On another recent excursion we went to Bantam Lake, where we researched the Berkshire Ice Company. The company built one of the largest ice plants in New England on the shore of the lake—a structure as big as two football fields, that could hold 75,000 tons of ice. During the summer, trains full of ice ran daily to New York City.

A fire destroyed the ice house in 1929, but it took two years for all the ice inside to fully melt.