When money grew in ponds weather like this was like hitting the lottery.

Thomas Perkins is the guy who recently dinged the Godwin's Law bell by saying resentment of the rich is akin to the Kristallnacht of 1930's Germany, but in a more simple time Colonel Thomas Handasyd Perkins was the man who created an industry, like an Edison or Fulton, by marshalling the early 19th century craft of refrigeration, not yet a technology so much as an art, to export ice sawn from Boston area ponds overseas. 

Caribbean plantation owners and English manors paid well for this luxury of the pre-refrigeration days, making it profitable even if most of the goods melted in transit.

If this lost industry existed today, then this wintry March we are still enduring, like going out not at all like a lamb so much as a rabid rogue ram, would indubitably be classified an economic boom time.