Opinion

The ice harvest

Monday, December 3, 2007
Whitaker's Furniture warehouse was once an ice house for the railroad. (Walt Sehnert)

One of the things we tend to take for granted these days is ice. Modern refrigerators are all equipped with some sort of ice making attachments -- from simple ice trays to ice making machines and dispensers. (Recently we were in a home that had a special attraction on their refrigerator -- an outside spigot leading to a small beer keg, for instant glasses of draft beer -- the ultimate in instant gratification?)

Ice was not always a commodity to be taken for granted. In the 1930s, in Plainview, our ice came from an ice-making facility at the light plant. Ice was made in 300-pound blocks, which were divided into to 100 pound blocks, then to 50-pound, and finally to 25-pound blocks. The 50 pounders and the 25s were the usual sizes for home delivery. We had an ice man, who had recently traded his faithful horse for an old Ford pickup. He made the rounds every morning of the houses in Plainview. Housewives had a sign, which they placed in the window, which indicated 25#, 50#, or 0#, telling the fellow just how much ice to leave. He would bring the ice into the house, his tongs clenching the appropriate size block slung over his back, which was protected from the ice by a type of rubber cape. He would put the ice in one side of the "ice-box."

The ice boxes were constructed so that cool air coming off the block of ice would circulate to the other side of the box, where butter, milk, and other perishables were stored. The system worked quite well.

There were always shady stories about "The Ice Man," probably because he came into the home to deliver his cargo in the mornings, when husbands were at work, but in Plainview our ice man was a hard working family man, a fellow who was very popular with neighborhood kids. He used his ice pick with the precision of a surgeon and could divide his ice chunks into perfect rectangles with a minimum of strokes. In summer there were always kids clustered around his truck, to pick up and suck the ice chips that came flying off the blocks as he chipped them to order. I'm sure he used his skill there also, because there always seemed to be just enough good sized ice chips to accommodate the kids who were hanging around his truck.

By the late '30s mechanical "Frigidaires" were becoming commonplace, and by the end of World War II, everyone was buying a new "Frig" as fast as the dealers got them in. (My dad was a big user of the ice plant ice, as he used a great deal of ice at the bakery. After the war many of the old "ice boxes" began showing up at garage sales, and Dad would buy them. At one time we had six of the boxes in the warehouse -- all in use to store ice plant ice. Some of the boxes were really quite beautiful furniture, with intricate designs of inlaid wood. Today these boxes are in great demand at antique shops.

But even before "Ice-Plant" ice, folks used ice to cool their drinks, preserve their food, and make ice cream. Then the ice came from local ponds and rivers. In those days "Ice Harvesting" was big business. The railroad, for instance, used large quantities of ice in their elegant dining cars, and to preserve meat from the Midwest on its journey to the packing plants in Chicago. An early lucrative business of McCook National Bank founder, Pat Walsh, was harvesting ice for McCook citizens and for the Railroad, from his pond south and west of McCook.

In Curtis, in Frontier County, ice harvesting was the major industry in town. The railroad had come to Curtis in 1886, and served as the division point between Holdrege and Sterling, Colo. It had a depot, a roundhouse, a coal chute, and a machine shop. Train crews worked both ways out of Curtis and several crews were maintained there.

One of the first projects after the railroad came to town was to throw up a dam at the end of a canyon along Medicine Creek. This formed a lake of about 20 acres. The lake was a popular place for summer recreation, providing swimming, boating, and fishing. In the winter it was a fine place for ice skating. It also provided the power for the town's flour mill.

But the lake also served as the site of the town's largest industry -- Ice Harvesting. At one time Curtis was reported to be the largest shipper of "natural" ice in the United States. Ice was shipped as far as Montana in the west and to Illinois in the east, and to all the places in between. There were five large ice houses built near the lake, four for the flour mill, for commercial use, and one for the railroad, for its own use.

Normally, 80 to 100 men would be employed in cutting ice. They would cut the ice into large rectangular pieces, which were stored in "ice-houses" -- large, wooden storage sheds. The blocks of ice were stacked in the sheds and covered with two to three feet of sawdust and/or straw for insulation. We tend to think of sawdust as a rather poor insulator, but ice covered with sawdust, in a normal, shaded ice house regularly lasted into September. In Curtis they tell the story about one of the filled ice houses burning to the ground, yet the ice protected in its blanket of sawdust and straw, was unaffected by the fire's heat. The consumer merely had to rinse the sawdust off the ice and it was "good as new."

(Harry Culbertson, a pioneer McCook railroader, said that the term "Featherbedding" originated in McCook. It was deriving from the railroad "bums," who took refuge in the ice houses in summer, where it was comfortably cool and the sawdust/straw mattress was soft to sleep on -- almost like a "featherbed".)

In the winter of 1912, temperatures in Curtis dropped to -25 degrees F, every night for three weeks. Ice was 22" thick and crews took off three crops of ice that one season. That year there were more than 200 men, working night and day, 'round the clock harvesting ice. They loaded some 1500 freight cars with ice that year, plus filling the ice houses with over 9,000 tons of ice for summer shipment. Ice chutes were built so that eight freight cars could be loaded at one time.

Hauling ice meant hauling an incredibly heavy cargo. Roy Williams, a Curtis roundhouse foreman and veteran railroader recalled that it was all that two old steam engines ("double-headers") could do to pull a train load of ice up a certain hill between Curtis and Moorefield, the next town east. They would fill both engines with water in Curtis and would have to fill them again at Moorefield, just nine miles down the road.

Harvesting ice from local ponds is a custom no longer in vogue. Our health standards are so much higher now than they were one hundred years ago, and maybe the ponds and streams were cleaner then too. Ice machines have gotten smaller, cheaper, and more efficient. I'm sure that, regarding ice, things are better all around. But gee, those ice chips from the ice man's truck sure did taste good on a hot summer day!

Source: "A Railroad Town", by Monine Mortensen, a monograph presented to the Frontier County Historical Association.

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