What’s an icebox? And how was ice made in the olden days? Learn about the ice harvest and how workers used these ice harvesting tools.
Young people today don’t know what an “icebox” is.
Before electricity was available in rural areas, people had to start planning and preparing for hot summer days in the middle of bitterly cold winter. Ice was taken from lakes, streams, or stock dams. I don’t remember any concern about clean water. They just wanted the ice to be at least 1 foot thick.
Ice harvest was like summer threshing. Several families would get together to cut ice blocks. Usually, the ice was cut with a large-tooth saw quite similar to a cross-cut timber saw. The ice was sawed into square blocks about 18-24 inches square. When the blocks were cut, they were pulled out of the water onto uncut ice that had formed on top of the lake. The blocks were pulled out of the water by strong men using ice tongs to grab them.
The trick was to keep your footing on the ice and avoid sliding into the open water where blocks were floating. Men usually chopped notches in the ice for a toehold while pulling blocks out with ice harvesting tools. A wood chute made from rough lumber reached from the ice where the blocks stood to the back end of a horse-drawn wagon (or sometimes a truck). The blocks of ice were pulled up the chute into the wagon with ice tongs, or sometimes a rope and a saddle horse were put to work.
One enormous block of ice, cloaked in sawdust
Then began the long trip with the team of horses pulling a wagonload of ice blocks to the ice house. The ice house was at the headquarters of the ranch where they were working that day. In these cases, the ice house was a hole in the ground, 4 to 6 feet deep, with a rough pole frame building covered by a roof.
The blocks were carefully placed in the hole in layers. All the cracks and holes between the blocks were filled with chipped ice, so when a layer was completed, there were no air spaces between blocks. The next layer was filled the same way. When the filling was completed, it was just one large block of solid ice.
The ice was then covered with sawdust about 2 feet thick on all sides. The building was larger and wider than the massive ice block and the covering on top of the ice was about 2 feet of sawdust. That was the insulation that kept the ice from melting in hot summer days. The sawdust was hauled from a sawmill at Cascade and was reused each year. It all had to be shoveled out of the hole before the next year’s ice could be put away.
How was ice made in the olden days?
The old-time icebox served the same purpose as today’s refrigerator, but was not nearly as convenient. It had one compartment that held a block of ice. The ice block stayed in the box quite well. Every morning it was someone’s chore to shovel back the sawdust, take a bar and break off a block of ice from the big block, take ice tongs and drag it out of the ice house, stand it up on a board or some other clean surface, get a pail of water from the well and wash the rest of the sawdust off.
The block was carried or hauled in the red wagon to the house and put in the ice compartment of the icebox. A large pan, usually an old dish pan, under the icebox caught the water as the ice melted. The pan had to be emptied about every two days. Going out to get the ice, cleaning it and putting it in the box, and then dumping the drip pan, was a dreaded job, especially on a hot summer morning. It was usually done after milking the cows, setting the irrigation water and having breakfast. But on a summer’s day, it was really nice to have cold milk and butter at breakfast and some ice chips in a glass of water.
We got our ice from various places. Once we hauled it by truck from Hat Creek over by the Landers’ place. Another year, we got it from a stock dam on our place and hauled it with a team and wagon. Another year we got ice from a dam at Fargo’s up by the Horseshoe Bend near Cascade Springs. That year, Burt Pierce hauled it for Dad in an old van-like 1930 Chevrolet school bus. We always had ice to use.
Ice harvesting tools used in the final harvest nearly 75 years ago
The last time I put up ice was in 1949, when there was a blizzard. My oldest son was born in January of that year. We lived in a log cabin with no running water or electricity, but we did have an ice house and I knew we would need an icebox for baby milk.
I was driving a truck for a contractor who was working on the Angostura Dam construction. He let me use the truck to haul ice to our cabin. At that time, you could buy ice for $1 a ton at Larvie Lake, and they’d load it.
The Larvies were the major ice supplier for Hot Springs and the surrounding area. They had a huge ice house near Larvie Lake and they put up hundreds of tons to sell to Hot Springs residents. The ice harvest at Larvie Lake was a big deal for two or three weeks each year. They hired a lot of men and the ice was cut with a motor-driven saw similar to the buzz saw more typically used to cut wood. The Larvies had an ice delivery service, just like the milk delivery service back in those days. They carried the ice into your house and put it in the ice box. The charge was based on the weight of the ice block delivered. The ice business was very important to the welfare of a town.
During World War II and the construction of Igloo, South Dakota, my uncle, Linn Tillotson, had an ice route to construction workers at Edgemont and Provo. He hauled ice from Custer and Edgemont and delivered it to cabins, homes and tents where people were living. At one time, there were several thousand people living in the Provo-Edgemont area. The people there were building the Igloo ammunition storage facility during World War II. Sewer, water and other utilities were non-existent in the area during war-time construction. FC
Russell Wyatt lives in Hot Springs, South Dakota.
