Thoreau writes in Walden:
In the winter of ’46-47 there came a hundred men of Hyperborean extraction swoop down on our pond—one morning, with many car-loads of ungainly-looking farming tools, sleds, ploughs, drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a double-pointed pike-staff, such as is not described in the New-England Farmer or the Cultivator . . . They went to work at once, ploughing, harrowing, rolling, furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were bent on making this a model farm . . . So they came and went every day, with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, form and to some point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snow-birds. But sometimes Squaw Walden had her revenge, and a hired man, walking behind his team, slipped through a crack in the ground down toward Tartarus, and he who was so brave before suddenly became but the ninth part of a man, almost gave up his animal heat, and was glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there was some virtue in a stove . . . To speak literally, a hundred Irishman, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice . . . They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre . . . They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air . . . This heap, made in the winter of ‘46-7 and estimated to contain ten thousand tons, was finally covered with hay and boards; and though it was unroofed the following July, and a part of it carried off, the rest remaining exposed to the sun, it stood over that summer and the next winter, and was not quite melted till September 1848.
Ralph Waldo Emerson writes to his brother William:
I am not without prospect that my woodlot by Walden Pond will get an increased value soon; as Mr [Frederic] Tudor has invaded us with a gang of Irishmen & taken 10,000 tons of ice from the pond in the last weeks (The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 3:383).
