Frozen Water in Belmont: Stories of Imagination and Unexpected Consequences

By Anne-Marie Lambert

Belmont would not be the town we know today without ice. Glaciers a mile high carved local hills and valleys to create a wetlands attractive to migrating wildlife. The unusual behavior of frozen water molecules ensured not just game-hunting but also ice fishing would support a substantial Native American population for thousands of years. Harsh winters necessitated both innovation and cooperation among tribes to ensure survival.

By 1820 local ice men descended from European settlers started to innovate in different ways. They shipped ice to warm places as far away as Calcutta, employing local farm hands to cut ice in winter and coal delivery men to make local ice deliveries in the warmer months. In 1841 the new railroad added a dog leg to pick up ice in Fresh Pond on its westward route to Fitchburg. That railroad and one of those ice men led to the incorporation of Belmont as a town in 1859, with tax revenue contributions from Frederic Tudor, Jacob Hittinger, and other local ice men.

Even today, when citizens can easily move to warmer climates, cold New England winters—and the potholes they create—test the mettle of residents attracted to the rich natural, educational, and business ecosystem of this region. Stories from Belmont’s history can give one new perspective on today’s innovations and communities.

Ice Forms the Land of Belmont

Over a million years ago, an ancient ocean extended as far as today’s Route 495. About 50,000 years ago, the ocean receded as its waters gathered into the polar ice caps, exposing the layered bedrock and blue clay at the bottom of the ocean. Also exposed during the last Ice Age was the land bridge that connected Siberia with Alaska and gave people from Asia an ice-free corridor into present-day Canada. These are thought to be the ancestors of the Native Americans who first lived in this area.

In the newly formed watershed, any rain that fell on the land that became Belmont drained through both surface and underground streams into what became the Charles River. About 15,000 years ago, the Laurentide Ice Sheet in the Arctic started melting after moving so far south that the land that became Belmont was compressed under one mile of ice. The kettle ponds that mark the final resting place of the glacier include Spy Pond, Fresh Pond, and Little Pond. The moraines and eskers left in the glacier’s wake blocked tributaries like the Menotomy River (now Alewife Brook) and diverted the meltwater and surface drainage towards the Mystic River. Certain underground flows unaffected by the glacier still drain to the Charles River today.

Because of the blockages, a wetlands ecosystem developed on top of the bedrock and clay. Eventually known as the Great Swamp, its peat moss and rich biodiversity were treasured by Native Americans and early European settlers alike, as was the underlying clay.

Native Americans and European Settlers Adapt to the Seasons

In their Algonquin language, Native Americans who used to live here called themselves “The People of the First Light,” and the Northeast coast land where they lived “Dawnland.” Based on a tusk found in 1959 in Spy Pond, we can imagine that at least one mastodon roamed near here about 42,000 years ago. While the tusk may have been dragged here by the glacier, I like to think the People of the First Light followed both the rising sun and descendants of that mastodon into what we now think of as our neighborhood when they arrived in New England about 12,000 years ago.

The People of the First Light, now known as the Wabanaki Conference, lived here for thousands of years, changing their location with the seasons in order to hunt and fish, including ice fishing for freshwater fish like pickerel in the winter. They would move inland to find shelter from harsh coastal storms. Their trails would follow the easier grades of our topography, favor the sunny side of local hills, and stay leeward of prevailing winds. Their trails were adopted by Europeans and now mark many of today’s highways like Route 60 and Route 2.

Little Ice Age (1600s–1800s)

Frederic Tudor’s grandfather would have told him that Boston Harbor froze over in 1740 and 1741, part of the “Little Ice Age.” Particularly cold winters lasted for a few centuries in much of the northern hemisphere. During the “Year Without a Summer” in 1816, there were food shortages throughout the area. While conditions in that particular year are now attributed to the 1815 explosion of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia, scientists have been exploring other factors besides volcanoes to explain regional dips in average temperature during the Little Ice Age.

