Storing Winter for Summer
Long before machines, people knew that ice and snow could cool food and drink. Ancient and medieval cultures in Persia, the Mediterranean and East Asia stored winter ice in pits, caves or thick-walled buildings. In Iran, a domed building called a yakhchal used insulation, shade and sometimes channels of water to keep ice through hot months. In Europe, wealthy estates and institutions built ice houses, often partly underground with thick walls and drainage, from about the seventeenth century.
Their uses were often luxuries: chilled drinks, ices and desserts. Ice also kept dairy, fish and game fresher, and it was used in medicine to reduce fever and swelling.
From Local Habit to Commercial Trade
In the early nineteenth century, ice harvesting became a business. In 1806 the Boston merchant Frederic Tudor sent a cargo of ice to the Caribbean island of Martinique. Many people thought the idea absurd, and early voyages lost money, as ice melted or the market was not ready. Tudor persisted, found better insulation using sawdust, and built storage houses at destinations. Over the following decades the trade extended to Southern US ports, and then to Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in the 1830s and later, carried on sailing ships. Ice also went to Europe from Norway and elsewhere.
Tudor’s story is the best known, but the industry grew because of many others. Nathaniel Wyeth, who worked with Tudor, developed a horse-drawn ice cutter and a grid method for scoring ice into uniform blocks, which made harvesting faster and cheaper.
How Ice Was Harvested
Harvesting took place in the depths of winter on frozen ponds, lakes and rivers.
- Workers cleared snow and scored the surface into a grid.
- Horses pulled a marker or a plow to cut grooves, and saws separated the blocks.
- Blocks were floated along channels or hauled up ramps toward the ice house.
- Inside, the ice was stacked in layers separated by straw, hay or sawdust, which insulated it.
The work was seasonal and dangerous. Men and horses fell through thin ice, and mild winters could ruin a harvest. Large companies employed thousands of workers on rivers such as the Hudson and lakes in Maine.
The Icebox and Home Delivery
In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the icebox came into homes. A typical model was an insulated wooden cabinet with a compartment for a block of ice and a tray to catch meltwater. The ice delivery man became a familiar figure in many American and European cities, and some households displayed a card in the window to say how much ice they wanted. Ice also supplied railroads, butchers, breweries and fishing fleets, and was loaded into insulated railroad cars with ice bunkers, a precursor of refrigerated shipping.
Problems and Decline
The natural ice trade had weaknesses. Ice was sometimes cut from polluted water, and frozen water does not necessarily become clean. By the later nineteenth century, concerns about disease helped push public health bodies to look at ice sources, a worry tied to the broader growth of water treatment. Supply was also unreliable, as mild winters could bring shortages and high prices.
Meanwhile, artificial refrigeration advanced. Machines using compressors or absorption refrigeration made ice in factories, and by the end of the nineteenth century manufactured ice was competing seriously with the harvested kind. Refrigeration was rarely a sudden replacement. Natural ice remained in use in rural areas for decades, and in the early twentieth century household refrigerators with their own cooling machinery began to replace the icebox. After the 1930s and 1940s the harvest dwindled in most places, though it was still used in some rural communities.
Legacy
The ice trade’s legacy is more than nostalgia. It established that people would pay to keep food and drink cold, and it built networks of cold storage, insulation techniques and delivery systems. Those habits, and the customers who held them, were ready when mechanical cooling became affordable.