Ice Houses go back to before Roman times. Typically a large building, at least partially underground would be loaded with ice in the winter from a nearby Lake or River. This would be covered in an insulator like sawdust. The above ground building and roof were typically thick.
The Ice House really started getting popular in the United Kingdom in the 1600s and followed the age old practice of being largely below ground for that easy insulation value.
New England did a lot of trade in ice. Packing ships full of ice and insulated with straw and shipping it to the Caribbean.
As to how they work, think of an ice house as a giant cooler. You pack said cooler with roughly 40’x100’x40’ feet of ice and sawdust on top and it lasts all summer and fall. So in Manhattan, ice deliveries still lasted through the 40s.
FTR: My Grandfather was an iceman until the late 30s or early 40s and out of loyalty he retained an icebox even when he changed jobs to cab driver. So in Manhattan, ice deliveries still lasted through the 40s apparently.
The Hudson River was a major source of ice of NYC. Every winter back to the colonial days, the Hudson would freeze over and become the fast road in New York. Ice Boats would zip down from the large farms as far up as Albany to New York City.
You’d be surprised what effort and expenses people have put into storing ice for the summer since ancient Roman times. Here is a list of links about ice cream in past times, it is remarcable IMO.
My father worked in an ice house in Texas sometime in the early 1960s. When he told me in prompted me to ask just how the heck old was he. They were producing their own ice of course as ice is not native to southern Texas.
Interesting to see that even the Master did not know about Persian ice cream - or, more accurately: sorbet, sharbat in the original Persian-, which even preceded the Roman ice craze:
one critical issue is that the blocks of ice have to be packed very,very tightly. Touching each other. If there is any air gap between them, the blocks melt much much faster…
Somewhere in the early 1800s a New England inventor came up with a horse drawn tool that scored the ice so the blocks could be cut in uniform blocks.
So the horses ran the tool one way for 20"1 lengths and then perpendicular with a second tool for 12" widths1 and so they would stack much tighter than before this simple but game changing tool.
This appears to be a simpler tool in action, but it seems to show the scoring into a uniform grid.
1 Numbers are just examples, I didn’t go digging for the exact size.
Somewhere along the way I ended up with an Ice Block Tongs. Not sure where I picked it up from. I used it occasionally for moving tree trunks sections back when I was splitting wood for my wood stove.
I suspect all that ice was suspect. Seems like there was a lot that could go wrong. But keep in mind that the outer layers melted away on those ice blocks.
But sanitary standards were a lot lower back then also. Germ theory wasn’t even in surgical use until what 1860s and not full use until maybe 1920?
Most towns and cities didn’t have sewer systems until the same time period.
Ice suppliers successfully marketed the superiority of their Natural Ice over the artificial ice produced by the first refrigeration equipment. People knew they had Natural Ice if it had bits of leaves and dead fish in it. It took while for people to decide the dangers of consuming artificial ice were worth risking for the convenience of year round ice.
Heh. This made me laugh. A few weeks ago, my gf’s horse Jake had a dental extraction done by an equine dental specialist who drove from Virginia to our place in western Pennsylvania. More than my gf or I ever spent for our dentistry.
I was stuck assisting. He was working and telling me about his hobby, smoking and dehydrating various meats. He asked if I’d like to try his latest and I said yes, figuring he’d give me some before leaving.
Nope, he pulled a baggie from his back pocket, took a piece for himself and handed me a piece. Both of our hands were covered with horse blood, saliva, etc. The jerky was delicious!
Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, who worked with Federic Tudor, a Bostonian who shipped ice from New England to the Southern states, the Caribbean and even Asia. About two decades ago, someone published a book about him.
When I was a kid our country cottage had an icebox until well into the 1960s, and we got regular deliveries from a local ice house. I remember the ice tongs that the ice man used to carry in the large block. And the stove was wood-burning. Electricity was pretty much used only for lighting, and until they were upgraded sometime in the 60s the power lines out there were two-wire systems that only carried 115 volts.
And snow. Where I grew up there is a mountain that would maintain a large cross-shaped pack of snow all through summer if the winter before was a good un.
