I was sitting on a chunk of ice along the shore drinking hot chocolate when one of my daughters reminded me of a favorite Maine picture book, Cocoa Ice, by Diana Applebaum. When “winter grips Maine hard,” a cold little girl drinks hot cocoa from the island of Santo Domingo. Her Uncle Jacob traveled on a schooner in the 1800s to trade Maine ice for that cocoa from “the island of always summer where chocolate grows on trees” and “children never wear boots or clean ashes from the stove because winter never comes”. Here, a little girl stands lookout from a palm tree watching for the schooner so that she can make cocoa ice. They each taste different places in different seasons half a world apart. While the adults trade goods, the little girls trade treasures. Uncle Jacob brings a balsam bag from the little girl in Maine to the one in Santo Domingo and returns
with a conch shell in exchange.
This is a lovely story and happens to be quite accurate. It describes the island of Santo Domingo, which is now divided into two countries – the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
Cocoa is still a valuable product in both countries where it is picked from the trees, dried, roasted and ground – the same steps that the little girl and her mother used in Cocoa Ice, although many of them are now mechanized.
Maine’s ice trade, however, ended with the advent of refrigeration, but this book illustrates in detail the traditional methods of harvesting ice from Maine waters. There were ice houses all along the Maine coast, but the ones that held ice for trade to faraway places had to be along a river where the schooners could come in and then travel south. Many of these, as like the one in Cocoa Ice, were along the Kennebec River.
The first part of the ice harvest was determining when the ice was ready. Men would go out with ice augurs to test the ice for ample thickness, carefully laying boards across to distribute their weight. The ice had to be thick enough not just for men, but also for horses, which pulled dredges across the ice to scrape off the snow. Too much snow on top of the ice would insulate the water underneath and keep the ice from freezing thick
and clear. Once it was ready, the ice boss would rule the ice with lines. Then, they would be cut with grooves to score the blocks. When all the blocks had been scored, ice saws cut them free so that they could float across the open water to the ice house.
The ice house was a large wooden shed with double walls that were packed inside with sawdust to insulate them. Teams of men used heavy chains to stack the blocks were high in rows. Then, hay was packed on top of the harvested ice and then the door was shut until spring. It was a virtual ice box inside and had to be kept closed so that the ice inside would last until the ice outside broke up and schooners could load the blocks on board to
be traded.
The schooners often carried other goods for trade like textiles and refined sugar, which could be used to sweeten the Caribbean cocoa. And they brought back other things like coffee in addition to the cocoa. If you’re interested in learning more about the MaineCaribbean trade routes of the 1800s, Maine Maritime Museum has some excellent exhibits with plenty of details. There are model replicas of the schooners, maps of trade routes, collections of actual goods traded on these trips, and quotes from sailors of that era.
While the ice trade ended many years ago, you can still see the process at Thompson’s ice house in South Bristol, Maine. They’ve been harvesting ice there since 1826 and were still harvesting until 1985. According to their website, they are “believed to be the only commercial ice house on the National Historic Register to continue to store naturally harvested ice from a nearby pond in the traditional way.” You can join them for their annual Ice Harvest each year on the Sunday of President’s Day weekend where you can try sawing through the ice, floating it onto the conveyer, and stacking the blocks inside the house. Or, if you come back in the summer, you can taste ice cream made from the ice harvested that winter for their Ice Cream Social on July 7.
You can also still get chocolate from the Caribbean. Bixby & Company chocolatiers are based in Rockland, Maine and source some of their chocolate from fair-trade connections in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. They also happen to be housed in a 125-year-old ice plant on Rockland’s waterfront. Maine Maritime Museum sponsored a special event as a part of Valentine’s Day at the Bixby & Company factory that included a discussion about the maritime chocolate trade between Maine and the Caribbean.
After reading Cocoa Ice, I feel a little bit of extra warmth when I drink hot chocolate on a frosty Maine day.
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