Pencil making photos

I can still see a grey spot in my palm where I stabbed myself with a pencil. The tip broke off. I've had pencil lead embedded in my right hand for 40 years now.

Thanks for sharing! Not only found it interesting, having grew up in Marietta GA immediately thought of Mary Phagan for the first time in many years. Long story short, she lived in Marietta and was murdered in a pencil factory in Atlanta about 1913. The alleged murderer was kidnapped from jail and lynched just outside of Marietta...

That was a really interesting case. I remember the TV miniseries about it.

Apparently, Leo Frank, the guy who was lyunched, was wrongly convicted:

Most likely the case... Minor correction, Mary Phagan's family was from Marietta and she is buried there but she was not living there at the time. Read the wikipeda article earlier just after I posted. Noticed it mentioned selling of souvenirs after the lynching. Remember my father telling that when he was young (1920s - 30s) it was still common to be shown a piece of the rope that hung Leo Frank. Often kept in the family Bible no less. No doubt many of them were fake as I recall from some source that all the local hardware stores sold out of rope in the days following the lynching.

My father was convinced that one of his uncles was involved in the lynching. Obviously not a major player since he does not appear in either of the two lists which have been released in recent decades.

Oh, Harry Golden's A Little Girl is Dead was one of the (many) sources for the wiki article. Read that many, many years ago and may possibly have my fathers copy unless my brother ended up with it.

I think it's good to have some historical markers like that in your family history, even if they're a little grisly. My ancestors scalped Iroquois Indians for the bounty, so I'm familiar with that feeling. With the proceeds they took up farming rocks in New Hampshire.

Lincoln reputedly said that New Hampshire was a good place to be -from-, referring to the better Midwestern soil.

It took the people of that area in southern NH a long time to wise up and switch to dairy farming. Actually, what it took was probably transportation to get milk and dairy products to market in Boston.

Sawing ice was the wintertime business for my grandfather and his sons. We had a round ice house alongside of the pond in Bay Head (a tiny village on the Great Bay next to Greenland -- now a housing development, from what I can see on Google Earth). The ice was packed in layers of sawdust and enough of it lasted to carry them through the summer.

When I was a little kid, they still sawed some ice, by hand, because my great uncle and aunt still had an icebox, and they also used it to keep milk cool on its way to market.

That's "Bayside," not Bay Head -- which was a favorite beach town of mine in NJ.

It generated a whole cottage industry. Lots of tools for both harvesting and using it. Interesting web page here showing some of the items:

Yeah, I recognize the saws. My grandfather's was a lot longer as I remember it, but I was about 5 when I last saw the...er, saw, and it looked big compared to me.

They'd load blocks of ice on a sledge and pull it up to the ice house by horse.

I never saw the ones in NJ, but there are photos of the boats and fishing from the 1920s that show really big, round ice houses up the beach. There were ponds for ice on the barrier islands and the pound boats...:

...would be hauled up the beach with horses, and pack the fish in barrels with ice at the ice house, whereupon they were hauled off to NYC by train.

My favorite tool was the ice plow. Nice picture about 4 pages down here:

I've come across a few in museums. One of those things that make me wonder how many were made?

Dad had told me they would cut some from a pond on their farm. Store it via sawdust like everyone else...

That's an interesting story about the high-volume ice harvesting. It sounds like a truly miserable job.

My older brother had one 1/4" from his right eye that I gave him in

One of my earliest jobs was washing sawdust off of 250 pound blocks of natural ice and moving it into clean storage for the next day's delivery or on site sale.

One of my first jobs was dish washer in the Ice King's summer cottage. At the time (ca 1968) it was a country club and event venue. Looks like it's a country club in name only these days.

The big icehouse on Lake Quannapowitt (mentioned in the Frederic Tudor article) was on the edge of the lake 'til the early sixties. You could buy block ice there, though I doubt it was lake ice at that time.

You're our bit of living history, Gerry. d8-)

This thread gives me a chance to post the story of 'I, Pencil'. It's an essay about the Wonder of the Invisible Hand and leaving creative energies uninhibited.

Mikek