufactured ice.\u00a0 A \u201cBridgeport Post\u201d article from March 19, 1939, is titled:\u00a0 \u201cState\u2019s Oldest Iceman Finds Winters Too Mild for Natural Ice.\u201d\u00a0 The former ice harvester and ice dealer featured in the article regrets that \u201cwinters aren\u2019t what they used to be\u201d and the fact that the lack of consistently available natural ice in Southern New England has caused him to deal only in manufactured ice.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: medium;\">\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ice Cutting \u201cIce Cutting\u201d was produced for a local Bridgeport Company, The Southern New England Ice Co., which was already over 100 years old at the time the film was made in the 1930\u2019s.\u00a0 The film depicts an activity that was once essential to city and rural life but today has been replaced by commercial [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":11810,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"video","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-video","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films","post_format-post-format-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9659"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12921,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9659\/revisions\/12921"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}