The rapid deforestation and reforestation of Europe and the Eastern United States may have contributed to the unusual climate pattern by releasing or trapping a large enough quantity of carbon dioxide to affect the climate. The long-standing tree-clearing practices in our area were rapidly curtailed by the death of over 90% of the Native American population from European diseases, after the bubonic plague had similarly killed one-quarter of the farming populations in Europe a few centuries earlier. Most of the forests that grew back here were eventually cut down again by European settlers and their descendants, not just for agriculture but also for lumber to build homes, ships, and commercial buildings, including the suburban developments we live in today.

Another cold winter came in 1844. The firms of Belmont’s own Jacob Hittinger, along with his former partner John Hill, were hailed as heroes when they used their ice-cutting skills and equipment to cut a 200-foot-wide passage from the wharf at East Boston through the frozen Boston harbor in three days. Their efforts enabled the Cunard steamer ship Britannia to proceed to sea on schedule, extending Boston’s reputation as a reliable commercial port for a few more years. Soon afterwards, though, New York took over as the major commercial shipping port of the Northeast.

In most ways, winter was a more difficult season for both Native Americans and European settlers, requiring extra effort to find and preserve food, to stay warm, and to keep merchant ships on schedule. However, some things improved in winter. Fresh Pond eventually became a popular skating destination for Harvard students, for example. In the 1870s, one famous student who skated for hours on Fresh Pond was Teddy Roosevelt.¹

When snow and ice could support a sleigh, land transportation became much easier than in the muddy spring. Bundling up for a holiday sleigh ride between Arlington and Belmont was a tradition for local families. Lydia Maria (“mar-EYE-a”) Childs, a local Watertown author, later captured the magic of a winter sleigh ride in her famous 1844 poem “Over the River and Through the Woods.” As the daughter of a housewife—a trained domestic engineer—I was especially interested to read Child’s 1829 book, The American Frugal Housewife, with such tips as how to prevent a frozen pump.

A different kind of transportation eventually changed our local landscape. Dreams of a “frozen water” industry facilitated by new steam-driven engines started Belmont on the path to becoming a railroad suburb.

Local Ice Industry: Tudor and Wyeth

By the late 1700s, New England farms and country estates would harvest ice for their own use from local ponds and store it in underground ice sheds. This was the practice at estates in what is now Belmont and at the Tudor family estate in Saugus. Legend has it that while sipping an ice-cooled drink in the summer of 1805, Frederic Tudor decided to try shipping New England ice to hotter climates. An impressive marketer, Tudor made headlines with his 1806 shipment of ice to Martinique. He and his brother learned important lessons: build an ice house before the ice arrives; negotiate lower shipping costs by proposing ice as ballast on an empty ship’s journey from Boston; consider layering the ice with local Baldwin apples to increase revenue.

Financially, the Martinique adventure was a failure. Subsequent ventures yielded more lessons in how to invent and establish the “frozen water” trade; one even took Tudor to debtors’ prison. With the help of his family, his inventive supplier and eventual partner Nathaniel Wyeth, and the many business relationships he forged around the world, Tudor traveled a long road to pay off his many debts. As Tudor’s foreman, Wyeth invented the horse-drawn ice-cutter in 1827, at age 25. He also invented many of the iron ice tools used throughout the area. In Arlington, William T. Wood & Co. became one of the chief manufacturers of such ice tools throughout the region and the country.

Eventually, Tudor shipped ice to Calcutta, Bombay, and Barbados, as well as to New Orleans and many other ports in the southern US. Still, economics scholar David G. Dickason estimates that it wasn’t until 1847, at age 65, that Tudor was finally in the black. Moreover, Dickason concludes, Tudor became one of the country’s early millionaires by the time he died at age 80 in 1864 mainly because of the real estate he had purchased for storing ice locally and around the world, and not so much because of selling ice at a large profit.

