In the 19th century, winter ice, cut from the frozen ponds, lakes and rivers of the American North, was transported around the world, initiating a new age of cool.
On September 10, 1833, the brig Tuscany docked in Calcutta and began unloading a wholly unexpected cargo—100 tons of crystal-clear ice, cut from the winter ponds of Massachusetts and transported from Boston across 15,000 miles of mostly tropical waters.
The British colony in Calcutta was, likewise, transported. Servants were sent scurrying to acquire the commodity, which had gone promptly on sale. One resident Briton wrote: “How many Calcutta tables glittered that morning with lumps of ice! The butter dishes were filled; the goblets of water were converted into miniature Arctic seas with icebergs….Everybody invited everybody to dinner, to taste of claret and beer cooled by the American importation.”
Ice to Calcutta was the grandest coup of a 19thcentury entrepreneur, Frederic Tudor, who by the time of this passage to India had been shipping ice to ports throughout the Caribbean for a quarter century. Tudor—whom one biographer cheerfully termed “a diminutive, pig-headed Bostonian”—had overcome the scorn of many, and a serious bout with bankruptcy, to pursue a business plan as dazzling as his ice in its simplicity. “In a country,” Tudor once wrote, “where at some seasons of the year the heat is almost unsupportable, where at times the common necessary of life, water, cannot be had but in a tepid state—ice must be considered as out doing most other luxuries.”
In warmer climes, ice had long ranked as a luxury. By one account, ice was stored in deep pits almost 4,000 years ago near the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia; the Roman emperor Nero used snow brought from the Apennines to cool his wine; England’s James I had brick-lined pits built at Greenwich to capture the cold of snow; and, later, ships from England gathered the floating ice of the North Atlantic to be brought to London.
In the 19th century, ice, like many things, made its way from luxury to necessity. Tudor’s most important contribution, perhaps, was to demonstrate to commercially minded America that a good return could thereby be had, and many followed in his footsteps. The world wanted cold. New England in winter had plenty of surplus cold to export, cold that conveniently stored itself in clear slabs of ice up to 2 feet thick. The region also had mounds of sawdust, the waste product of lumbering—and a cheap, effective insulator for the frozen commodity.
Ice made its way from the ponds and rivers of New England, where it was cut, packed in sawdust and stored until the following summer. It was then sold to the city dwellers of the East Coast, to whom it was delivered by, of course, the iceman. Ice also made its way from the Great Lakes and freshwater ponds of the Midwest to Chicago, where Swift, Armour and others used it to introduce fresh meat to the American table, and to Milwaukee, where German brewers used it to produce the cold-fermented lager beers that went with that meat. The whole process was like a miniglacier, which by the late 19th century saw 8 million tons of ice moving south each year.
Ice is peculiar stuff. It forms in the open—lakes, ponds and elsewhere—whenever water of less than 40 degrees Fahrenheit is exposed to air that is below freezing. The ice industry was dependent on one simple fact of nature: Unlike most things, water expands when it freezes. A cubic foot of ice weighs about 58 pounds—10 percent less than an equal volume of water. Were this not the case, ice would not float, and there would be no surface ice available to harvest.
Ice is hard, often slippery and unyielding to the touch. It is also startling to the uninitiated. In his Second Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling writes of a bird that, present when a cargo of ice is being unloaded in India, catches and straightaway swallows a chunk of ice casually tossed its way. The adjutant bird reported: “Never have I felt such cold. I danced in my grief and amazement until I recovered my breath, and then I danced and cried out against the falseness of the world; and the boatmen derided me until they fell down.”
Ice is sometimes a commodity of contemplation. Henry David Thoreau wrote: “Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect.” Thoreau, America’s best-known naturalist, reported on a commercial ice harvest when in 1847 workmen came to, in Thoreau’s phrase, “unroof the house of fishes”—stripping the ice from Walden, America’s best-known pond.
As Thoreau described the scene: “A hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes…and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour. They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre.” The resulting pile, Thoreau reported, stood 35 feet high and 100 feet square. With its gaps stuffed with meadow hay, it looked like “a venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac.” Told that some of the ice was destined for India, Thoreau struck a globalizing note: “Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants…of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well.”
Although Thoreau called the methods of ice harvesting “too well known to require description,” as with many 19th-century chores, those methods are now all but entirely forgotten. Thoreau’s description was of a small commercial operation; more commonly, ice harvesting was a rural task, one that, like butchering hogs and raising a barn, was part of the communal side of farm life. Farmers worked in teams to cut and store the ice that they would need the following summer to chill and preserve milk and butter.
The ice harvest had no fixed date, falling anytime from the week before New Year’s to late February. Climate influenced its timing. On winter’s southern tier—that is, the Ohio River valley and Pennsylvania— the fear that an unseasonable thaw might spoil the crop prompted farmers to harvest when ice had reached 6 inches thick. Farther north, in Maine, where winter’s cold could be better relied upon, the harvest waited until 15 inches or more of ice had formed.
