How Was Ice Delivered Before Refrigerators? (2024)

FAQs

How Was Ice Delivered Before Refrigerators? ›

Ice Deliveries

Ice was cut from the surface of ponds and streams, then stored in ice houses, before being sent on by ship, barge or railroad to its final destination around the world. Networks of ice wagons were typically used to distribute the product to the final domestic and smaller commercial customers.

Harvesting ice from ponds in the winter, ice businesses began to flourish throughout New England and other areas cold enough to create good, thick ice. Most operations used horse-drawn carriages to take ice to storehouses. From there, trains, boats and horses were used to transport the ice where it needed to go.

For millennia, those rich enough got servants to gather snow and ice formed during the winter and stored it in straw-lined underground pits called 'ice houses'.

At the end of the 19th century, many people kept their food fresh in iceboxes made of wood. These cabinets held large blocks of ice to keep food cool. Iceboxes were lined with tin or zinc for insulation. Ice delivery businesses grew as more homes required ice to preserve food.

An ice house, or icehouse, is a building used to store ice throughout the year, commonly used prior to the invention of the refrigerator. Some were underground chambers, usually man-made, close to natural sources of winter ice such as freshwater lakes, but many were buildings with various types of insulation.

Ice harvested from Midwestern rivers, lakes and ponds served many purposes during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The growing meat packing and brewing industries needed it. People needed ice at home, too. Iceboxes - large wooden coolers using blocks of ice - were common well into the 1930s and 40s.

Around 500 BC, the Egyptian and Indian cultures had discovered rapid evaporation as a means to cool water placed in clay pots, on straw beds. Evaporation, combined with the decrease in night temperatures, froze the water.

Answer and Explanation: They cut blocks of ice from a frozen river or lake during the winter then stored the blocks in an insulated or subterranean building called an "Ice House." Ice houses were designs to keep ice frozen through the summer so it could be used at any time of the year.

And before that was available, ice blocks were cut from frozen lakes and rivers, and stored in ice houses. Even in the 1950's, some people still had ice delivered to their home. They would put a card in the window indicating how much ice they needed that day.

How did ice houses stay cold? ›

How did they work, though? The answer is a simple knowledge of insulation. Partially-buried buildings with thick walls would house several tons of ice that were covered with straw or sawdust to further insulate the blocks.

While there were electric refrigerators in the early 1900s, it wasn't until the 1920s and 1930s that refrigerator technology improved and they became more affordable and therefore more common in homes. Some ice boxes remained in use until World War II, but by the 1950s they mostsly melted away into history.

Indian and Egyptian cultures used rapid evaporation to cool water quickly, sometimes quickly enough to make ice. Iran developed a yakh-chal (Persian for “ice pit”), which were onion-shaped buildings up to two stories tall, with an equal amount of space underground.

The meat was stored in a dry, cool room with some air circulation. Consumption began immediately after the meat was cured and smoked, although some meat was stored for 9 months.”

Before refrigerators, the springhouse was a fixture around most homes, providing a place to keep milk, butter, and other perishables from spoiling. Running springwater kept temperatures cool enough to preserve foods even on hot summer days. The “house” was a wooden structure with a roof built directly over the spring.

In cold regions, during winter, lakes and ponds would freeze. People would cut large blocks of this natural ice using saws and store them in structures called “ice houses.” These ice houses were well-insulated, often with straw or sawdust, to keep the ice from melting as summer approached.

These teams would begin by scraping any snow off the ice. Then they used tools pulled by horses to cut a grooved grid into the ice. Those grooves would be cut through, making huge chunks of ice that could float down a river channel to a chute to be picked up.

Ice Pits Were Insulated With Straw And Wood

It wasn't just ice cream that was stored in these underground pits, as they were also used for meat and other foods that could spoil in the heat. In fact, ice harvesting was a booming industry that ramped up in the beginning of the 19th century.

The icebox had started going away as early as the late 1930s in bigger cities (NYC and Chicago). The 1950s saw the real end of the icebox era….. tho there were holdouts. Speaking from my family's ice business perspective, the last home delivery my Dad's company made was in the early 1970s.