The winter season has always been a busy time in Fishtown. This year we have Team Elmer’s completing construction projects involving the main entrance of Fishtown in preparation for the 2024 season, but historically Fishtown would be in the middle of a very busy time of year indeed: ice harvest season.
For about two weeks in January or February, local fishermen and merchants would harvest ice from Lake Leelanau and transport it to ice houses and storage sheds located in Fishtown and the surrounding community. Large blocks were packed in sawdust in the ice shanties to last for the entirety of the upcoming warm seasons. For the fishermen the ice ensured the freshness of fish in the transition from lake to market, and for community and summer residents it stocked iceboxes to help keep food cold in the warmer months.
The ice needed to be solid enough to hold horse wagons and in later years trucks that could haul it away from the lake, ideally at least a foot thick. Men used saws to cut slabs, then broke them apart with chisels and pulled them up a ramp into the back of a wagon or truck using tow hooks. When situating blocks in the ice house or storage shed, they used large tongs to handle each block and layered sawdust between each block to insulate and protect against the formation of one large ice block.
There were originally five ice houses located in Fishtown, and two still stand today, one on each side of the Leland River. Fishing partners Will Harting and Otto Light reputedly built the ice house that is on the north side of Fishtown in 1926 to serve the needs of theirs and the Henry J. Steffens’ fisheries. By the 1950s it served all the remaining Fishtown fishermen, until the arrival of coolers and ice makers beginning in the 1960s. You can visit this historical building next season as the new location of the Fishtown Preservation Welcome Center. We hope to see you there in just a few months!
Keeping commercial fishing traditions alive in Fishtown is something that’s important to us at Fishtown Preservation. While we don’t have to rely on an annual ice harvest to keep the whitefish that Captain Joel Peterson catches on the Joy in the summertime fresh, the winter season is still a time of busy preparation for Fishtown. We look forward to unveiling the new entrance to Fishtown this year, which was funded by donations to the Campaign for Fishtown. The previous entrance and retaining wall were nearly forty years old, being eroded by road runoff, and needed to meet modern access criteria. Thank you to everyone who contributed financially to make this and all our high-water remediation projects possible. And an extra-special thanks to the amazing construction crews who continue to do the work through, rain, snow—or ice!