The work of commercial harvesting was done by coordinated teams, well described in such contemporary sources as Scribner’s Magazine and Henry Hall’s The Ice Industry in the United States, both published in 1875. Crew members had specialized tasks. First, horse-drawn wooden snowplows would clear the surface snow that overlay the ice. A snow-ice plane followed, to shave off any crusted or pocketed ice that remained. Then, a horse-drawn marker would scratch a 2- or 3-inch-deep groove into the ice. The marker was then fixed with a sliding guide; with the guide set into the previously made cut, the marker would create a second cut, generally 22 inches from the first. By this rather tedious means, the surface would be scratched first in one direction, then at 90 degrees, creating something resembling a large, frozen checkerboard.
Cutting then began. Commonly, ice would be cut through most of its thickness by teams of horses pulling ice plows. Workers would free the ice using long-handled pry bars, breaking it into rafts of perhaps 30 cakes long by 12 wide, then cutting smaller units to be floated toward shore. In her account of late-19th-century ice harvesting in Maine, Jennie G. Everson wrote: “Moving ice was called ‘live ice,’ while blocks that had come to a stop were known as ‘dead ice,’ and hard labor was required to start it moving again. In warm or rainy weather, when the ice was sticky and slushy and went slowly, shouts of ‘Come on, boys, don’t let her die,’ ‘Catch her while she’s hot,’ or perhaps taunts by older and more experienced men, rang through the house.” On shore, the often 300-pound blocks were pulled by horses up a chute that extended into the water, and then dispatched for storage.
The trade had its own specialized tools, many designed by Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth of Boston, an associate of Tudor’s and the inventor of the first practical ice cutter and other tools that improved the work’s efficiency. Tools included ice saws of varying sizes, a grapple used in towing sheets of ice by horse, breaking-off bars to separate pieces from flows, splitting chisels to separate sheets into blocks, bar chisels to loosen and trim cakes, ice hooks to pull or push the floating ice, and scoop nets to remove ice from the channel through which the cakes were floated. There were dozens of other tools as well.
Once harvested, the ice had to be stored. Here, again, the debt was to Tudor, who realized that melted ice would turn no profit and who did much to master methods of insulation. In 1816 he built an icehouse in Havana that used wood shavings 3 feet thick as insulation. The resulting loss from melting was just seven gallons an hour; at that rate, its stockpile of 150 tons would take six months to disappear.
Less elegant constructions often sufficed. A visiting Midwestern farmer noted that his neighbor’s icehouse was of a plain rough-board construction, 16 feet square, with a simple roof and openings back and front. According to the farmer, the neighbor reported that “his ice kept perfectly until the next winter. He put a layer of sawdust about a foot thick on the ground, and then stacked the ice snugly in the center, 18 or 20 inches from the walls; and then filled it in with sawdust, and up over the top a foot or more thick.” With the understanding gained from this visit, the farmer built his own icehouse, later affirming: “At the present time I have an abundance of ice, and the cakes seem to come out as square and perfect as when they went in, seemingly nothing lacking except what is used out. I am satisfied how to build an ice house.”
While harvesting ice in teams meant the work got done, the camaraderie that developed was apparently not enough to make the work a pleasure. Ice harvesting made for long, cold days—days made longer and colder if one failed to remain dry. Horses, their shoes fitted with special steel cleats for traction, provided much of the power—and much of the uncertainty if their 1,500-pound bulks found a weak spot or air pocket in the ice and suddenly broke through. In America’s Icemen, author Joseph Jones described one scene: “If a horse broke through the ice the driver immediately grabbed the rope and pulled it tight around the [horse’s] neck. By shutting off the wind the horse would not struggle in the water.” Planks were placed under the horse and then a second team would haul it from the water. Chilled to the core, “the frightened horse was wiped down, blanketed, thoroughly exercised.” In addition to the shock and cold, horses sometimes drowned.
The work may seem picturesque today, but those who performed it did not necessarily recall it fondly. One upstate New York resident said: “Looking back I cannot see any romantic side to the ice harvest. It was just cold, hard work that was necessary to protect milk and food during the hot summer months….The ice harvest, like hog raising, has gone from upstate New York, but it is one industry that is not missed.”
Early on, commercial ice remained a product for the affluent, and, in the case of Tudor, an item for export. In 1847 Tudor sent 23,000 tons of ice to 31 foreign destinations. Tudor had his rivals. To promote its sale in England, Wenham Lake Ice Company, an American concern, sent a block of ice to Queen Victoria. To promote it further, the company’s office on The Strand in London kept a 2-foot block of ice on display in its window—so clear, it was claimed, that one could read a newspaper through it. A second entrepreneur, Gage, Hittinger and Company, tried to build a market for ice by introducing the British to mint juleps and other drinks best served chilled. This effort, in a country that allegedly still drinks its beer warm, was not entirely successful.
