The Winter Lake

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Winter Parties in the 1920s

The era of ice-boating did not end with the Ice Cloud in 1901. Winter ice-boating continued for decades but in more modest craft, sharing the winter ice with skating parties. Benjamin Rood's boat 'The Spirit of West Corner' reached a speed of 65 miles an hour on Sunday, February 12, 1928, when 200 people were also on the Lake ice skating, ice-boating and playing ice hockey. The Lake winters also drew crowds from nearby cities during the 'skating season.'

The Lake was not simply a summer colony. The Lake always had a full-time residential community dating to its settlement in the 1840s with many ancestral families who were settled in the Lake region for many decades. These families had generations who were raised, schooled and worked at the Lake ' and gathered for winter fun.

On January 12, 1964, the Sunday Independent reflected on the winter parties of the young generation who lived at the lake in the 1920s:

 

The young people congregated for ice skating at Sandy Beach, Picnic Grounds, Alderson and sometimes in the Sunset section. Each group had their own bonfires, especially at night, and these provided landmarks for the skaters as well as providing the warmth sometimes so necessary.

Sherman Davis, who was called 'Pop' Davis, was the official fireman for the young people of the Sandy Beach section and always made sure that there was sufficient fire to meet the specific requirements for the day, a hot bed of coals for quick warmth or roaring flames for visibility. [Sherm Davis held a maintenance position at Laketon High and worked on the Lake steamboats in the Summers.]

When ice conditions were favorable, which seemed to be most of the time to the participants, the young people would couple up and skate all over the lake, stopping at each group's bonfire to visit and get warm. An evening passed surprisingly quick in this manner.

A more exciting phase of Winter sports was the operation of ice boats and ice sleds which was indulged in by all on Saturdays and Sunday and on moonlight nights.

The boats were driven all over the lake and the young people took turns in the boats. A complete circle of the lake did not take long because the boats were constructed for speed as well as durability.

Al Stull, Otto Biery and Ben Rood were the proud owners of the boats. Rood's boat was a sail boat propelled by the wind while the others were motor driven with large propellers providing the speed.

About two or three Sunday afternoons a season ice boat racing became the order of the day and everybody turned out to cheer for the success of their favorite craft. Occasionally Rood was hampered by the lack of sufficient wind propulsion but on gusty days, which occurred more often, he was able to hold his own and often better the efforts of the motor driven boats.

On one occasion when the winds were of gale force Rood was checked at 92 miles per hour traveling from Picnic Grounds to Sunset.

Ben Rood grew up and still lives at the Sandy Beach end of the lake. During his high school days he was a star athlete in all sports at the Laketon School where he was captain of the basketball team.

Associated with his father in the grocery business, Ben also [created the Rood Camp Ground across from Sandy Beach.] His was one of the largest Summer camps in Pennsylvania and at its peak had 500 to 600 persons registered for the Summer.

Rood also served as Republican committeeman (a post he still holds) most of the time since 1930. He also operated the Harvey's Lake-Dallas bus for a period exceeding 25 years. At present he is employed as a foreman at Ricketts Glen State Park.

 

In the mid-1920s snows could be uncertain. In February 1924 there was 15 inches of ice on the Lake and topped with heavy snow. Skating was not possible so areas were found to coast and ski. In December 1925 there was only 3 inches of snow and iced areas were limited for skaters. Some used Oneonta Hill as a ski slope. A new sport was riding a bobsled towed by an automobile on Lakeside Drive.

The best skating conditions since the mid-1890s occurred in January 1926 when 1,500 skaters were reported on the Lake one early weekend. Now automobiles were routinely crossing the Lake ' some in speed contests. Five years later 3,000 skaters were reported on the Lake on Sunday, January 25, 1931, with automobiles routinely using the ice as a road.

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Incidents and Accidents III

On January 10, 1931, William J. Jennings, 14, and James L. Casterline, 16, were skating and broke through ice in separate accidents at the same time. Casterline was 300 feet from shore and Jennings was 100 feet out. The boys rescue by Clark D. Smith, age 16, was described in the following Evening News article on April 30, 1932, when Clark received a Carnegie Hero Fund Medal:

 

Smith, who was heavily clothed, skated from safe ice to a point two feet from the hole where Jennings was treading water and grasping the edge of the ice. Stooping, he tossed one end of his belt into Jennings' hand. Digging one skate into the ice, he then moved backward and pulled Jennings out of the hole and 15 feet to firm ice.

