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In The Frozen Water Trade, author Gavin Weightman describes a once-thriving and now nearly forgotten U.S. business: the natural ice industry. Taken from New York's Hudson River and the lakes and streams of New England and the Midwest, natural ice became a staple of American life from the early 1800s until the 1950s.
The ice was also shipped around the world, from the Caribbean to India, in insulated ships and stored in vast ice houses. In the winter of 1879-80 alone, between 8 million and 10 million tons of winter ice was harvested, employing thousands of workers. BusinessWeek Books Editor Hardy Green reviewed The Frozen Water Trade in the magazine's Feb. 24 issue and recently talked to Weightman about this era. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:
Q: How did you come to choose this topic for a book?
A: Ages ago, I was looking at a history of Victorian London and came across a story that Queen Victoria had gotten ice from Massachusetts. It sounded ridiculous, but the story stuck in my head. Then I investigated more and discovered that this was a huge industry.
Q: You describe how Frederick Tudor -- an industry pioneer who would become known as "The Ice King" -- in 1805 hit on a scheme to export ice to the Caribbean. Why did he think people there would want it?
A: The Tudors were from an area -- New England -- where those who could afford it cut their own ice, stored it in icehouses, and used it in the summer. In their youth, Frederick and his brother William traveled to Cuba, where they found the heat intolerable. That gave them the idea that ice would sell like hot cakes in the Caribbean -- where there were no mountains and no local source of cooling, people would see it as a fantastic luxury.
He was partly right, but he also had to generate a market for the stuff. Initially, the people in Martinique didn't know what to do with it.
Q: You say in the book that ice "became essential to the American way of life from the middle of the 19th century." Could you describe that?
A: Frederick's idea was that the main market would be in the tropics, but he was wrong. Once they got the industry going, they found that there was a tremendous local demand, in Boston and all the way down the Eastern seaboard. During the California gold rush, which began in 1849, they were even shipping ice to California. By that decade, the use of small ice boxes was becoming quite common.
By the 1860s and '70s, New York was so dependent on ice that newspapers began running big stories that reported on the state of the ice harvest. These might appear in mid-winter, saying what the ice harvest in New England had been like and whether or not there would be supplies for the summer. In the summer there would be stories reporting on how well the store of ice was holding out.
Insulation made it possible for dealers to store it for years -- so there were also sensational stories, speculating on whether dealers were playing underhanded games, keeping ice in storage to create artificial shortages.
Q: It seems fantastic to imagine huge teams of workers using horse-drawn ice plows to cut lakes and rivers, then extracting ice with various hand tools, often working by night.
A: The horse-drawn plow, which came in about 1827, was critical to development of the industry. The plow had parallel blades that cut deep grooves in the ice, then guys would pry large blocks out. The process used to draw big crowds and was often the subject of magazine illustrations.
There was a terrific sense of urgency. Ice had to be about a foot thick to support the weight of horses and the teams of men. The work had to be done as quickly as possible before the weather changed. Once you got it into the icehouse and insulated it with straw, everything was all right.
Sometimes in a good winter, you'd get more than one harvest. And there were huge warehouses, some of which held 400,000 tons of ice.
Q: Was there friction among various companies competing for ice?
A: In the 1840s, Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Mass., was a primary source of ice, and there were disputes in which one party might be accused of cutting more ice than he could legally claim. A Harvard University law professor was called in to adjudicate, and he drew up a complex map to divide up the rights. The amount of ice you could cut was related to the amount of shore property you owned. This set a standard that was adopted elsewhere.
But there were real battles between rival companies on the Milwaukee River and elsewhere. Big companies bought up sections of the Kennebec River in Maine. But then the ice might move due to a current, sparking disputes over who the ice belonged to.
Q: What ended the ice industry?
A: Two things. First, as cities began to spread, they polluted the sources of the ice. There was rising worry about typhus, and one or two cases where it broke out.
That gave investors incentive to put more into production of artificial ice [frozen by steam-driven artificial refrigeration]. Had the producers of steam-driven artificial refrigeration wanted to, they could have supplanted the natural-ice trade as early as the 1860s, but they didn't think it was cost-effective.
The sale of natural vs. artificial ice was still neck-and-neck till World War I. Then, in the 1920s, inventors began to miniaturize refrigeration using electric motors. That destroyed the domestic ice trade. But the amazing thing is that it lasted as long as it did.
Edited by Patricia O'Connell
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