Glacières; or, Freezing Caverns

by Edwin Swift Balch

THE FREEZING WELL OF OWEGO.

On Thursday, June 23d, 1898, I went to Owego, in Tioga County, New York. Inquiries at the Lehigh Valley railroad station and at the chief hotel failed to elicit any information about a freezing well; and in fact, I soon found that the existence of such a thing was a blank to the rising generation. So I called on an old resident of Owego, who told me that he knew of the well in question and that it was filled up with stones many years ago; but that he remembered that, when he was a boy, it used to freeze, and that it was spoken of as the deep well or freezing well. I then walked up to the site of the well, which is about one and a half kilometers to the northwest from the centre of Owego and about one kilometer from the Susquehanna River. It is directly in the middle of the highway, and nothing is now visible but a heap of stones.

Near by was the house of a Mr. Preston, who told me he was born in 1816, and had lived all his life at this spot. He said that the well was about twenty-eight meters deep, and that it went first through a layer of sand and then through a layer of gravel. He had more than once been down the well and had seen the sides covered with ice. A bucket sent down for water would sometimes come up with ice on the sides. Whether the water at the bottom ever froze, no one knew, for the ice caked and filled up the bore at about two-thirds of the way down and became so thick, that as Mr. Preston put it, “it was just like hammering on an anvil to try to break it.” He also stated that another well was dug about one hundred meters further down the road, and that originally this sometimes had a little ice on the sides. Of late years however, it was covered over with a wooden top and since then no ice was known to form. I could obtain no information about any other wells in the neighborhood ever showing similar peculiarities.

THE ICY GLEN, NEAR STOCKBRIDGE.

The Icy Glen is situated on Bear Mountain, about one kilometer from Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It is in the midst of fine woods and there are many big trees in it. The bottom of the glen is full of rocks and boulders, among which there is a rough path. I was told that ice remained over there much longer than anywhere else in the neighborhood, sometimes as late as May. On the 3d of July, 1898, I not only found no traces of ice or snow, but the temperatures under the boulders showed nothing abnormal. To make up for this, however, there were legions of mosquitoes.

FREEZING MARBLE CAVE, NEAR MANCHESTER.

Near Manchester, Vermont, there is a little cave,[6] which is noteworthy, in that it is in a marble formation. It is known as Skinner’s Cave, because it was owned for many years by Mr. Mark Skinner. It lies in Skinner’s Hollow, some five or six kilometers from the centre of Manchester, at the base of the eastern slope of Mount Equinox, of the Taghconic Range of the Green Mountains.

[6] My attention was called to this cave, by Messrs. John Ritchie, Jr., of Boston, and Byerly Hart of Philadelphia, who visited it some years ago. Mr. Ritchie’s opinion is that it is simply a refrigerator.

The cave is on the property of Mr. N. M. Canfield, who, on learning the object of my visit, on the 5th of July, 1898, with true native American courtesy, walked up to it with me. The last two kilometers were over a rough logging road, which towards the end was steep and covered with many broken logs. I could not have found the cave alone, as it was so surrounded with bushes, that the entrance was invisible until we actually reached it. It is in a gorge of Mount Equinox, in the midst of a beautiful forest, which effectually cuts off any wind. The cave faces nearly north and can scarcely ever, if indeed at any time, be reached by the rays of the sun. The moment we got into the entrance, we found the chilly, damp, summer atmosphere of true glacière caves. The rocks were brown and mossy on the outside, but Mr. Canfield called my attention to the fact that they were marble, and on his knocking off a small piece, a section of pure white marble was exposed. In no other instance have I heard of a marble cave in connection with ice. There were scarcely any cracks or crevices in the rock.