The lake front presented a strange appearance during the last two or three weeks. From the foot of Michigan Street south as far as the eye could reach the glistening bosom of the ice-covered lake was dotted with icemen and fishermen, dogs and horses, and the white silence of it all was broken only by the shouts of the ice gatherers, the puffing of nearby engines and the howling of the half-starved dogs about the adjacent fishermen's shanties.

Here and there a great patch of black water rippled in the stiff northern breeze which swept the broad expanse of frozen lake. It was surrounded upon all sides by industrious icemen with saws and chisel-bars and pike-poles sawing and separating the blocks of ice from the vast field and dispatching them through narrow channels in the ice to the elevating apparatus which carried them to the icehouse or cars on nearby railway tracks

The ice field is laid out with mathematical precision. The blocks are cut in uniform size. They were 32 inches long and 22 inches wide in a field visited by an Express reporter. They vary greatly in thickness and quality. They weigh from 200 to 300 pounds and are not unwieldy to handle. The fields are scraped as clean of snow and slush ice as a heavy scraper and strong horse can do it; and the preparation of an ice field for the harvesters is an expensive task. Where the surface is particularly rouch and hummocky with snowbanks steel drags, fashioned somewhat after a farmer's harrow, are employed to level it and loosen the drifts and hummocks so that the scraper will be more effective. Sometimes a horse goes through the ice and creates a sensation.

Away off toward Stony Point, where Alderman John P. Sullivan's men are now working, the ice is thickest. The ice at that point has averaged twelve inches in thickness and thousands of tons have been harvested since the beginning of the season. Most of it will be used by the various railways, cold storage and packing houses. It was loaded into cars and carried away to icehouses as fast as the cars were filled. At the other end of the field a big icehouse with a capacity of 20,000 tons has been filled and teams have drawn thousands of tons from the harbor to various icehouses throughout the city, some smaller, some greater.

A reporter for The Express asked a well-known ice dealer to give him a rough estimate of the probable quantity of ice consumed by the people of this city every year. "You will not be many tons from the mar," said he, "if you place it at the 250,000 tons. this year we are all putting in a little extra on account of the expected consumption by thirsty Pan-American visitors, and there will be a store of at least 300,000 to insure an ample supply."

Not all of the ice crop is gathered in Buffalo waters. There is, indeed, a small proportion of the whole harvested in local ice fields. The numerous lakes up in the hills of Western New York contribute the greater proportion of the quarter of a million tons which are used in this city. One of the largest dealers in Buffalo gathers about 25,000 tons here and 60,000 tons in a lake some 45 or 60 miles from the city...One Buffalo firm has a large icehouse on the Grand River, near Dunnville, Ont., and that house is being filled for this trade, but that is practically all that is likely to come to us from across the border this season.

From an Express article, March 24, 1907: "It costs about ten cents per ton to house natural ice taken from still water. Cut from Lake Erie it costs 25 to 35 cents a ton. During a season ice will shrink from one third to one quarter in bulk." Note: the ice from Lake Erie was used for non-human consumption, i.e. not for drinking.

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