In Tudor’s day, Fresh Pond was divided between Cambridge and Watertown. Wyeth’s family operated a famous hotel on Fresh Pond and owned a substantial portion of the shoreline. In 1838, Tudor bought Fresh Pond Farm in Watertown specifically for its access to the pond in winter. In 1841, as the industry was thriving, a carefully engineered map divvied up the ice among ice “farmers” based on the percentage of shoreline each stakeholder owned. Local land values soared. In 1859, the Watertown portion of Fresh Pond became part of the new town of Belmont, including both Tudor and Wyeth’s portions. In 1880, Cambridge successfully petitioned to acquire the Belmont portion of Fresh Pond in order to protect its water supply.

Before and after he died, Tudor’s role in the ice industry received a lot of attention, with several books written about his personality and entrepreneurship.² As an engineer’s daughter, I find myself curious to understand the path of the inventive Wyeth, as well as other local “ice men” who were not all born with Tudor’s privilege, his colorful personality, or his family connections and wealth.

After trying to make his fortune by opening trading posts in Oregon in the 1830s, Nathaniel Wyeth returned just as the railroad was taking off in Boston. Wyeth became an ice merchant in his own right after a dispute with Tudor over an 1829 patent for the ice plow. An “engineer’s engineer,” Wyeth was responsible for bringing a spur of the now abandoned Charlestown railroad to the shores of Fresh Pond in 1841 to transport large blocks of ice to Boston Harbor. A similar spur on the Lexington line soon picked up ice from Spy Pond and Little Pond in what was West Cambridge (now Arlington).

Wyeth designed specially insulated cars for ice to travel by train. He also played a role in designing steam-powered conveyor belts to deliver the ice to new double-insulated, above-ground ice houses, and in engineering the shoreline of Fresh Pond to create more shallow waters so the ice “harvest” would be available earlier in the winter.

The potential to harvest ice on Walden Pond was one reason for building a new railroad from Boston to Concord by way of Waltham. By 1843, the Fitchburg line ran parallel to the Charlestown line, stopping, as it does today, in Porter Square in Cambridge and Plympton’s Crossing (now Waverley) in what was then Watertown. In Concord, Henry David Thoreau reflected on Tudor’s ice harvesting on Walden Pond in 1847 with mixed feelings. Delighted to contemplate that while he was “bathing his intellect” in the philosophy of the “Bhagvat Geeta,” residents of Calcutta might be “sharing his well” with him, he was unhappy about the removal of “the only coat, ay, the skin itself, of Walden Pond.”³ Meanwhile, in Calcutta, while most of the ice was consumed by the British in India, the Hindu mystic Ramakrishna (1836–1886) did start to use the image of blocks of ice, a recently introduced American product, to contemplate the theistic question, “If God has a form, why does He have so many forms?”⁴

The freight trains soon became popular for passengers too. By 1855, the Waverley Land Company had laid out a subdivision near Plympton’s Crossing, and the prestigious railroad suburb we now know as Belmont had begun. By naming the new subdivision after the popular 1814 novel Waverley by Sir Walter Scott, the investors captured the imagination of future residents. By the turn of the century additional stops were added at Wellington (now Belmont Center) and at Hill’s Crossing (at the Brighton Street end of the Alewife bike path).

Local Ice Industry: Hittinger and Howard

Our most civic-minded Belmont “ice man” was the son of an English mother and a first-generation German father who died abroad when he was five years old. Jacob Hittinger began working at age 14 as a gardener, moving into the produce business in Boston by age 19, in 1825. A few years later, he partnered with John Hill to cut and ship ice from both Spy and Fresh Ponds, which he did for over 20 years in a series of partnerships with the local businessmen Hill, Gage, and Sawyer. Hittinger was involved in ice shipments to southern ports such as Mobile, Alabama, as well as one of the first attempts to ship ice to England. In 1842, he tried to sell Britons on the idea of mixed drinks with ice by training London bartenders in advance to create chilled cocktails like the sherry cobbler, juleps, and smashes. He gave up, and must have been frustrated when another competitor, Charles B. Lander, had better luck selling them “Wenham Ice” two years later.