As a product for affluent consumers, ice had its hierarchy, and Wenham’s was considered the best. Food writer Elizabeth David wrote that, at mid-19th century, “No British dinner party was considered complete without Wenham’s ice”—a small block decorating each table, larger blocks for cooling. (When Norway displaced America as the source of England’s ice, a lake there was renamed Wenham so that its product could be marketed under that name.)
Ice was an exotic export, but its real impact was in the United States, where about 97 percent of domestically harvested ice was used. The most notable impact was on the American diet. And it was a good thing, too.
Most mid-19th-century Americans lived on salted pork, bread or corn mush, a diet low in many vitamins, high in fat, exceedingly long on monotony and not all that safe—intestinal illnesses traceable to spoiled food were widespread, often fatal. Monotony and danger stemmed from the same cause. Unless chilled, meats and most types of produce would spoil; they could not, therefore, be delivered to markets far from their point of origin. Thus, diets were largely restricted to what nearby agriculture could produce. The danger had mostly to do with bacteria associated with spoilage. And to prevent or, at least, retard that spoilage, people had for centuries been storing produce in cellars and salting, pickling, smoking, drying or spicing meats—indeed, the preservative properties of spices had done much to drive early trade with the Orient.
In 1867 a revolution in food preservation came when J.B. Sutherland of Michigan patented a refrigerated railway car that channeled air through bunkers of ice located at either end of the car, thus cooling the contents. That same year, the Illinois Central Railroad put a refrigerated car into service, with 100 pounds of ice used to cool 200 quart batches of strawberries. Brewers, wishing to produce cold-fermented German lagers, became major users of ice, permitting year-round production of brews previously available only in cooler months.
The most important step came in 1878, when Chicago cattle dealer Gustavus Swift sought an alternative to shipping live cattle east for slaughter; if already butchered beef could be shipped cooled, the costs would greatly decrease. Swift commissioned the design of a railway car that was chilled by bins of ice positioned near its top. The cooler air produced by the melting ice would sink to the bottom of the car, preserving its contents. The consequence: Chicago became the cattle and hog butcher to the world, and fresh meat found its place in the American diet nationwide. Soon, other perishable goods—apples from Washington, peaches from Georgia— were being carried across the country in rapidly moving refrigerated cars, and produce could be shipped from wherever it could be grown most economically, all year long.
The railways had created cool. Families maintained cold storage in their homes by purchasing ice chests, which became a standard item in a middle-class home by the 1880s. Sturdily made of oak, the containers could store up to 100 pounds of ice—generally, a day’s worth of cooling. That ice was delivered from the slowmoving cart of the iceman, who— rather like the Good Humor men of later years—was a creature of interest to neighborhood children. By one account: “Children loved the iceman! Little kids would string along behind and beg for ice chips. If that didn’t work they would climb on the back of the delivery wagon or truck, while the iceman was making a delivery, and steal a piece of ice to suck.” By the late 19th century, such home use accounted for half the national consumption of ice.
As ice went from luxury to acknowledged necessity, massive quantities were required to meet the demand. In the Chicago area, 3,000 men worked at harvesting ice from the rivers that flowed into Lake Michigan. By 1883, Chicago ice companies had an aggregate capacity of 1.3 million tons. Meat packers maintained huge railroad-side warehouses filled with ice where refrigerated cars could be replenished. In Pewaukee, Wis., Armour built a 6-acre icehouse that stored 175,000 tons in a single location.
The ice business prospered. With demand rising, the industry sought out new sources. Weather played a role. The winter of 1879-80 was unseasonably warm in New York’s Hudson River Valley, and by February 1880 its local crop of ice was largely ruined. Wholesale prices in New York City rose above $4 a ton, which spelled opportunity for ice harvesting in Maine. There, the Kennebec, Sheepscot and Penobscot rivers lay coated in 15 or more inches of glistening ice. That ice could be cut, loaded and freighted to New York, Jones wrote, for barely $1.50 a ton. Four thousand men were soon bringing in the crop. So much sawdust was required for insulation that the former nuisance suddenly gained commercial value, selling for $3 a cord. About 1.3 million tons of ice was harvested in Maine, three-quarters of it from the Kennebec, a yield that represented about one-fourth of the nation’s consumption. From 1880 onward, Maine ranked ahead of Massachusetts as the leading provider of ice.
