How far south in the USA could 19th century icehouses operate before mechanical refrigeration? Now of course anywhere on the Atlantic coast and maybe even the Gulf coast could get ice shipped down from New England; but inland, especially before railroads, could an icehouse operate in Mississippi, Alabama or southern Georgia solely on how much ice could be harvested in the brief, not-that-cold winters?
We just had a related thread last month, you might find some help in it.
What I was wondering was, how far south could you harvest enough ice locally to stock an ice house?
I’d expect not much further south than New England. It gets cold enough to freeze much further south than that, but to run an economical ice house, you need more than that, not just to freeze, but to freeze deep. If your local ponds only have an inch of ice on the top, then all you can harvest is inch-thick slabs. If the ponds can even take the weight of your harvesting equipment.
That is incorrect, at least as far south as the Potomac and Cincinnati.
There were Ice houses in Arkansas in the mid 1800s.
Hot springs boasted of one, Little Rock and Fort Smith had them.
There’s still the building of one that was in Camden, Ar (it’s a bar now) right on the Ouachita River. I can’t seem to find it’s vintage. But it’s old.
A bit of googling suggests that, in the south, ice was shipped to the South, from northern states, on board river barges.
By the time of the railroads, I would not be surprised if it was faster to ship ice that way, in insulated boxcars, but I also suspect that mechanical ice production began at scale at roughly the same time.
OK, so how did they do it? Did they just do very thin slabs, or did it actually freeze thick enough? Because even in the Cleveland of my youth, ice more than an inch or two thick was rare.
Don’t forget that ice at 0 deg will keep a lot longer than ice at 30 deg. My grandmother had an ice box until the end of the war and a guy came down the street once a week in a horse drawn cart and delivered her what must have been 100# block of ice. But that ice could well have been made by a mechanical refrigerator. This was in Philly, BTW.
It was apparently colder back in 1820 as an example. Parts of the Potomac froze enough.
I’ll have a hard time finding cites, but I believe the Potomac was still freezing over as late as the 1920s.
I worked in a former ice house in Seattle, where it almost never freezes, and gets up onto the 80s and 90s in July/August.
I’m assuming that’s why the ice houses were on the rivers. Where the steamboats came thru.
A small, relatively quiet body of water will freeze a lot deeper than that. I used to work the ice harvest when I volunteered at a living history farm in Illinois circa 2010.
We’d cut the ice from one of the farm ponds. Management considered five inches the minimum depth of ice that was safe to walk and work on, so we’d wait until there was a freeze to that depth to start.
I was there about five years, and every year, we did eventually get a hard freeze and do the harvest, although sometimes we had to wait until late January or early February.
Hm, maybe that’s the problem; I’m basing my expectations on Lake Erie, which is both large and constantly-flowing.
Ice was shipped from the US as far afield as England, so shipping it to the South would have been no trouble at all. Wenham Lake Ice Company - Wikipedia
The Miami & Erie Canal was surrounded by ice ponds just a few miles north of Cincinnati. They’d fill them up with canal water before the canal itself froze for the winter, then they’d harvest and store the ice in adjacent ice houses until the spring when the canal thawed. Since the canal’s connection to the Ohio River was abandoned in the early 1860s I suspect this ice was mostly for local use rather than exporting. Still, it shows that back in the 1800s it got plenty cold enough here to have a viable ice industry.
Right – this is the point . You don’t have to make ice where your ice house is located. Frederic Tudor made his fortune sawing up ice in Massachusetts ponds, storing it in sawdust (a great insulator), and shipping it all over the world. Surprisingly, although ice houses had existed well before Tudor’s time, he had to work hard to convince investors that this was a real business with a real chance of profit. He had to create a market for ice. It paid off, in the end. see the book The Frozen Water Trade by Gavin Weightman.
Cecil Forester wrote about Horatio Hoornblower enjoying a drink chilled with ice from an ice house in New Orleans in the early 18th century, but this is far too early for Tudor’s business. As I say, other people had done it before, but not as a large-scale business.
Actually my question was about how far south you could harvest enough ice to maintain at least a small ice house, or even just a “cold house” for cream or milk.
If there was only some way to emphasize at the top of the thread that you want to know how far south “harvestable ice could be collected” rather then people telling you the answer to how far south ice could be stored.
Yeah, it’s easy to store ice anywhere. Even aside from insulation, just get a big enough pile of it in one place, and the square-cube law works in your favor. The question isn’t where you can store it, but where you can produce it.