Bear Creek was a company town fully controlled by the ice company. The ice business required large numbers of temporary laborers during the winter harvest. Otherwise, the industry required fewer men during the balance of the year to unload the ice from the plants on to the railroad cars. The 1880s to the 1910s coincided with substantial immigration to the United States of people from the Ukraine and southern and eastern Europe. Employment agencies in New York provided new immigrants with employment in the ice fields and coal mines of northeastern Pennsylvania. The Bear Creek Ice Company paid a fee to labor agencies in New York to send immigrants to Lewis's White Haven and Bear Creek industries at a day rate of $4.50, the men having their train fare of $6.00 deducted from their pay. The men also paid a $1.05 daily fee to board in houses at Bear Creek.

Ice ten inches thick could be cut, but a thickness of thirteen to fourteen inches was preferable, and in later years a twelve-inch thickness became the uniform standard in domestic ice boxes. An ice auger was used to drill test holes. Ice thickness was measured with a gauge dropped through the hole drilled through the ice.

In addition, snow and slush on the ice pond had to be cleared. A team of horses pulled a large scoop that scraped and cleared a pond's surface. The snow and slush would be pulled over to the shore where it was piled. Next, a channel of water had to be cleared between the water box at an ice plant. Once a channel of open water to a plant was cleared, actual work on the ice field could begin. A long straight initial line had to be cut on the frozen surface; a plank board was originally used as a sighting line, although, in later years, a standard carpenter's blue chalkline was adopted. The initial line was cut with a small saw about twelve to eighteen inches long with a long handle. A man pushed it along to scratch along the initial line a hundred feet or more along the ice.

Then a horse-drawn marking saw was set into the line. This saw had a series of teeth that cut into the ice about three inches deep along the line. It had an arm which was extended ninety degrees from it and scratched a parallel 32 inch line along the ice's surface. The marking plow was then moved over to the parallel line, cut it three inches deep, and drew another 32-inch parallel line. The process continued until there were a series of parallel rows cut three inches deep. The marking plow, or a second one in use, could similarly mark out and cut the field crossways, this time at 22 inch intervals, until the field had a checkerboard pattern with a 32 x 22 inch rectangular appearance.

As the marking plow was doing its work, another team of horses pulled an "ice plow" similar to the marking plow. The ice plow had a series of larger teeth from 4 to 12 inches (front to back) in size. This plow, like the marking plow, had a man to guide the horse by the reins and a second man to work the plow. This plow was fitted into the cuts made by the marking plow. It passed through the earlier cuts a few times, deepening the cuts from three inches to eight to twelve inches, depending on the thickness of the ice.

But the horse-drawn plows did not completely cut the ice free. Large rectangular sections of the ice containing perhaps fifty pre-scored cakes were cut free with handsaws by the workers, and the sections floated in open water to the water-box near an ice plant. Here the floats of ice were chopped apart into strips of ice, and finally into individual cakes of ice which were a uniform 32 x 22 inches. Cakes were 8 to 18 inches thick, and sometimes thicker, depending on the severity of the winter.

In the World War I era, the horse-drawn ice plow was replaced by the gasoline-powered rotary ice plow. The initial line on the ice was sighted by a chalk line and scored by a worker who pushed a long-handled small marking saw along it. The rotary saw also had an extended arm that could be set at 32 inches. The end of the arm fit into the initial scored line. As the rotary saw was pushed or pulled along, the extended bar in the earlier line guided the rotary saw which cut a parallel line along the ice 32 inches away from the bar. After a line was cut several hundred feet, the rotary saw was moved over, the bar fitted into the prior cut, and the rotary saw moved along to cut another 32 inch line. The rotary saw could be adjusted as to the depth it sawed, and it usually needed only one pass over the ice to cut to the desired depth, for example, eight inches for twelve-inch ice. Once a field of parallel lines 32 inches apart was cut, the arm was adjusted to 22 inches and the field crosscut with a series of lines 22 inches apart. Or, a second circular plow was used for the cross-cuts to speed cutting the field as with the horse-drawn plows, the ice field was cut in a 32 x 22 inch pattern to within the last few inches of the depth of the ice.

The men could saw off a "float" of pre-scored cakes, ten cakes wide and up to twenty cakes long. The float was split in half creating a float five cakes wide by no more than twenty cakes long (100 cakes). The floats and half-floats were cut from the ice field with a gasoline powered jigsaw device. The floats were poled by the men towards the water box. Here, from the floats, men would use an ice bar to chop off separate strips containing five cakes. Individual cakes were then spiked off from each strip with a needle bar, and the cakes were swept up by the conveyor chain onto the ice plant conveyor for loading into railroad cars or the ice houses.

Although individual ice cakes were a uniform 32 by 22 inches (larger than those of the 1890's), their thickness varied according to ice conditions on the lake. In early years, typical thickness was fourteen to sixteen inches. Ten to twelve-inch ice occurred in a warm winter but was considered poor ice: seventeen to eighteen inch ice could occur in severe winters, but it was very heavy and undesirable. In later years, twelve-inch ice was the standard, and the cakes were planed down to this thickness. Once the ice cakes were separated, they were carried up into a conveyor and the cakes passed under an overhead-planing mill which was a series of graduated knives which planed or scraped off the top of each cake to a uniform thickness. The cakes then passed under a heavy bristled brush which slightly scored or corrugated the top of the ice cakes that helped prevent their sticking together while in storage. There was a considerable amount of slush ice on the cakes from the planing and brushing process. Slush fell into a water-driven channel to the ground below. Men continually worked to clear away the tons of waste into a field below (the "snipe pile").

Old belt-driven sawmill engines that burned coal in boilers powered the conveyor. A flywheel and pulley arrangement connected the engines to the conveyor system. In the head house, forty feet above the boiler and engine room, the gallery operator engaged the conveyor with a simple clutch lever.

One man worked the conveyor in each of the rooms in the icehouse. Each man was responsible to push the ice cakes from the conveyor down a wooden chute into his assigned room in the icehouse or to railcar on opposite side of the railroad track. At the end of the conveyor, any broken or unusable cakes passed up by men were pushed off to fall to the ground. The ice cakes from the gallery ran down wooden chutes to the open icehouse doors. Each chute pitched downward from the gallery to the ice house room. To slow the cakes' descent down the chutes, a board could be placed into the chute. Nails were driven partly through the extra board and the nail heads were bent over. The series of bent nail heads, call scratchers, caught the bottom of ice cakes, and slowed their speed down the chute.

In the beginning of the season, the conveyor or gallery, which was manually raised and lowered by winches, was at its lowest level near the bottom of the icehouse. Usually, each of the ice plant rooms was filled daily to uniform levels during the ice harvest. The conveyor was winched upward as the rooms in a plant were filled with ice during the season.

At the end of the chute, in each room, were two men called "switchers" who alternated in catching the ice cakes with switching hooks as the cakes fell down the chute and entered the room. Each switcher would work to fill his half-side of the room. He would grab a corner of an ice cake with his hook and shoot the cake behind him, swinging it around to his side of the room to another worker. Each switcher worked with two other men, called "placers," and one man, called a "spacer," who lined up the cakes inside the room until a full ice layer was complete. The rooms were filled from the rear to the front. The ice cakes were lined up in parallel rows from back to front with four inches of space between them to prevent their freezing into a solid mass. A total of eight men worked inside each room.

This process continued until all the rooms were filled. The filled icehouse was topped with six inches of hay to insulate the ice. From March to late in the year a reduced work force was employed to unload the icehouses and fill railroad cars for shipment to the company's eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York customers.