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.”