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INTRODUCTION

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 in hotels, and were dependent on ice for the preservation of fresh food long before there was any artificial refrigeration at all. All the ice was natural, cut from lakes and rivers in winter, stored in huge ice-houses and delivered to customers in horse-drawn wagons. A great quantity was exported in the holds of sailing ships: that is how the ice from Wenham Lake, near Salem in Massachusetts, was carried to London. In fact the New England ice trade had begun not as a domestic business but with exports to the West Indies, and it had achieved a much more remarkable feat before any ice was sold in London: in the 1830s Boston merchants began selling ice to the British community in Calcutta. The voyage to India was about 16,000 miles, and in favourable conditions took about 130 days. Yet for fifty years the sale of New England ice to Calcutta was a profitable business. In fact its success saved the man who had first dreamed up the ice trade from financial catastrophe.

He was Frederic Tudor, surely one of most remarkable businessmen of the nineteenth century. Tudor was a diminutive, pig-headed Bostonian who dedicated most of his working life to supplying ice to the tropics. He suffered the humiliation of bankruptcy, was jailed for debt, endured a mental breakdown, but came through it all to father six children after the age of fifty and to die in 1864, aged eighty, a wealthy man with a country estate. At no time did Tudor, or any of those who became his competitors in the ice business, make use of artificial refrigeration. With one or two trivial exceptions, all the ice marketed in Tudor’s lifetime was ‘harvested’ from lakes and rivers which froze in the winter. In the holds of ships the ice was preserved through many days, and even weeks, sailing through tropical heat by the insulation of sawdust supplied by timber mills in Maine.

The ice trade was carried on in a century of great inventions – the electric telegraph, railways, steam-driven machines of all kinds, and gas and electric light. It continued long after Tudor’s death, into the age of petrol engines and electric trams. As late as 1907 New York, by then the quintessential modern city of skyscrapers and motor cars, was absolutely reliant on natural ice harvested from lakes and rivers, including the Hudson, and on imports of Kennebec River ice sent by ship from Maine. When winter weather was mild, the New York Times would warn of an ice ‘famine’ the following summer, and every year newspaper articles would appear promising an end to the reliance on harvested ice.

Frederic Tudor had not anticipated that the trade he began would lead to such ice-addiction among his fellow Americans. From the time he first shipped lake ice to the West Indies in 1806 to the beginnings of the Calcutta trade in the 1830s, he clung to one conviction: people living in tropical climates would pay a good price for ice if they could get it. The inhabitants of Havana in Cuba, and the British sweltering in Calcutta, could make ice cream, cool their drinks and relieve their suffering from fevers with ice harvested from the clear waters of New England’s many spring-fed ponds. They could even enjoy crisp Baldwin apples from the orchards of Massachusetts, and fresh churned butter, which Tudor packed in barrels and stowed alongside the ice.

The techniques Tudor and his employees developed for cutting, storing and shipping ice were in time adopted across all the areas of North America where winters were hard enough to produce a saleable crop. Ice was shipped down the eastern seaboard and carried across the continent in insulated railroad cars to satisfy the ever-growing demands of the first nation in history to enjoy refrigeration not as a luxury for the rich but as an everyday necessity for a very wide section of its population.

There had been earlier ice trades. In the sixteenth century, the mountain ranges which surround the Mediterranean and are high enough to remain snow-capped in summer provided refrigeration for those living on the torrid coasts. Snow and ice gathered on the upper slopes of the mountains was packed in straw baskets and brought down the winding Alpine tracks on donkeys. A similar trade had existed in South America for centuries, and continues in some places to this day. Wherever there were accessible mountains which carried summer snow, and towns close enough to provide a market for it, there was likely to be an ice trade. But the American industry was on a much larger scale, and was far more sophisticated than anything before it.

The harvest, which lasted for a few weeks, usually between January and March, took place across that huge region of North America where the winters are hard enough to freeze lakes and rivers solid. Whether it was on the Hudson River, one of the New England ponds, the Kennebec River in Maine or in the mid-west, it presented the same extraordinary winter tableau, and in many places drew crowds of spectators.

After a week or so of sub-zero temperatures, soundings would be taken to check the thickness of the ice. If it had frozen to a depth of eighteen inches or more it was ready – strong enough to support the weight of hundreds of men and horses, and thick enough to yield good-sized cubes of ice.

Migrant workers who lodged close to the frozen lakes and rivers joined local farmworkers to make up teams of ice harvesters. Blacksmiths shod the heavy horses with spiked shoes. The men wore boots with cork soles so they could get a grip on the ice, and wrapped their legs in layers of cloth to protect them from the cold. All the while they watched the weather: a warm spell could quickly ruin the ice, while a fall of snow might delay the cutting, for the ice would have to be cleared with horse-drawn scrapers before its surface could be marked out. Often they worked at night by torchlight. Ice was valuable, and competing ice companies working on the same lake or river had to observe boundaries: ownership was established by buying sections of shoreline, on which huge timber ice stores were built.

Once a favourable area of ice was established and the snow cleared to reveal the crystal surface of the ice, it could be marked out. This was generally the work of men who steered iron cutters drawn by teams of two horses across the surface, creating parallel lines in one direction and then, working at right angles to the first cuts, another set of parallel lines, so that the whole area to be cut was divided up into regular squares. The favoured size of the cubes varied according to the market for which the ice was destined. Blocks for India or the West Indies were the largest, those destined for American cities often smaller – a ‘New York’ ice cube was twenty-two inches square.

When the surface was marked out, horse-drawn ploughs with metal teeth cut far enough down into the first grooves to enable men with long-handled chisels to prise the blocks free. The giant ice cubes were then coaxed along channels of free water to a mechanism which hoisted them into the timber ice-house. Loading was from the top, the blocks sliding down a chute from which they were hauled into regular stacks, like huge building blocks. Sawdust was put between and around the blocks as insulation. Stacked like that awaiting shipment, the ice cubes were able to survive for several years, shrinking slowly through each summer and refreezing in winter.

Before the building of railroads to transport it, ice was carried from the stores to a port or nearby town in wagons drawn by teams of horses or oxen. From there most of it was moved by ship, and could not be carried until the spring thaw: on the Hudson, specially designed barges carried the ice down to New York. In city centres huge ice warehouses provided depots from which ice was distributed to customers. In the home Americans kept blocks of ice cut to a standard size in what were called refrigerators or ice-boxes – there are people living in rural areas who still remember these very well. It took a number of years to perfect the design of these containers for storing ice, for this proved to be technically difficult. Refrigerators were chiefly built of wood and lined with metal inside, with different compartments for keeping food fresh. Those who could afford it had a fresh block of ice delivered daily, for which they paid a weekly or monthly subscription.

American ice was crystal clear, and considered clean enough to put directly into drinks, a custom which was novel to Europeans in the nineteenth century. Before the Civil War of the 1860s the mint juleps of New Orleans and other southern cocktails were made with ice shipped down from Boston, and the abundance of natural ice which could be delivered daily made it possible for Americans to enjoy home-made ice cream right through the summer. This required an additional piece of equipment, for it is impossible to freeze liquids simply by immersing them in ice; a bit of alchemy is required. It had been discovered centuries earlier, possibly in China, that a mixture of salt and ice will draw heat from a metal container immersed in it and reduce the temperature inside it to below zero. If a liquid is put into the container it will freeze solid. To make ice cream with a pleasing, light texture it is important to stir the cream as it freezes. Nineteenth-century ice-cream-making machines therefore included a paddle mechanism to stir the mixture as it solidified.

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.