Technology, pollution doomed Penobscot River ice industry

Bangoreans already knew a century ago that their export ice industry was dying, a victim of financial manipulation and technology. Then, one day in July 1908, the president of the much reviled American Ice Co., which controlled most of the ice trade on the East Coast, came to town to deliver the death certificate.

The season had begun on a sour note. There was “slight prospect” that much ice would be cut on the Penobscot River that winter, said the Bangor Daily Commercial on Dec. 20, 1907. The American Ice Co. had cut about 75,000 tons last winter, and most of it, that which hadn’t melted anyway, still was sitting in the company’s three icehouses on the banks of the river. Only small companies such as Getchell Bros. and the Bangor Ice Co., which took most of their ice from Kenduskeag Stream and sold it locally, would be doing much cutting, the newspaper predicted.

Hopes picked up a bit in January. Word got out that the American Ice Co. probably would be cutting 12,000 tons, or enough to fill its Arctic icehouse. The American and Orrington icehouses were already near capacity from last year’s harvest, said the Bangor Daily News on Jan. 21, 1908.

Three days later, the Commercial said hundreds of unemployed men would benefit if the ice were cut. The Panic of 1907 had taken its toll in eastern Maine, leaving many skilled workers without jobs.

The weather grew colder and the ice became thick enough to cut, but nothing happened except up the Kenduskeag where the small companies worked. The Bangor Daily News waxed gloomy in an editorial on Feb. 7, taking to task the trusts and particularly Charles W. Morse, the Bath man who had founded the American Ice Co. and was now involved in endless controversy and litigation that would eventually land him in prison.

“Since Charles W. Morse formed the great ice trust the harvest from the surface of ponds and lakes and streams in Maine has been a negligible quantity, yielding small profits to the men who perform the work and of no considerable benefit to the state,” said the editorial writer. “Thirty years ago the cutting and housing of ice on Penobscot river was an important industry, bringing in thousands of dollars every winter to residents of Bangor and vicinity, and yielding fair to big profits to those who owned the shacks and houses in which the cold commodity was stored. But since the winter of 1897 there have been small and uncertain profits in putting up ice.”

There was ice enough in Maine to cool off the entire nation, and it could be marketed in New York and other big cities for a profit at far below the prices charged by the trust, “but so long as the ‘trust busters’ in Congress permit the combination to restrain trade and stifle competition those among us who hope for a revival of the old days on Penobscot River must remain idle and submit.”

The editorial writer concluded bitterly, “To be sure Charles W. Morse, the organizer of the trust, has been kicked out of the corporation, but the men who have succeeded are fully as soulless as he. … So it really didn’t matter whether the Penobscot froze up in January or remained open all winter.”

The ice in the river disappeared as spring neared. None of it was cut by the American Ice Co. In June two schooners appeared to take away a small amount from the American Ice House in Hampden, and once again the papers cheered and speculated that unemployed men in the area would be back to work soon – not cutting, but loading ice on vessels.

Then, in early July, one of the American Ice Co.’s “soulless” owners, President Wesley M. Oler Jr. of New York City, appeared in Bangor on a summer romp with his son. He was there also to inspect his icehouses as well and to deliver a message to the folks of Bangor, perhaps to let them know he had some sort of a soul even if it was colored green.

Oler said his company expected to keep the icehouses on the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers full, but the ice would only be needed in the summer – and only for a while. He explained: “We can supply New York with machine ice and Hudson crop; machine ice is used largely too in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington and Alexandria. But when there is an extra demand on account of hot weather, the Maine crops have to be drawn upon. That is what is happening now.

“But even the Hudson is giving way to the machines. We haven’t the capacity on the Hudson now, by 600,000 tons, that we had a few years ago. Machine ice will entirely take the place of native ice in a few years anyway – it is a matter of evolution. We cannot today put Maine ice into New York and sell it at prices we charge for machine ice and Hudson ice. There wouldn’t be any profit in it, and we are not in business for our health,” he concluded, as quoted in the Bangor Daily News on July 2.

The next day Oler and his son were the guests of Commodore Elias C. Benedict, the well-known New York banker and stockbroker, for a sail down Penobscot Bay on his steam yacht Oneida. A bevy of Bangor’s distinguished citizens, including Franklin W. Cram, president of the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad, accompanied the party, apparently having no trouble socializing with the “soulless” forces of the ice trust.

There it was in a nutshell. As in so many areas of its economy, Maine had gotten too far away from the markets as the country’s population moved West, and its hardworking residents were being bested by technology – ice manufacturing machines in this case – that rendered its raw material obsolete.

Health was also part of the equation. Water in the rivers of America was becoming polluted with sewage and industrial debris. Ice cutting near the American Ice Co.’s Stetson icehouse, for example, had been abandoned two years before because it was covered with cinders from the Maine Central Railroad yard.

“There is, of course, sewage dumped into Maine rivers, but in such small quantities that Penobscot or Kennebec water is pretty near nectar in comparison with the Hudson,” wrote a naive reporter for the Commercial on March 3. Polluted river water had caused a typhoid epidemic just four years before.

By 1919, when Louis C. Hatch published his history of Maine, there were no more icehouses left on the Penobscot River. The export ice business was about over.

wreilly@bangordailynews.net