On the harbor's east side, a cold storage plant known as the "Freezer" was built in 1919 on the site of an earlier sardine cannery. Its five-story main building measured 100 feet by 65 feet, and by 1925 it was a fully operational cold storage facility for fish that also manufactured artificial ice. A Register article in August 1943 said Boothbay Freezer was generally believed to be the best ice manufacturing plant on the New England coast, but production during the war years was hampered by an acute labor shortage, with the company reporting it had six men but needed fifty more and about thirty-five women and girls when it could have used one hundred and thirty-five. The factory was completely destroyed by fire in 1978.