RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Lowell Politics: November 30, 2025

The Lowell City Council met on Tuesday night. The longest and most intense discussion involved a proposed amendment to the city’s “Peace and Good Order” ordinance that would impose a new limitation on already-legal “needle exchange programs” by prohibiting such programs from operating within 1000 feet of a school. In the end, the council voted unanimously to send the proposed amendment to the council’s Public Safety Subcommittee for a meeting with the city’s Board of Health and with representatives from the state Department of Public Health.

For a while, the council seemed headed down the “we don’t care what the data show, we’re going to follow our own common sense” approach that we witnessed last week with the pre-emptive “safe injection site” ban, however, the council this Tuesday jumped back onto the rational decision track in sending the proposal to the subcommittee for further consideration.

The problem councilors seek to address is the profusion of used needles scattered about certain parts of the city, especially in public parks like the South Common. Although city health officials questioned on Tuesday could not identify a single instance of a public-school student having been pricked by a stray needle, the fear of that happening is not far-fetched and the potential harm that would come from it is considerable.

While a councilor’s “common sense” might say that a program that hands out free needles to addicts would contribute to this epidemic of used needles in public spaces, experts disagree. Tuesday night, two members of the city’s board of health, Chair JoAnn Keegan and Member Erin Gendron, spoke on this motion and urged restraint in curtailing the needle distribution programs now in place. They, and several councilors, referred to a presentation made by representatives from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health at the last Lowell Board of Health meeting.

At that meeting, Dawn Fukuda of DPH explained that Syringe Service Programs do much more than distribute clean needles to addicts. They also provide a continuum of care that includes treatment of wounds, testing for infectious diseases, and linkage to substance abuse treatment. She emphasized that drug users have personal autonomy and will make better health decisions when provided with accurate information, and often those decisions lead to recovery treatment.

Dr. Alex Walley, also of DPH, said 30 years of scientific data prove that Syringe Service Programs (SSP) are an effective public health tool that reduce the transmission of HIV by 34 percent to 58 percent, depending on the quality of the program. Dr. Walley also cited a Seattle study that showed addicts who participated in an SSP were five times more likely to start addiction treatment and three times more likely to stop using drugs entirely than those who did not use the program. He pointed to another study from Miami that showed a 49 percent decrease in syringe litter after the program opened.

Next, Dr. Walley spoke about an outbreak of HIV in Lowell in 2018 when there was a spike in new HIV cases with most having been transmitted by dirty needles. Infections were not limited to intravenous drug users but spread through the general population, usually due to sexual transmission. However, statistics showed that once an SSP program opened in Lowell, the rise in new HIV infections relented.

At the council meeting, Councilor Rita Mercier who, along with Councilors Corey Robinson, Erik Gitschier and Corey Belanger, attended the board of health meeting, criticized SSPs for lacking a strict one-for-one needle exchange policy. As I understand it, clean needles are typically distributed in packages of ten, however, a patron who turns in fewer than ten used needles still gets a full package.

In response to this no one-for-one policy criticism, both DPH’s Fukuda at the board of health meeting and Ms. Keegan at the council meeting explained that the primary purpose of the SSP is harm reduction among the served population, and that an addict who is unable to get clean needles will just reuse a dirty one which will damage their veins and risk infection.

Besides Councilor Mercier, her colleagues who support this amendment (and those who supported last week’s safe injection site prohibition) have a familiar litany of complaints: the suburbs are not sharing this societal burden; rampant vagrancy drives businesses out of downtown; public spaces are rendered unsafe or uncomfortable for everyone else; the state was wrong to abolish involuntary civil commitments; and so on. In the face of this frustration, curtailing the SSP program might make councilors feel as though they are doing something when, as the public health professionals tactfully explained, such restrictions just reshuffle the deck of pathologies the community faces without solving any of them.

There is no magical solution to this but two things, more addiction treatment and more housing, seem to be the best long-term strategies for addressing these issues. But both are expensive and, with the housing piece at least, require tough political choices that many elected officials are unwilling to make, so instead we have a revolving solution-of-the-month approach from the council.

