Pond and Ice House
Posted on | February 25, 2009 |
It is not known if there was an ice house on the Phillips farm when the Randall family purchased it in March 1885. It was never mentioned in the journals of John S. Randall, which he kept until his death in 1886. It is surmised that an ice house was built shortly after the main barn was built in June 1889. The pond, and the ice it supplied, was a very important resource for cooling the milk from Forrest Randall’s herd of dairy cows; in fact, it became a necessity as the dairy farm continued to grow.
Pond and ice house on south side of North Country Road c.1900.
Early pictures show a two-story ice house with three doors on a stone foundation. Several newspaper accounts from the Port Jefferson Echo, a local newspaper, mention Forrest Randall and his ice making.
January 16, 1904 “Forrest Randall had a gang of men at work monday and tuesday filling his ice house. The ice is nearly a foot thick, a few inches of the top layer being snow ice”
Feburary 2, 1907 “Forrest Randall and James H. Hopkins have been taking advantage of the recent cold weather to replenish their stock of ice”
November 27,1909 “Forrest Randall has taken down his old ice house and is building it up new” 
- The 1909 ice house pictured in 1950
The reason for the dismantling of the ice house in 1909 is not known, but after 20 years of service, it may have been rotting or new ideas and technology may have come into play. The photographic record shows a change in design in the new 1909 ice house: it now rested on a foundation of cement with walls that rise at least four feet on all sides except where the doors are located. At the time of this rebuilding, Forrest was nearly 40 years old.
Ice house and pond in 1950
In recorded interviews, Waldo Randall (born 1914) remembered that ice was always purchased for the home and the farm milk house. (Ice was purchased in 300 pound blocks from Long Island Ice and Fuel in Port Jefferson until the 1960s.) So the rebuilt ice house, by the 1920s, was no longer needed or used. The building sat as a relic of the past until the early 1950s.
As the milk processing facility grew, so did the use of water for cooling the milk and cleaning the machinery. The clean water from the milk coolers was diverted to the pond. The waste water from the plant would be deverted to a cesspool. Sometime in the 1930s or ’40s, the pond went from a 1 to 2 foot depth to something much deeper in order to handle this waste water. At this time the rock wall in the pond was eliminated and the pond expanded away from the road. (A large rock on the east side of the pond was a place that generations of children of the family and community used to fish and play on was left.)
Eloise Randall, Charlie Davis, Waldo and John Randall on "The Rock" with pond in background in 1919
So by the 1950s, during wet times the pond was overflowing into the cow pasture. Harry Randall took the building down to the foundation and installed an irrigation pump and motor inside. The roof was then replaced by Donald Murphy. This allowed the pond to be pumped out to irrigate the pasture and crop land. The pump originally had a Ford flat head engine on it, and when that finally failed, a PTO shaft was used to be hooked up to the Farmall tractor. Once again, the pond and the Ice house had a use. This was used in this form till the mid 1960s.
1970s view of ice house
Once again the building became a icon of times past. Unused except by the children at the farm whom used it as a place to play during rainy days as well as shelter for the winter time skaters.
Warne Randall with raft on the pond 1954
The pond continued to be used for a water source for pastured animals and a place of play for generations of children. It was also the home of countless ducks, geese, fish and eels. (Sometime in the early 1970s someone put a trap filled with eels from the Mt. Sinai harbor in the pond for keeping and some how they were released. For years the eels survived in the fresh water and when the pond flooded there were eels out in the pasture.)
The importance of the pond and its ice house cannot be underestimated. Without the water storage for pasturing animals, the ice to cool the milk, much of the growth of the farm could not have happened so early on. The importantance was noted by John S. Randall shortly after purchasing the farm in 1885. “Went to work on my pond” during a very dry summer.
After the sale of the farm and development proposed in the 1980s the Town of Brookhaven preserved the pond and to have it left untouched. It is sad to note that the years since the pond has been slowly filled in and the natural drainage that once kept it with water has been so altered that it now just resembles a wet swampy area. This once valuable resource will undoubtly in the future be missed and would be needed once again as history has shown us in the last 100 yrs.
A second pond was created around 1949. This pond was the by product of a 18 foot deep leaching field that was overwhelmed by the waste water from the bottle washer. For years it got bigger even though it was used to irrigate, and as a pasture water source for 55 to 65 cows. But in 1978 the water was tested by officials. They found the water to not contain enough oxygen and a treatment plant of sorts would be needed. This was not done and the days of processing milk were over. This pond was to the south of the barns and tended to be the best for skating.
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Tags: Arrowhead Farms > dairy > Dairy Farm history > Historic Ice house > Long Island History > Mt.Sinai NY history > Randall Farms
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