Smith then skated cautiously to a point two feet from the hole where Casterline was. He again braced himself, tossed one end of the belt to Casterline, and tried to pull the youth from the water. The ice sagged under Casterline and broke for at least a foot. Water flowed three feet back from the hole. Another boy arrived, stood as far as possible from Smith, and also grasped the belt. Then Smith and the other boy drew Casterline out of the water.

 

Clark used the Carnegie award fund to attend Wyoming Seminary. He later served in World War II and was a store manager for the Thom McAnn Shoe Company.

Two other skaters, Al Dukas, 19, and Eddie Stushnick, 25, from Edwardsville, broke through the ice near Sandy Beach in early January 1934. Both were rescued with no serious affect.

In mid-February 1934, A.L. Stull, a prominent figure at the Lake and founder of the Harvey's Lake Protective Association, was driving across the Lake on the ice when his front wheels sank into thin ice. A week earlier Andrew Diamond, Tunkhannock, lost his car to the Lake when it sank through ice near the same spot as Stull. George Jones, a GAR teacher, saw Stull's accident and Jones drove on to the ice to rescue Stull. Jones' car also sank to the bottom of the Lake. Both Stull and Jones were able to escape their sinking cars and Jones' car was also recovered. The Diamond car was never recovered. The accounts are silent regarding Stull's car but presumably it was also saved as there is no report it too sank to the Lake bottom.

On February 19, 1935, a rare phenomenon occurred at the Lake. A 3-inch snow had fallen over the ice-covered Lake followed by a 'playful wind.' The wind picked up particles of snow and began to create wet compact balls which were wind-swept over the ice until they formed huge snow-balls weighing more than 30 pounds. This 'natural snow-balling' had been seen in the Mid-Western U.S. plains but never in our region.

During the late Winter in early March 1937, the Picnic Grounds and Sandy Beach were crowded with an estimated 5,000 visitors who were on the ice with ice-boats, skates, scooters and even bicycles. Two skaters broke through ice at the Picnic Grounds. Ruth Jackson, 23, a Laketon High School teacher, drew near the two girls and Jackson threw out her long scarf to the girls who held on to it until additional help arrived. Jackson was credited with saving the two girls but she dismissed the notion she was a heroine. In the meantime, at Sandy Beach two young men, Andrew Lotusky and Henry Deater, were skating in bathing suits and they later swam in an area where ice had been cut away by ice harvesters.

In the late 1920s and during the 1930s, ice-boats had a resurgence with gasoline-driven engines and even propellers. William Woolbert, an automobile dealer in the Valley and later owning Woolbert Boats, built three unique ice-boats he operated on the Lake. He was interviewed by the Times-Leader in September 1987:

 

It was on Harvey's Lake that Woolbert began ' and continues ' his love affair with boating. For almost 50 years, he owned a house and, of course, a dock on the lake. Although he recently sold the house, he arranged with the new owner for use of the dock.

But Woolbert's ties to the lake go back another two decades before the [boat club] was formed in the '40s. He remembers, as a teenager in the '20s, bicycling to the lake from his Shavertown home to sail a boat called 'The Snipe.'

Things have changed since then. At Woolbert's Boats, which he sold in 1984, Woolbert displays some small sepia-tinted pictures, shots of the lake's shoreline 60 years ago. Smiling swimmers wearing bathing caps bob in front of a large wooden building. 'That was a dance hall owned by Frank Devlin, who also owned the Family Theater on South Main Street,' he says. 'And underneath the dance hall there was a bowling alley.'

Woolbert remembers 'good dances at Sandy Beach' and dancing the Charleston in a crowd of 300 or 400 people who had come to enjoy the band or orchestra's music.

It was about that same time that Woolbert, then a service manager for the Imperial Motor Corp. in Kingston, became interested in ice boats and decided to build one. His brother, Bob, agreed to help him with the project.

Together, they welded and wired spare parts they'd taken from old cars and added a special motorcycle engine originally converted to power a plane. Woolbert remembers that one of the few parts they had to purchase was an airplane propeller.

The final product looked something like a squat two-passenger helicopter wearing ice skates.

'We had an old handbrake from a car as our brake,' Woolbert says, 'and to stop the boat, you really give it a good pull, especially when we were going 75 miles an hour. I'll show you what I mean.'

He fishes around on the desk in front of him and uncovers a used envelope and a pen. With a steady hand, he sketches the iceboat's primitive brake system.

Starting the 750-pound invention was no easy feat, either, Woolbert recalls. 'We'd take two or three charges of hot oil down to the lake and pour four quarts of warm oil in just to warm her up. Then, to start it, we had to spin the propeller with our hands ' while standing on the ice. It was very dangerous, standing on the slippery ice by this propeller.'