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The council did give a small boost to creating more housing in Lowell by voting unanimously to amend the 20-year-old “Rebuilding of the Julian D. Steele Public Housing Development” plan. The amendment allows the construction of 16 new duplexes which will create 32 housing units that will be sold to buyers whose total household gross income is between 70 percent and 100 percent of the area median income as defined by HUD.

The state legislation that established this project back in 2000 requires the approval of the Lowell Housing Authority, the Department of Housing and Community Development and the Lowell City Council. With the council’s action on Tuesday, all three entities have approved the plan so presumably construction may now proceed.

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Twelve months ago, when many “best books of the year” lists appeared, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz was prominently mentioned. I bought, read, and enjoyed the book which challenges the nostalgic view of the early 90s as a peaceful “end of history” between the Cold War and the War on Terror. Instead, Ganz argues this period was a turbulent crucible that birthed modern American extremism and the MAGA movement.

Besides authoring this bestselling book, Ganz writes about the writes about the history and ideology of the American Right on his Substack newsletter, Unpopular Front, which I subscribe to. One day last week, Ganz discussed US policy towards Cambodia in 1975, after the Khmer Rouge had come to power and the North Vietnamese had defeated South Vietnam. Because events from that time and place are central to understanding Lowell today, I read what Ganz wrote with great attention.

Ganz explained that to understand US policy towards Cambodia in 1975, one must understand the larger geopolitics of the Cold War at the time: “The Khmer Rouge was aligned with China, which viewed them as a counterweight to Soviet-backed Vietnam. The United States was capitalizing on the Sino-Soviet split to cultivate relations with China and form a bloc against the USSR, so the US was effectively the ally of the Khmer Rouge’s ally.”

In support of that analysis, Ganz cited a now declassified but once Secret transcript of a meeting between US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Foreign Minister Chatchai Chunhawan of Thailand. Here are the relevant parts of their conversation:

Kissinger: Our interest in Southeast Asia remains strong. We appreciate the spirit in which the negotiations for our withdrawal have taken place . . . It is important that we still have a presence in Southeast Asia. We appreciate what you did in Vietnam. I am, personally, embarrassed by the Vietnam War. I believe that if you go to war, you go to win and not to lose with moderation.

We are aware that the biggest threat in Southeast Asia at the present time is North Vietnam. Our strategy is to get the Chinese into Laos and Cambodia as a barrier to the Vietnamese.

Chatchai: I asked the Chinese to take over in Laos. They mentioned that they had a road building team in northern Laos.

Kissinger: We would support this. You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them. Tell them the latter part, but don’t tell them what I said before. (Emphasis supplied).

The full transcript, which makes fascinating reading, is available online (link below).

When Henry Kissinger died two years ago, the Boston Globe interviewed some survivors of the Cambodian genocide who were living in Lowell. Their comments about Kissinger were extremely harsh which surprised me, not because they weren’t deserved (a view that Ganz also shares), but because they were so passionate. Reading this meeting transcript gives me a better understanding of the reasons for that passionate response.

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Links cited in today’s newsletter:

Lowell Board of Health meeting on November 5, 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPCaNf4bR0A

Proposed Amendment to Needle Exchange Program ordinance

https://www.lowellma.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Item/33286?fileID=86916

Transcript of November 26, 1975, meeting between US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Foreign Minister Chatchai of Thailand.

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB193/HAK-11-26-75.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I Give Thanks for Kindness

 I Give Thanks for Kindness

Rev. Steve Edington

[This is the text of an editorial that was published in the November 26, 2025 issue of the New Hampshire Union Leader.]

Strange as it may sound, my most uplifting experience in recent days was a memorial service I attended at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, New Hampshire where I had a twenty-four year ministry.

The Nashua service was for a man named John who died much too early after a struggle with cancer. He’d had a very successful career as a chemical engineer; and while that part of his life was acknowledged, the primary themes of his service had to do with bicycles and Santa Claus.

