I’ve noticed in westerns people often have “ice houses” to store meat.
In the days of pre-refridgeration, just where did this ice come from? Was it chipped out in the winter and stored in super insulated sheds and divied-out as needed?
If this is the case, was the insulation good enough to have ice year round?
And a follow-up question, when did man first have the ability to make ice blocks using refridgeration?
MtM
I know many of the stately houses in England have ice houses. They used to get the ice from their own lakes in winter. They had thick brick or stone walls with straw giving extra insulation.I think that a hundred or so years ago winters in the UK were much colder and there was more chances to collect the ice.
I read a book once, and they usually got ice from frozen lakes and such during the winter and stored it during the warmer months for as long as it would last. I’m not sure it lasted all summer or not.
My guess is that if you collected enough ice, you could insulate it well enough to keep the mass through until the next winter.
I don’t know if I remember exactly when the first “freezer” was invented, but IIRC it was in the 30’s.
They did in fact chip it out lakes during the river, and normally sawdust was used as insulation for long term storage of the ice.
They usually got ice from frozen lakes and such during the winter and stored it during the warmer months for as long as it would last. I’m not sure it lasted all summer or not.
My guess is that if you collected enough ice, you could insulate it well enough to keep the mass through until the next winter.
I don’t know if I remember exactly when the first “freezer” was invented, but IIRC it was in the 30’s.
Nice…two posts. :rolleyes: Sorry about that.
The Romans of 2000 years ago used ice all year round.
They would transport a one metre square block of ice - from the mountains I suppose - stick it in a pit and insulated it with straw. It would easily last all year, even in the temperate climate of Rome.
I believe one of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (Farmer Boy?) described the process of sawing enormous blocks of ice from a lake, to be packed in a thick layer of sawdust in an ice-house.
I think I saw a picture in an old National Geographic of the the aftermath of an ice-house fire. Little of the building itself remained, save for a few scorched beams and some ash. But the pile of ice inside was still quite imposing. I guess sawdust is a pretty good insulator.
According to this museum site, at least a few harvest-and-store type ice-houses were still going concerns into the 1930s.
The second volume of Daniel J. Boorstin’s great trilogy, the Americans, has a chapter detailing the creation of the ice industry in New England in the early part of the 19th century.
My family’s estate in Devon has an ice house and they also have ice ponds there (the people who have the house and the title now are something ridculous like 3rd or 4th cousins to me, but it was the seat of my ancestors). Ice houses are usually dug into the ground.
First have the ability? Probably this
Or when was there actually a machine available that could do it? Sometime soon after this (these very first machines were capable of cooling, but not freezing)
DancingFool
In the upper Great Lakes states, the annual ice harvest was a big part of the local economy during the Nineteenth Century. See here for story and pictures of the ice harvest in Wisconsin.
And then there’s the darker side of ice harvesting as told in Upton Sinclair’s, “The Jungle.” Written in 1906 (before the advent of mechanical refrigeration), he mentions how a (semi) fictional meat packing plant would dump their offal and effluent into a big holding pond next door throughout the year.
Every winter they would carve up the ice and sell it to the local neighborhood.