🔥 Chatham’s Brick Monster (and the “six-inch squid” rule)

You remember that giant brick freezer at the head of Parker’s Wharf on Stage Harbor — sitting there like Chatham had this whole working-life running in the background while everyone else was doing beach days and Main Street.

It didn’t blend in.
It dominated.

Most people remember it as the cranberry freezer (because for years that’s what it was). But that’s not how it started.

It started as a fish machine — born out of the weir-trap world that goes back to the 1850s out in Chatham Bay, just west of Monomoy. The old routine was basic: catch fish, pack it on ice, ship it to Boston by train. Until ice got scarce, costs climbed, and suddenly the math didn’t math.

So around 1910, two guys — Eugene Snow and George Parker — built a freezing plant at the end of Port Fortune Lane. By 1913, it had a name that sounds like it belongs on a stamped crate:
Chatham Cold Storage and Weir Company.

And by the 1920s, it was humming.

Every spring it would “wake up” around April. From April through August — trap season — fishermen unloaded daily at the wharf in front of the freezer: 10 traps, thousands of totes, case after case getting frozen and moved out in refrigerated trucks.

The main catch?

Squid and mackerel.

Mackerel went to domestic markets.
But squid took a different path — mostly to Argentina, and also Italy — and here’s the detail that makes people stop and reread:

Italian buyers only wanted squid exactly six inches long.

Chatham. Exporting squid. With a ruler standard.
If you didn’t live here, you’d think someone made that up.

Then the Depression hit, fish prices fell through the floor, the freezer company went bankrupt, and in 1934 the land, wharf, and plant were sold to the United Cape Cod Cranberry Company (later run by Ocean Spray).

So the brick monster switched careers.

For about 25 years, it froze and stored cranberries — until the 1959 cranberry scare (the herbicide panic right before the holidays). After that, the freezer likely closed around 1960.

And then it just… sat.

Abandoned.
Huge.
A landmark you didn’t even realize you’d gotten used to — until the day you couldn’t ignore it.

Thursday, December 31, 1971.
They were demolishing the interior to clear the land for a house when a cutting torch caught something it shouldn’t have — and the whole building lit up.

Captain Fred Bennett came in from bass fishing and said, “I came in… and there it was, burning.” He photographed it.

Chatham called in help: a ladder truck from Harwich, an engine from Orleans, and firefighters from Brewster.

44 men fought it.
It took 30 and a half hours for the last ember to go out.

In a strange way, the fire did what everyone was planning to do anyway — it helped the building come down. But the crew still had to finish the job.

And just like that, one of the most “working Chatham” things Chatham ever had was gone.

Chatham memory check:
Do you remember the freezer sitting there? The fire?
And did anyone else grow up hearing about the six-inch squid like it was local folklore?