In his retirement John took up repairing discarded bicycles to make them useable again and gave them to people who could only afford very limited means of transportation. This good will project evolved into the Gate City Bike Coop which served as a repair and distribution center for persons for whom having a bicycle made their lives a little easier. It was all an act of kindness and goodwill for John and for the people who followed John’s example, and who came to work with him, giving their time to such a worthwhile humanitarian effort.

John had a big bushy white beard and a bald head and looked like Santa Claus. When Holiday events in the Nashua called for a visit from Santa, John was often there. He had just the right touch for interacting with youngsters, and brought much joy into a lot of little kids’ lives who got a visit from the most realistic Santa they had ever seen.

To honor this part of John’s life, some of the attendees showed up wearing Santa Claus outfits, and they fit in quite well.

The service ended with the combined voices of the Nashua UU Choir and the New Hampshire Gay Men’s Chorus singing the spiritual “River in Judea” that practically blew the roof off the building and lifted us all out of our seats.

Beyond the sadness that was in the sanctuary over the loss of John was also a celebration and an affirmation of the human spirit and of the kindness, compassion, and love which we humans are capable of. It was a calling to all of us to our better selves. It was a reminder I certainly needed as Thanksgiving approaches.

And speaking of Thanksgiving:

While a variety of Thanksgiving observances preceded it, the tradition of Presidential proclamations of Thanksgiving began with George Washington. In his Proclamation, issued in 1789, President Washington asked God to “render our national government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a government of wise, just, and constitutional laws (and to) bless us with peace and concord…”

The bigger picture in Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation was his view that one of the roles of the President is to uplift us as citizens and summon us to what a later President, Abraham Lincoln, called “the better angels of our nature.” I think the Presidents who came after Washington recognized this role: That above and beyond their political persuasions and actions, they had a greater duty to summon us to our higher selves both as American citizens and as human beings.

Some Presidents, as we know, did a better job with this duty than did others. But Washington clearly recognized such a Presidential role, as the language of his initial Thanksgiving proclamation shows.

We now have a President who simply does not recognize that kind of a calling. Instead of a summons to our better angels, we get spitefulness, mean-spiritedness, and baseless name calling.

After the October 18 No Kings Day rallies he used his social media outlet to post an AI generated depiction of him flying an airplane showering the No Kings demonstrators with excrement.

This is one of the more egregious examples of how the Presidential office is being demeaned; and is being used to call us to our baser selves rather than to our higher selves. Trump’s Presidency is the very antithesis of Washington’s Thanksgiving call for “a government of wise, just, and constitutional laws (that will) bless us with peace and concord…”

I happen to believe the current President’s spitefulness and meanness will not, in the end, prevail. I hold to the hope—especially in this season of thanksgiving and generosity—that there remains enough goodness, and kindness, and human decency in our citizenry at large, as well as a sense of basic human justice and fairness, that will ultimately withstand the baseness and cruelty and grievous injustices we are currently witnessing.

This is why I came away from John’s memorial service with a spirit of hope, believing that there are so many others like him clear across our land. However much of a struggle it will continue to be, these are the people who will in time have the last say as who “we the people” truly are.

Rev. Steve Edington is the Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua.

My Thanksgivings

My Thanksgivings

By Leo Racicot

     Artist Norman Rockwell wasn’t far off-the-mark in his wholesome, homespun depictions of how Thanksgivings were celebrated in the middle years of the 20th century. His illustrations of families gathered together around the table, gazing hungrily at the turkey being carried in by a doting grandma, being carved by an avuncular relative capture exactly the way holidays looked in the 1950s and 1960s.

