Thompson Ice House Museum
Photo: Thompson Ice House Museum.
If you twist and turn your way along the Damariscotta River south of town for about twelve miles, you'll end up in the tiny fishing village of South Bristol. One or two twists before you see the harbor, you'll find the Thompson Ice House Museum.
In 1826, Asa Thompson dammed a creek on his property to create a pond and built an ice house when he realized there was a market for the ice. For nearly the next two centuries, successive generations of Thompsons cut and marketed their ice. They sold to fishermen and to locals, to steamships that carried it south to bigger cities, and to the summer residents of Christmas Cove for their ice boxes.
The last ice was sold in 1985 and in 1990 the ice house became a museum. Every year (typically in February) museum volunteers organize a community ice-cutting where anyone who shows up is welcome to help harvest the ice out of the pond. Using hand saws and mechanical saws, the harvesters cut 2-3-foot square blocks out of the pond and use long poles to float them toward the ice house chute. Once loaded into the house, more volunteers pack the blocks tight until the cutting crew runs out of either ice or energy. There is typically plenty of ice left to supply the ice cream social the museum hosts in July.
Ice production was a huge industry in Maine in the 19th century. The clean, fresh water made ice that was crystal-blue and considered top-notch by consumers. By the 1880s over a million pounds of ice was being shipped out of the Kennebec River alone. And while the ice business used to be a staple of the Maine cottage industries as well, the Thompson Ice House is the last functioning ice house in the state.
