Ice harvesting on Mascouten Bay

Harvesting ice out of Mascouten Bay was quite an interesting business during the winter. It was a beautiful body of water at the edge of the Illinois River at the northeast corner of Beardstown and was where the Indians fished and hunted just 100 years earlier. The workers at the bay would use a team of horses to pull large knives that would score the ice in 100-pound blocks. They would float the blocks of ice to the edge of the shore where a steam engine ran