We never celebrated Thanksgivings at our house. Prior to Papa passing away, I’m sure we must have but I have no memory of them. No, Thanksgivings, beginning every year in 1960, were held at our Aunt Marie’s and Nana’s place, just the five of us, our mother, Diane and myself. Marie would pick us up in the morning, in her ubiquitous Rambler (she always swore by Ramblers, until, in later years, they turned out to be one lemon after another. In later years, Marie developed an ongoing run-the-gauntlet relationship with AMC much the way Darren McGavin’s father did with his rackety old basement boiler in the movie, A Christmas Story. But for a while, the reliable Rambler was a welcome sight in front of our house on holiday mornings, Marie at the wheel, Nana in the backseat (Ma would join her there while Diane and I would sit up front with Marie, Diane in the middle)  and off we’d go singing “Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go!” all the way. Anticipation was so thick, we could taste it, as we salivated over the soon-to-be-devoured feast Marie had prepared. Yes, there was just the five of us now but we loved being in the warm car, so cozy, so filled with good will (well, until someone said or did the wrong thing and the traditional holiday bickering would begin). We couldn’t wait to get to the meal. We knew that Marie and Nana were good cooks and that Marie, who absolutely loved all holidays, would have their apartment brimming with decoration. I especially remember two wax candle pilgrims, a boy and a girl, that were never lit but were, through the years, as welcome a sight as was the turkey, the homemade stuffing (no boxed stuffing in those days — Nana spent hours the night before tearing loaf after loaf of semi- stale bread, (fresh bread made the dressing too gooey) onions, celery, butter and sage), and abundant sides.  There were also turkey candles, chocolate turkeys Marie had bought at Mrs. Nelson’s Candy Shoppe (It’s still in its original location on Chelmsford Street). She also loved and was skilled with making crafts (a cornucopia centerpiece for the table, a Fall-themed wreath, small figurines and lapel cloche pins made of yard, one for Diane, one for me.

The only caveats were an ice cream roll Marie liked to serve topped with claret sauce (Diane’s hope that “This year, she won’t have that awful dessert was never realized. Every year, Marie managed to find it in

some market or another and serve it with great pride. How could we not pretend to relish it? She had such a beaming grin from ear-to-ear when placing it before us. Another big “no-no” in her home was that no one but no one was allowed in the living room where she’d encased every stick of furniture, lamp, loveseat and knickknack in the thickest plastic. I always loved and wished I could sit on the red velvet loveseat with the painting above it of a dark-haired lady in a red velvet gown playing the piano. Marie teased us that it was a painting of her sister, our Aunt Helen, and we believed her. (it did look like Helen) As a result of the living room and its mummified furnishings, we were all relegated to the kitchen only and couldn’t and didn’t dare budge unless it was to use the bathroom.  One memory I’ll never shake — after our meal, after

we were all stuffed to-the-gills, as everyone is on Thanksgiving, Marie would do the dishes, whistling along with the radio, to Patsy Cline or  Tony Bennett or The King Family (to this day, if I hear the song, Love at Home, it sets me  to blubbering). Anyway, no sooner had Marie wiped clean the last cup and plate than she’d whirl around and say, most gleefully, “Who wants a turkey sandwich!”   What we’d already eaten hadn’t even gotten past our esophagus than she was insisting we all have a sandwich.  Gag.  But again, polite acquiescence was the rule of the day,

Many a Thanksgiving, snow covered the streets and as dusk fell, we all piled back into the Rambler

(Marie, Diane and me once again in the front, Ma and Nana in the back) and make the ride from the Highlands to Willie Street, listening to the carols on the radio.

They’re all gone now. Only I remain. What I wouldn’t give to be squished against them again, all of us huddled together, in our wintery coats and mittens, so safe, so warm with their voices, their eccentricities, their laughter in the dark car rolling towards home.

Nana passed away in 1976, Ma, eight years later. Marie was so grief-stricken, she moved out to Nevada where Helen lived, to help care for her niece, our cousin, Karen (“Cookie”) and because she needed a change of scene. Diane made a life for herself with a man named Rico who, as the family story goes, “came to buy one of Diane’s Pekingese dogs and never left”.  So, Thanksgiving family get-togethers came to an end. My friend, Joe’s family took me into their homes and their hearts and included me for a time in holiday gatherings. Mr. and Mrs. Markiewicz, who owned and operated one of Lowell’s only homemade candy stores, The Blue Dot on Bridge Street, had an almost innate gift for hospitality and for making everyone feel relaxed, as if you were one of them. I loved their home on Fulton Street in Centralville. Joe’s grandmother, “Babcia”, was like something out of a children’s story book; she kept rabbits in rabbit hutches in the backyard garden. There was a pear tree in the yard that every summer yielded enough fruit for a dozen summers. Squiggy, the cat, could be found strutting about like a prizefighter. I liked Joe’s aunt, Ciotka Anne” who shared many interesting stories about being a registered nurse overseas in World War II. Her husband died very young after they’d been married a brief while. Ciotka Anne’s love for him was so strong, she vowed never to marry again. I thought that was so romantic. I liked them all.  “Them” being eldest sister, Jane, middle sister, Ann Marie, youngest sister, Mary, and Joe’s twin, John, and their respective spouses, Michael, Dennis, Bob and Liz. I liked that the Polish word for Joe was Jasiu, for John, Jusiu.  All were so welcoming and accepting of “Joey’s high school friend”, and the clan had such a natural bonhomie, probably partly because they were in the food business. They were the first of many “families” that was to come my way and “adopt” me.

