1908 – Attitash ice company marketing stock and bonds

From the February 1908 issue of Cold Storage and Ice Trade Journal:

“George W. Eldridge, vice-president of the Lake Attitash Ice and Transportation Company, has been marketing the company’s stock and bonds, and, incidentally, on May 14, he delivered a “private” lecture at Music Hall, Newburyport, his subject being: “The Lake Attitash Ice and Transportation Company; what it has done and what it intends to do.” He gave a history of the company and described its proposed plant as published in Cold Storage And Ice Trade Journal of November and December, 1907.

“He said that before he joined the company he investigated its prospects and found that it was a “veritable gold mine”; that Lake Attitash was 100 feet deep and covered several hundred acres; that the lake was fed by springs of pure water and that it lay, “as it has from time immemorial, untrammeled by the hand of man”; that 2,000,000 tons of ice could be cut from the lake annually, ice from 10 to 18 inches thick having been cut there during the ice famine winter of 1905-1906; and that the runway from the lake to the Merrimack River and the ice houses would be ready for ice on January first, 1909—although his description of the present conditions seemed to indicate that little progress had been made on the construction during the past three or four months.

As he calculates it, the company will be able to sell ice in Boston for less (?) than $2 per ton and make a profit of at least $1 per ton! Capt. Eldridge claims the honor of suggesting that the company go into the freight business, and, like Col. Sellers, he has the profits therefrom figured to a nicety. According to his prospectus, the company can tow freight from Haverhill and Newburyport to Boston for 240 days per year and can probably handle 800 tons of freight daily at a net profit of $1 per ton, but if it handles only 100 tons per day, the annual net earnings from that source would be $24,000.

Capt. Eldridge is an authority on charts and tides, being the publisher of Eldridge’s Charts and Tide Tables for the past 40 years; and he illustrated his lecture with his charts of the company’s property and the routes of its vessels. The Lake Attitash Company is getting a goodly amount of free advertising, which is intended to help sell its securities. It has sold 6 per cent, first mortgage gold bonds, amounting to $53,000, the total allotment being $100,000.”