At about five miles above the foot of the lake, and extending across it from shore to shore, a large fissure in the ice usually appears during the winter. This fissure is sometimes so wide that a team cannot cross it, and many years ago a span of horses was accidentally driven into it. The crevice in the ice has caused much speculation. The lake is narrow at the place where the crack appears, and the fissure is supposed to be created by expansion from the north and from the south, causing the ice to rise several feet in gable-like form until the ridge cracks, for fragments of ice are found on each side of the crevice.[125]
The tremendous forces exerted by the expansion of the freezing lake cry aloud on still winter nights, whenever, after a period of thawing weather, the mercury suddenly drops to a point far below zero. On such nights, while the trees of the surrounding forest here and there begin to be so penetrated with the fierce cold that they crack like rifle-shots, the ice-bound lake sets up an unearthly groaning, and the cavernous sound of its bellowing echoes dismally over the sleeping village, like the trumpetings of some huge leviathan in agony.
Cooperstown has a winter harvest-time, in January or February, when ice is cut from the lake for the summer supply. This industry occupies a large force of men, with plows, saws, hooks, crowbars, horses and bob-sleds, for several weeks. The ice taken from Otsego Lake, from ten to twenty inches thick, according to the severity of the winter, is always pure as mountain dew, and clear as crystal.
The midsummer view of Otsego Lake at one time included, in the clearings along the western shore and hillsides, a great luxuriance of hop-vines. The golden wreaths of hops, as they hang ripening in the August sunshine, sweeping in graceful clusters from the tall poles, or swinging in the breeze in umbrella-like canopies, add a more picturesque feature to the landscape than any other growing crop.
Hops have a part in the story of Cooperstown, which was at one time the centre of the most important hop-growing industry in America. Hop culture was introduced into Otsego county about the year 1830. In 1845 only 168,605 pounds were produced. In 1885, within a radial distance of forty miles from Cooperstown was included more than half of the hop-producing region of the United States.
Elizabeth Hudson
Hop Picking
The hop-picking season, during the latter part of August, has given a picturesque character of its own to the life of the village and environs. In the primitive days of the industry, when the harvesting of the crop did not require any additional help from outside of the immediate region, the task of hop-picking was lightened by the enjoyment of social pleasures and romantic excitements that came to be associated with it by the young people of Otsego. At the beginning of the picking season, in those days, anyone passing through the country would meet wagon after wagon, of the style known as a "democrat," loaded down with gay and lively maidens, with one or two young men to each load. On reaching the hop-yard to which they were assigned, these frolicsome parties exchanged their holiday attire for broad-rimmed hats and working dresses. Boxes were placed about the hop-yard, four pickers to each, the boxes being divided into four sections holding ten bushels apiece, and into these were dropped the clusters picked from the vines by nimble fingers. Experienced hands can fill two or more boxes in a day, for which as much as fifty cents a box used to be paid.