When I worked for The Sheas, Hilda and Francis and their autistic son, Richard, Thanksgivings, of course, landed on a Thursday (one of my usual work days). Ms. Shea (his mother) liked to go all out for Richard’s benefit, on holidays and birthdays, and whomever was working had the Herculean task of putting a special holiday meal together for him and any member of his live-in staff who’d show up. Often in those years, I’d spend Thanksgiving Day flailing about to keep two ovens, twelve burners going at once to make sure a tradiitonal Thanksgiving feast was presented to the household. Talk about frantic.  I operated out of an old moldering kitchen, which though well past its prime, made me fall in love it with it — I suppose because it was my first where I learned to make Boeuf Bourgignon, Michael Field’s Jambalaya and a pretty mean chutney, if I do say so myself. It wasn’t the best-looking kitchen but it did the trick and I look back so fondly on those working holidays. There was always stimulating conversation at these meals made up of Richard’s all-male graduate student staff . Many were taking their studies at Harvard, MIT, B.U., B. C., studying to be doctors, lawyers, ministers, philosophers. Smart, articulate guys. Richard’s father, Francis Shea, had  served under Justice Jackson in the Franklin Roosevelt Administrations and taken part in The Nuremberg Trials that sought to bring the Nazi regime to justice. Mrs. Shea was no slouch in her own right; she was the first female to graduate  from Yale Law School; she led the class of all men,  and later, in Washington, was instrumental in founding the F.C.C., worked alongside Alger Hiss and had dated Abe Fortas. She was proud of the fact that she’d turned his marriage proposals down, twice. By explanation, she’d say, “A Jew marrying a Jew?”  and would scoff at the very idea, cautioning us, “In life, try never to be redundant.” These gatherings weren’t the most elegant of affairs but I think, in Mrs. Shea’s mind, they retained some of the glamourand civility of her and her husband’s D.C. glory days. And Richard enjoyed and looked forward to them.  I played along with the pretense, acting like I was their majordomo or some high-toned chef like Jacques Pepin or Rene Verdon, one year even donning cook’s “whites” and a toque blanche to make the holiday fun.

When Rico moved to Florida without Diane, and on Thanksgivings and Christmases when she had to work (She did box office at Showcase Cinemas Lowell for 26 years), I’d stay with her Pekingese dogs (which included, over the years, Mio (Miyoshi), Pudgy, Prince, Brownie, Pebbles, Cash (Cashew), Buffy, Jake, Emily and Buddy). Sometimes it got to me that I was spending the holiday with the dogs, or with a lone dog. But the more I sat with them, the more I realized what a blessing it was being able to be with them, take them for a walk on a day when the city was free of people and noise (Can there be a day as quiet as Thanksgiving?)  I came to adore that breed (though my friend, Bob Stone, used to quip, “Pekingese look like mops with eyes). Buddy and I became intrepid explorers of the Acre and beyond, walking as far-and-wide as Father Armand Morrissette Boulevard, or just to the corner Market Basket where he’d wonder where all the people went.  I couldn’t say “yes” when he asked very nicely to go inside the nearby Asian Bakery where the aromas of delicate, ornate Southeast Asian treats filled our nostrils with longing. But he was happy and thankful on Thanksgiving Day to be able to sniff, not eat. God in Heaven, how I miss him, miss them all. They brightened many of my bachelor years with their companionship and their antics. Some of the best Thanksgivings of my life were spent in the company of canines.