Maine achieved preeminence, however, just as the foundations of the ice industry began to melt from under its feet. One cause was technological innovation. The basic elements of mechanical ice making—compressor, condenser, expansion valve and evaporator—had been established as long ago as 1834, when a device incorporating such components was patented in Britain by Jacob Perkins, an American living in London. In 1848, a Frenchman, Ferdinand Carre, devised an ammonia-based refrigerating system. In 1851, a Florida physician, Dr. John Gorrie—who had been treating malaria patients by placing them in a room cooled by air circulating over blocks of ice—completed an automatic ice-making machine, for which he received a U.S. patent that year. In 1856, an Australian, James Harrison, produced a working refrigerator on the principle of vapor compression.
None of these inventors thrived—indeed, Dr. Gorrie went broke trying to promote his invention. The central problem was that none of the inventions were, at least as yet, particularly efficient. The ice they produced was far more costly than the going rate for natural ice. That rate varied, depending on where the ice was headed. Ice being bulky, much of its retail price in any city reflected the costs of getting it there. Ice that in New York City might sell for $8 a ton, delivered, brought 10 or more times that amount in inland Southern cities. Those faced with such prices welcomed alternatives.
The country’s first artificial ice-making company opened in New Orleans in 1868; it placed its ice on sale at $35 a ton, exorbitant by New York City rates, but a bargain locally. The New Orleans Crescent reported, “So great has been the demand of late for this ice that the immense quantity of 60 tons per day is inadequate to meet it.” The efficiency of mechanical refrigeration increased with the years; larger volumes brought lower prices, and the affordability of the mechanical alternative worked its way northward.
Holding the bulk of the market, natural ice makers sloughed off their upstart mechanical rivals. In January 1889, the Bath, Maine, Daily Times reported that a Chicago ice-making machine had blown up, setting several buildings ablaze and inflicting $200,000 in damage. It editorialized: “Kennebec ice men can now chuckle under their collars and mark up several points for their natural river product. A few accidents like this will discourage the general introduction of such concerns, and Maine’s winter industry will continue to flourish as of old.”
He who chuckles last, however, chuckles best. A key selling point of pond and river ice was that it was “natural”—formed by nature’s cold on nature’s lakes and ponds and, as such, “superior.” This point was about to be lost. Then, as now, the word “natural” had no very certain meaning; it covered a multitude of sins. Those sins were quite small—the billions of bacteria contained in the raw sewage and general sludge of industrial life that were being dumped untreated into the nation’s water system. That water, when frozen, was sawed up, sold and used to cool drinks. Thoreau had observed that ice remained pure over time, but only, as events were to demonstrate, if that water was pure to begin with. Doubts about the purity of ice harvested from rivers and ponds began to surface in the 1880s, a few years before the Maine newspaper’s confident prediction. Doubt grew. In the summer of 1901, a typhoid epidemic in Chicago was blamed on polluted ice.
And finally, the “natural industry” was the victim of Mother Nature. In the early 19th century, Tudor realized that the simple cold of New England’s winters was a valuable commercial asset. Cold was indeed the natural ice industry’s key raw material, but it was a material the industry itself could not produce. In 1905-06, a warm winter devastated the crop. And on February 2, 1906, The New York Times headlined: “ICE FAMINE THREATENS UNLESS COLD SETS IN—Twenty Days’ Hard Frost Needed to Make a Crop—NONE HARVESTED ON HUDSON. New York needs 4,000,000 Tons a year and Artificial Plants can supply only 700,000.”
The availability of cheap natural ice had turned it into a necessity, and as such, it was a precious commodity people were unwilling to leave to the vicissitudes of Old Man Winter. Mechanically produced ice was not only safer, it was also more reliable. The number of commercial ice-making houses in America, 787 in 1899, rose to more than 2,000 by 1909. And it was perhaps a good thing for New Yorkers that the ice harvest failed on the Hudson River in 1906. The following year, Dr. Daniel D. Jackson of the state’s Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity declared Hudson River ice unfit for cooling drinks. The natural ice industry died swiftly. Just before the turn of the century, the Kennebec River in Maine had produced 1.3 million tons of ice a year; in 1907-08, no ice was commercially harvested on the Kennebec.
The death of the natural ice industry came less than a century after Frederic Tudor’s entrepreneurial insight that cold—the bane of New England’s winters—was itself a commercial commodity. With that principle established, inventors followed: first, to create the cooled railcars that brought fresh meat and produce to America’s table; and second, to devise mechanical methods of producing cold more cheaply, more reliably, more safely and in greater abundance than the lakes and rivers of Massachusetts and Maine could manage.
What Tudor introduced to the world of trade was a new concept, that of a self-contained zone of cold that would protect goods in transit. Known in today’s world of trade as “cold chain,” it is how all manner of temperature-sensitive goods—including 80 million shipments of pharmaceuticals a year—reach their destinations, following in the wake of Tuscany’s 15,000-mile passage to India in 1833.
Originally published in the August 2006 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.