Hittinger moved from Charlestown to Watertown in 1849, shortly after the arrival of the railroad. He pushed hard to incorporate Belmont as a town. He led five attempts to create Belmont from parts of Watertown, Waltham, and West Cambridge (now Arlington) starting in 1855 and only succeeding in 1859. He was elected one of the first Belmont selectmen, as were several of his seven sons. Court records suggest that he and others tried unsuccessfully to receive compensation for their four years of lobbying expenses.

Hittinger was a successful ice dealer, harvesting on Fresh Pond, Spy Pond, and Little Pond. Late in his life, however, he ran into financial difficulties. One winter was too warm for ice in Boston (1869–70), allowing Maine ice men to pick up the slack. A big fire in December 1874 destroyed the Charlestown wharf he owned, as well as several nearby train cars on the Fitchburg railroad.⁵ Nonetheless, by the time he died in 1880, Hittinger had played a pioneering role in the ice industry and a strong civic role in the new town of Belmont. Several of his sons and grandsons carried on his Fresh Pond Ice Company from Charlestown. Other sons ran the Hittinger Fruit Company in Belmont, a return to Jacob’s gardening roots.

Our last ice man, William C. Howard, cut ice well into the 1890s on Mill Pond and Duck Pond, then known as Handyside Pond. In 1860, the Howard brothers purchased a Watertown company and followed a pattern common throughout New England of cutting ice from shallow ponds created by the dams associated with old mills. In September 1892, as one of the owners of Howard Ice Co., William Howard blasted out a large rock from the center of Mill Pond to create more surface area for ice to form. For the most part, this ice appears to have been used for stocking ice boxes and making ice cream, but not for consumption. Though fed by Beaver Brook just downstream of the famous Belmont Spring, such shallow mill ponds tended to have murkier water. I like to imagine what it was like when the ice man would deliver to each home or business, checking the signs left in each window to know what was ordered, removing the ice with huge tongs, and trimming it cleanly to fit each size of ice box.

Today

While the last ice was cut on Fresh Pond in 1891, Spy Pond ice cutting continued until a fire in 1930 destroyed the last ice house. With pollution of our local ponds becoming more evident, this was also the time when the regional water authority was set up to bring in cleaner water from suburban reservoirs, so it may have been a good time to stop shipping ice cubes for others. Even Spy Pond was eventually treated—in situ—with lime and copper sulfate to kill algae to improve the quality of the ice for consumption.

Chilled food and drinks are still as alluring as ever, even in winter: friends and families visit Rancatore’s and Moozy’s for frozen treats and red-cheeked conversation; the energy and smiles as skaters zoom ’round Viglirolo Skating Rink must recall the fun our predecessors had on frozen lakes, as well as at the DCR rink by Route 2, which attracted crowds through the 1950s; and the expertise of today’s Belmont bartenders, distillers, and beer-sellers includes more chilled drinks than Tudor and Hittinger could have imagined.

Tudor got the ice industry going, Wyeth connected it with the railroad, Howard kept it local, and Hittinger turned the new suburb into a town, our town. You can see Tudor’s grave at King’s Chapel Burying Ground in Boston, Wyeth’s and Hittinger’s at Mount Auburn Cemetery, and Howard’s at the Common Street Cemetery in Watertown. You can also think of these ice men the next time you drive on Hittinger Street by the Belmont High School, or look out on Spy Pond from Route 2, or stroll by the cascade at the Beaver Brook Reservation, or just notice the steam-powered locomotive proudly included in the Belmont town seal depicted on our big new trash and recycling bins. As you witness people and nature adapting to winter, or contemplate the future of the town ice rink, don’t just imagine what’s possible with a public/private partnership, imagine what it took to survive the last Ice Age, and the bigger opportunities and adventures our next climate change might hold.