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Aunt Helen at the piano

Buddy out for a walk

Five of us on Thanksgiving morning

Joe & me at his sister Janie’s, Thanksgiving 1986

Joe’s Ciotka Anne

My first Thanksgiving

Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving

Pekingese Buffy & Jake

Richard at home with some of his companions

Richard Shea and me at pre-holiday table, 1999

Spumoni with Claret Sauce

The Markiewicz Clan

Lowell Stories: Keeping Things Fresh

This is another of our Lowell Stories series, which we hope to make a regular feature on this website. If you have a story to share, get in touch and we’ll help preserve it in print. We’ll even write it for you if that would help. 

Richard Howe

Lowell Stories – Keeping Things Fresh: From Ice Delivery to Neighborhood Stores

by Melissa Franks

A stop at the grave of Daniel Gage—the once renowned “Ice King of Lowell”—on Richard Howe’s Lowell Cemetery tour in September, got me talking about ice with Lowell native Sheila Battle, who had once been my math teacher at Tyngsboro High and later my neighbor on Hanks Street….

Daniel Gage (1828-1901) had founded the Gage Ice Company, which from some point around 1870 and for the next 80 years or so, helped keep Lowell’s people and perishables cool.  Coincidentally, Sheila had long cherished a black-and-white period picture of her grandfather standing beside his ice delivery wagon, arm slung over one of the two horses that pulled it.

Lowellian James McDougall delivering ice

The framed photo taken sometime in the 1930s had long held pride-of-place on her wall:  in it, her grandfather James McDougall, then in his 50s, wears a jaunty newsboy cap plus a vest, probably meant to protect against the ice melt.

While Sheila herself didn’t remember the ice wagons from her younger days visiting her grandfather at his Boynton Street home in Centralville, she did introduce me to a few of her friends at the Lowell Senior Center, all proud Sacred Heart School alumnae who remember going to Gage’s Ice House on the corner of Wilder and Pawtucket streets to get ice for daytrips in the 1950s.

“If you went to the beach or whatever, you’d buy a block of ice for 25 cents and it would come down the shoot,” one said.

Mid-century households had, for years, used refrigerators, but, because the freezer space within them barely held ice trays, most perishables were still purchased fresh, and local, and often.  And there were many nearby stores to supply every need.

Sheila Battle, Barbara (McNamara) Hoey, and Donna (Sheedy) Smith at the Lowell Senior Center

Fresh food for Sacred Heart Neighbors

Barbara (McNamara) Hoey, who grew up on Gorham Street and Donna (Sheedy) Smith, raised on Bowden, remember the stores and shop owners with whom they regularly interacted as they tramped multiple times daily to the Sacred Heart School and Parish, including back-forth for lunch on school days and, of course, for church on Sundays.

Barbara’s father owned McNamara’s Superette on Gorham, which he’d rebuilt from a small market to double its size about the same time as Mike Demoulas built-up his store.  Working there throughout her youth, Barbara took calls from local customers with their daily shopping lists, which she then delivered to their houses.  As these were neighbors, most everything sold was “on account.”  Donna’s mother regularly sent her to McNamara’s with a note for the person at the meat counter to fill the order.

On/near Gorham Street in the Sacred Heart area, other shops that Barbara and Donna readily named were Eddie LeLacheur’s store (Stoplyne Market), Haynes Greenhouse, Quealy Market (in The Grove), at least two creameries (Dairy Queen and Nickel’s) and Rouine’s Drugstore.  They remembered the exact location of the tiny Joe’s Variety (on Stromquist and Cosgrove), as that’s where they’d stop after lunch to purchase the penny candy that would power them through afternoon classes.

Barbara said: “You knew everyone in every store.  At the Dairy Queen, they’d give you an ice cream if you had a good report card.”  Donna said, “Those were happy times.”