Until the oil warmed the engine enough to start it, the Woolbert brothers would have to repeat this procedure several times.

Despite all the effort they devoted to building their creation, weather conditions at Harveys Lake were right for racing the boat only a few weekends each year. In the '40s, Woolbert sold the racer with the silver lightning bolt to a man from upper New York state, 'where it was colder for longer.'

'And I haven't seen another in 40 years,' Woolbert says. 'No one seems to be interested, and it's something you have to be interested in.'

 

Woolbert later because a charter member of the Harvey's Lake Boat Club in 1941, later renamed the Harvey's Lake Yacht Club. He was in the auto business from 1927 to 1941. During World War II he was with the Chrysler Corporation in England and France under contract with the U.S. Navy. After the War he had his own auto dealership before creating the Woolbert Boat Company, retiring in 1984.

The Casterline ice-harvesting company had two notable accidents at the Lake during Winter harvesting seasons. In February 1936 a tractor broke through the ice at Sunset and submerged in 20 feet of water. The operator was able to jump to safety. George Casterline rigged a derrick and pile driver system to raise the tractor from the Lake.

In February 1942 William Casterline, 32, was plowing snow from the Lake ice preparatory to cutting ice. The plow truck began to sink backwards through the ice and Casterline was able to leap to safety. The truck sank in 20 feet of water but was apparently later retrieved.

The Lake had an unusually full cover of ice on Christmas Day 1947. Ralph Davis at Alderson noted that the Lake in earlier years did freeze between Christmas and New Year's day. But in recent years the Lake did not freeze over for skating until the second week of January. There was fear thawing ice in March 1948 would cause significant dock damage. But with a very gradual thaw and little wind shifting the 16 to 26-inch-thick ice, the Lake completely cleared by the end of March with no real damage.

Large public gatherings of ice skaters were still evident in the 1950s. In early February 1954 skaters gathered in large numbers at both Alderson and Sunset. The Lake road also attracted sight-seers to watch the skaters and ice-fishermen in 25-degree weather. In January 1955 Lake residents Tom Garrity and Dick Williams donated a jeep-plowing service to clear snow from sections of the Lake ice which attracted 500 skaters to Sunset and Alderson, even as the center of the Lake was not frozen.

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Ice Littering

In 1952 the Pennsylvania Fish Commission stocked 200 smelt from Lake Erie into Harvey's Lake. A smelt's adult length is 7-9 inches with a weight of 3 ounces. They are a tasty treat and amenable to numerous recipes.

The Lake's smelt population exploded in the mid-1950s and produced an ice-fishing boom at the Lake until the smelt population severely declined in the late 1950s, although smelt reappeared in some years into the late 1960s.

The wave of ice-fishermen on the Lake had wind-shelters of wood, plastic and canvas. Some shelters were abandoned on the Lake ice after use along with an array of beer cans and debris. This littering was widely criticized by Lake residents and sportsmen clubs. However, no action was taken for a decade after the smelt boom. In 1966 Lake Township adopted an ordinance for the 1966-67 winter season to require ice- fishermen to pay a nominal $1.00 permit fee and a deposit to erect a hut on the ice. The $5.00 deposit was refunded if the ice hut was removed. Cardboard or plastic huts were banned. The Fish Commission also cited ice-fishermen for littering. A repeated litterer could also have a fishing license revoked.

However, when Harvey's Lake became a separate Borough on January 2, 1968, State authorities ruled that the Borough did not have the authority to issue permits for ice-fishing shacks because regulation of fishing waters was exclusively a State concern. After a Borough challenge, the State authorized the Borough to reinstate the permit-deposit system which had been erratically enforced. The Borough raised the permit-deposit fee to $7.00, and it later revised its ordinance in 1978 to now eliminate permits and permanent ice-fishing shelters, and to require removal of shelters after each fishing day. In July 1981 the ordinance was again amended to require shelters to be water resistant and also portable (not sheds). A $100 daily penalty was imposed if a shelter was not removed after a day's fishing. (A more extended article on smelt fishing at the Lake is located elsewhere on this website).

 

Note: An extended article on the Harvey's Lake Ski Area (1965-1971) is located elsewhere on this website. Information on the Harvey's Lake ice-harvesting industry is also available on this website and at www.harveyslakebook.org.

December 2018.

All photographs subject to copyright are Copyright c 2018 FCP Collection.