This photograph shows ice cutting at Keeler Farm on Nod Road about 1900. It’s part of a walk-through show on house moves and ice cutting that has opened at the Ridgefield Historical Society, now open some Saturdays.
What Ridgefield lakes and ponds were sites for the commercial harvesting of winter ice, once America’s leading export?
How was ice harvesting done on a Ridgefield farm in the first half of the 20th Century?
What Main Street house literally had a skeleton found in a closet when it was cut in half for moving?
What nearby town had its entire village relocated, with horses pulling four houses at time, in the late 1800s?
They’re the sort of things a person might learn on a Saturday when the Ridgefield Historical Society displays on two vanishing activities that were once part of work-a-day economic life in Ridgefield: ice harvesting, and the moving — rather than tearing down — of buildings.
“Commercial ice harvesting created millionaires. It went to as far away as Calcutta and Australia,” said Nancy Selander, society president. “At one point it was the leading export of the country — ice, ice to everywhere.
“Imagine what people from India and Cuba must have thought the first time they touched ice.”
House-moving isn’t exactly a lost art, but today it’s an eccentricity — rich folks indulging a whim — whereas once it was simply the practical thing to do.
“It was so much cheaper to move it than rebuild it,” Ms. Selander said.
The historical society’s show includes photographs and a map of 35 Ridgefield buildings that were moved, or include parts of relocated buildings in them. Some are quite familiar, others are out of the way and their history little known.
There are more detailed accounts on six of them, and separate displays on one well-documented house-move, on Ridgefield building-mover Caro Northrop (1860-1941), and on that nearby village that got relocated.
The show will be open Saturday, Aug. 24, from 1 to 4 at the society’s Scott House at 4 Sunset Lane. The show is inaugurating Saturday hours twice a month at the society.
In the fall and beyond, society will be open 1 to 3, on the second and fourth Saturdays. The society will continue to be open — and the show may be seen into the fall— on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, from 1 to 5.
The ice-harvesting display draws on the late Joseph Tulipani’s memoirs of growing up with four brothers on the family farm on Nod Road.
“In the winter when the freeze was at its height and ice on the ponds were known to be at least a foot thick or better, it was a must to fill the rather small wooden ice house with pieces of ice for the spring,” he wrote.
He provides a detailed, 11-step account of the process by which pond ice was sectioned into rectangles, sawed into blocks, pulled out with tongs, loaded onto a horse-drawn sled, taken to the ice house, and packed in sawdust.
Beyond the Tulipani farm memoir, the show looks at the Gruman Ice Tool Works, a manufacturer that started in Ridgefield in before the Civil War and lasted into the 20th Century. The firm’s recycled building will be recognized by many as a Branchville automotive business.
The display includes large ice tongs, and a scale model of an ice-cutting machine, made as part of the process of acquiring a patent.
A map shows six lakes and ponds in town where ice was harvested commercially by two Ridgefield-based ice companies.
The 1940’s relocation of the 18th Century Patrick Lannon House, also known as Tuppence, is part an exhibit on both house moves and ice cutting that’s on display at the Ridgefield Historical Society. The house was part of a trading post that dates back to 1710, and is now a private home on south Main Street.
The house-moving display shows 35 buildings in town that are documented as moved, but there were surely more.
“We don’t know how many,” said historical society member Elizabeth Reid. “A lot of these moves were unrecorded. Caro Northrop said he moved about 1,000 buildings in this area.”
Drawing on sources that range from local historians like George Rockwell and Dick Venus, to reminiscences like those of Francis Martin, to an 1888 Ridgefield Press, historical society member Michael Grace researched and wrote accounts of the moving of six buildings, including 72 High Ridge, 27 Governor Street, 23 Catoonah Street, 612 Main Street, 192 High Ridge and The Big Shop, which today houses Terrasole Ristorante, The Cake Box, Valery’s, and Luc’s Cafe.
“In Ridgefield’s ‘resort era’ it might have seemed like every other building on Main Street was an inn or hotel,” says his account of The Oreneca Hotel’s relocation to High Ridge and its service there as a private home, convent, and apartment house.
“During the tourist season, as in many resort towns, private homes often did double duty as what we might now call bed and breakfasts. There were also some seasonal inns, but the mainstays were the sometimes quite luxurious year-round establishments.”
Of another High Ridge house, he wrote: “What’s the best way to avoid acquiring undesirable new neighbors? Buy the house next door and move it across the street and down a ways. At least that the solution Mrs. A. Barton Hepburn is reputed to have chosen.”
Week in and week out, people visit or call the Ridgefield Historical Society for a variety of resources or services — help with genealogy research, to learn the history of an old house, with questions on period architecture or historical preservation. The society also has a lending library of works relating to local history, and an interesting collection of donated artifacts.