1955 Lowell Sun listing of Gorham Street Businesses

Ice Delivery and its Horse-Drawn Heydey:  Gage Ice Company

While Barbara and Donna didn’t recall direct-to-home ice deliveries, both said most homes still had an “ice box” –basically an insulated cabinet kept in the coldest part of the house that held an ice block, perishables, and a pan for the melt.

Another Sacred Heart grad and her older brother, now 90, remember ice being delivered as late as the 1940s to their grandparents’ Cosgrove Street home, where they were one of many extended Irish families then occupying the Swede Village neighborhood.   They said:

If you wanted ice delivered, you had to place a card in the window.  The card had prices written on each corner—ranging from about 5 cents to 25 cents—and the way you turned the card determined the size of the ice block you wanted.  The ice man, using metal tongs and wearing a protective leather strap to cover his shoulder, would hoist the ice onto his back and carry it into the house.

While now driving trucks, those ice men were still likely to be from the Gage Ice Company, which continued as a central ice source for Lowell and surrounding towns, even after moving from natural to artificial ice and from wagons to motorized vehicles.

Born in Pelham in 1828, Daniel Gage came to Lowell in 1855, starting a cattle business before launching his ice business in 1870.  The Gage Ice Company was located at 552 Pawtucket Street, on the banks of the Merrimack River, where ice was harvested, and the blocks floated to the nearby ice houses.  Later, the company expanded to Forge Village in Westford, with Forge Pond as a source.

Early ice harvesting was labor intensive, physically demanding and even dangerous, requiring both extensive manpower and horsepower especially during the harvesting season in the dead of winter when ice had to be at least a foot thick.  Records from 1881 indicate that it took 175 men and 50 horses to fill the Forge Pond ice house.  A 1901 Lowell Sun editor estimated Gage’s had 240 horses in its operations.

Here’s a glimpse of the ice activity from the Feb. 11, 1902 Lowell Sun:

“Nearly three thousand men, women and children enjoyed the excellent skating on the Merrimack River above the Pawtucket Falls on Sunday.  In some places it was somewhat rough, but as a rule it was in excellent condition.  The Daniel Gage Ice company was cutting ice, and the work of stowing.  It was watched by many who had grown tired of skating.”

While mechanical refrigeration began to take its toll on the natural ice business by the turn of the century, it was during World War I, when the “Frigidaire” became a part of more and more households, that the ice houses really began to disappear.  Around that time, according to a Jan. 11, 1976 Lowell Sun retrospective on the natural ice industry:

“The bright card left in the kitchen window to tell the man in the street how much ice to leave was torn up.   And kids, following the dripping ice wagon for slivers of ice, had to turn to lollipops.”  

When Daniel Gage died in 1901 at nearly 73 after 30 years running Gage Ice, he was one of the wealthiest men in the city.    He also had wood and coal businesses, and was a civic leader whose works included distributing free ice to other charitable institutions.  For nearly as long—another 28 years—his daughter Martina Gage, headed Gage Ice, herself becoming one of the city’s most prominent business leaders.

Daniel Gage monument and Martina Gage gravestone at the Lowell Cemetery

End of an Era

It was in 1929, when Martina stepped aside and the company reorganized under different management but kept the Gage name, that “the long familiar horse-drawn ice wagons were replaced by motorized equipment” and “the newly organized company opened a modern up-to-date plant for the manufacture of artificial ice” per a June 30, 1936 Lowell Courier-Citizen article.

Other updates to Gage’s operations by the time of the 1936 publication reveal:  the ice was now being made by water drawn from artesian wells; it owned a fleet of 50 trucks; and its diversified products and services included the sale of refrigerators and furnaces.

Given this paradigm shift in Lowell’s ice business, it could very well be that Sheila Battle’s photo of her grandfather delivering ice via horse-drawn wagon was one of the final images to capture a bygone period of time, just as it blinked into memory.

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These two stories from Lowell Historical Society Curator Ryan Owen in his blog “Forgotten New England” give more detail on the enterprise, both the work and the company itself:  “Past Occupations: Ice Cutters in Massachusetts” and “The Daniel Gage Ice Company of Lowell Massachusetts.”