Frederic Tudor, promoting his pioneer shipment of ice to the West Indies in 1806, can be credited with being the first person to sell ice cream in that part of the world. The use of salt and ice to make a ‘freezing mixture’ was really the only bit of science or chemistry Tudor ever employed in the ice business. All the other innovations to do with the cutting and storing of natural ice – and there were a great many of them – were arrived at by trial and error and close observation of the keeping properties of frozen water. Whereas heat could easily be produced by the burning of fuels such as coal, the reverse process of generating low temperatures was much more complex. Even today, when half the population of the world enjoys the benefits of domestic refrigeration, very few people understand how the cooler or the ice-making machine works. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the physics of heat was properly understood, and even then there were technical problems with making machines which could produce artificial ice cheaply enough to compete with the abundant natural supplies from frozen lakes and rivers. The modern domestic refrigerator is powered by electricity, which was not widely available in homes until the 1920s. The first successful artificial refrigerators were large industrial plants which required enormous power. The ice they produced was delivered to customers who made use of it in exactly the same way as they did supplies of natural ice – by placing it in their ice-boxes.
It was in places where the supply of natural ice presented special problems that artificially manufactured ice was first used on any scale. As early as the 1860s the southern states of America began to depend on artificial ice when shipments of lake and river ice from the North ceased during the Civil War. Calcutta got its first artificial ice plants around 1880, putting an end to the Boston trade. But in most of North America natural ice harvesting gained ground continuously in the nineteenth century, and did not become established in many regions until after the 1880s. The boom in Maine came in the last decades of the century when New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington were desperate for supplies.
When the first comprehensive report on the ice industry of the United States was commissioned in 1879 as part of a national census it was estimated that about eight million tons were harvested annually, though the business was so extensive and production so poorly documented that this was at best a well-informed guess. The figures were put together by one Henry Hall, who signed himself ‘special agent’ and gave an account of the great growth of the industry in the preceding ten years. Of the eight million tons of ice harvested, about five million reached the consumer – the rest melted during shipment and storage. By far the biggest market was New York, and none of its ice was manufactured artificially: it was all cut in winter and stored in hundreds of timber warehouses which lined the lakes and rivers and had a capacity of up to 50,000 tons each. Between New York and Albany, 150 miles up the Hudson River, there were 135 ice-houses, but even this was not enough to supply the metropolis, which relied heavily on imports. In fact, in the year of the great ice census New York and Philadelphia suffered one of their recurrent ice ‘famines’ when unseasonably warm weather destroyed the harvest on the Hudson and local lakes, and the price of ice rose from $4 to $5 a ton. That year the ice was fifteen to twenty inches thick in Maine, a top-quality crop, and it could be shipped down to New York at an estimated cost of $1.50 a ton. This produced a frenzy of harvesting on the Kennebec, Penobscot and Sheepscot rivers, and two thousand cargoes of ice packed in hay and sawdust were shipped south to New York, Philadelphia and other southern cities, where they were sold for a total of around $1.5 million.
Though the demand for ice rose annually, the New York suppliers did not explore the use of artificial refrigeration. Instead they began to buy up sections of the Kennebec River shoreline and to erect great wooden warehouses there, transforming the landscape of the river for many miles. It was the same further inland, where ice companies bought up shoreline along the lakes and put up storehouses to supply the meat industry of Chicago and the brewers of Milwaukee, as well as millions of domestic consumers.
The first real crisis in the natural ice trade was not caused by competition from artificial manufacture, but by pollution. As the cities grew they encroached on the rivers and lakes from which the ice was cut, and soon there were health scares. The authorities reported that the Hudson River was becoming an open sewer, yet ice cut from it ended up in drinks served in New York hotels and put into domestic refrigerators. This produced a search for cleaner supplies away from towns, and stimulated the search for a means of manufacturing ice with pure water. The realisation that diseases such as typhoid were not killed off in frozen water added to the urgency of finding safer forms of refrigeration.
The natural ice trade began to decline from the early decades of the twentieth century, though in more remote areas of North America where electric power was not available but lake ice was abundant in winter it survived as late as the 1950s. As ice harvesting died out, the evidence of its former vast scale rapidly disappeared. There was no alternative use for the great ice-houses, many of which simply burned down, often set alight by a spark from a steam train – they were surprisingly inflammable, as most were made of wood and kept as dry as possible to better preserve the blocks of ice they had housed. But the majority were demolished or simply rotted away.
Over a wide area of the northern states, young diving enthusiasts with no knowledge of the former ice trade still emerge from lakes and rivers clutching an impressive variety of odd implements – ploughs and chisels and scrapers which fell through the ice during the harvesting. One or two museums keep small displays of these tools, and collectors have preserved manufacturers’ catalogues which proudly present their versions of the ice-plough, the ice saw, the grapple, the Jack-grapple, the breaking-off bar, the caulk-bar, the packing chisel, the House bar, the fork-bar, the float-hook, the line-marker and many other specialist implements the use of which has long been forgotten.
The inner-city ice-houses have also gone, and the ice wagon and the iceman are rapidly fading memories (although the latter survived for a time in countless bawdy jokes and in the title of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh). All that is left in America of this once-great industry is the water itself which provided a continuously renewable supply of ice each winter. There are few memorials on the banks of the rivers and lakes which once produced such a vital crop, although a small museum close to Wenham Lake, near Salem, Massachusetts, has some souvenirs and a colourful account of the area’s part in the ice trade.
Most of the few histories of the ice trade are local publications, for despite the industry’s extent it was, like farming or the mining of coal, of greatest interest to those communities which earned their living from it and whose families retain some memories passed down from earlier generations. The shipping of ice over hundreds and even thousands of miles became so routine that few records remain in the memoirs of sea-captains or sailors, who generally treated the blocks as just another cargo, like sugar or wheat. Even the epic voyages from Boston to Calcutta appear to have left little impression on the elite crews who carried ice, and who sometimes called the business, in their matter-of-fact seafaring fashion, the ‘frozen water trade’.
I have borrowed the seaman’s term for the business as the title of this book. It struck me when I first came across it as evocative of an industry which grew so impressively in the nineteenth century without any recourse to modern inventions. Its success was grounded in human qualities and skills which have been neglected as driving forces in an age now characterised in history books by the novelties and excitements of electricity and steam. Timber, sailcloth, horsepower, manpower and the traditional skills of blacksmiths, farmers and sailors made America the first ever refrigerated nation. This is the story of how that was achieved.