Anne-Marie Lambert is co-director of the Belmont Stormwater Working Group and has recently retired from the board of the Belmont Citizens Forum. She would like to thank Viktoria Haase of the Belmont Historical Society for educating her about the Howard Brothers and making the amazing resources of the Claflin Room at the Belmont Public Library available for this article.

Footnotes

1. Sinclair, Jill, Fresh Pond, The History of a Cambridge Landscape, 2009.

2. One such book is The Frozen Water Trade, A True Story by Gavin Weightman, 2003.

3. Thoreau, Henry D., Walden, Or, Life in the Woods, 1908. Chapter xvi, “The Pond in Winter.”

4. Wilson, J. “Ganga and Hinduism,” Appendix 2, in E. Hillary, From the Ocean to the Sky, 1979.

5. Philadelphia Inquirer, December 18, 1874.

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Molecular Structure of Water, H₂O

Most materials are denser as solids than as liquids and “freeze” from the bottom up. Ice is unique due to the tetrahedral molecular structure that forms as negatively charged oxygen atoms simultaneously repel from each other and are attracted to the hydrogen atoms of neighboring water molecules.

The coldest and densest water in a pond is still at the bottom, but then floats to the surface as the hexagon ice crystals form. This cycle is a foundation of pond ecosystems in the Northeast, where amphibians hibernate in the bottom mud without freezing, and other creatures survive all but the harshest winters thanks to the oxygen trapped under the ice.

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Additional reference materials 

1889 Annual Report of National Museum of Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Report of the National Museum, Section II Report of the Curators, page 329

Belmont Historical Society Newsletters

   – December 1971, Vol. VI No. 2, on Beaver Brook area (Mill and Duck ponds)

   – June 198,2 Vol. XVI No. 4, on Hittinger Farm Greenhouses

   – December 1972, Vol VII No. 2, on Ice Cutting on Fresh Pond

Betts, Richard B., Footsteps through Belmont: A historical walking tour of the town, 1985

Betts, Richard B., The Streets of Belmont and How they were Named, Belmont HIstorical Society, 2012

Butler, Daniel Allen, The Age of Cunard: A Transatlantic History 1839-2003, 2003

Davis, Thomas W., “Chapter XLIV, Belmont” from The History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, with Biographical Sketches, compiled by D. Hamilton Hurd, Vol III 1890 p. 682-700, including section on Jacob Hittinger

Dickason, David G., ”The Nineteenth-Century Indo-American Ice Trade: An Hyperborean Epic,” Modern Asian Studies, January 1991 25(01):53 – 89 DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X00015845

Freeman, John Ripley, Report on Improvement of the Upper Mystic River and Alewife Brook by means of Tide Gates and Large Drainage Channels, Massachusetts Metropolitan Park Commission, 1904

Ice Business Arlington, Massachusetts 1880s-1940, edited by Oakes Plimpton, from Stories of Early 20th Century Life, Arlington Arts Council, 1992

“Ice Culture,” Charles’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, February 13, 1864, page 99

Kaye, Clifford A., “The Geology and Early History of the Boston Area of Massachusetts, A Bicentennial Approach,” Geological Survey Bulletin 1476, US Department of the Interior, 1976

Mann, Charles C., 1491, 2005

Kirsner, Scott. “Ice King Frederic Tudor was One Cool Character,” Boston Globe, August 17, 2018.

Mass Historical Commission, History & Archaeological Resources of the Boston Area, A framework for Preservation Decisions, 1982

Philadelphia Inquirer December 16, 1874, “Fires at Charlestown Wharves at a wharf owned by Jacob Hittinger”

The Taxable Valuation of the Real and Personal Estates, with the Amount of Tax in the Town of Belmont for the Year 1876, Belmont 1875-1885, Ref 352.1

Town of Arlington Open Space and Recreation Plan 2015-2022