The Frozen WaterTrade
How Ice from New England Lakes
Kept the World Cool
GAVIN WEIGHTMAN
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This paperback edition 2003
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 2002
Copyright © Gavin Weightman 2002
Source ISBN: 9780007102860
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN 9780007375943
Version: 2019-09-25
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In fond memory of my uncle
Morris Weightman
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: The Frozen Assets of New England
Chapter 2: Tropical Ice Creams
Chapter 3: From the Ice-House to the Jailhouse
Chapter 5: Sad Return from Savannah
Chapter 7: The Cutting Edge of the Ice Trade
Chapter 8: A Cool Cargo for Calcutta
Chapter 9: The Ice Wagon Rolls on
Chapter 11: Homage to the Ice King
The inspiration for this book was one of those scraps of information that lodge in the mind and refuse to go away. I had read somewhere, while researching the history of nineteenth-century London, that Queen Victoria had for a time enjoyed a supply of ice from Massachusetts in New England. It was delivered by an American enterprise called the Wenham Lake Ice Company, which in the 1840s had an ice store and a shop in London with a window onto The Strand, in which a large cube of crystal clear ice about two feet square was displayed every day in summer. Sometimes a colourful New England fish called a pickerel would be frozen into the block of ice on show.
I wondered if the ingenious Americans, pioneers of mass production, great inventors and modernisers, had stolen a march on the rest of the world and devised a form of refrigeration which could produce ice cheaply enough to sell at a price the wealthy in London could afford. I discovered that there was in fact a huge ice industry in nineteenth-century North America, but that it was not at all what I had imagined.
Ice became essential to the American way of life from the mid-nineteenth century. Americans made ice cream at home on Sundays, had ice-boxes in which to keep butter and milk fresh, were served iced drinks