KINGSTON>> A century ago, keeping perishables cold didn’t start with plugging in a refrigerator.
Instead, food was kept cool in a large insulated wooden box called an “ice box,” stocked with large blocks of ice, said Allynne Lange of Newburgh, a curator at the Hudson River Maritime Museum on Kingston’s East Strand. All along the Hudson Valley to New York City, ice was cut from the Hudson River, as well as lakes and ponds, she said.
While farmers had cut ice to keep dairy products cold since colonial times and wealthy founding fathers maintained ice houses to make ice cream, a delicacy at the time, villagers and city dwellers didn’t benefit from this natural form of refrigeration until insulated ice boxes began appearing in the 1800s.
“Citizens in New York City wanted ice available so their milk would stay fresh,” Lange said. Demand led to the construction of the first industrial-scale ice houses along the river, around 1850, she said
After the Civil War, Lange said, people found jobs in new industries, ice boxes became affordable to even the working class, and the ice industry boomed.
On top of filling ice boxes, ice companies served a thriving brewing industry from Kingston to New York that required large quantities of ice, especially in the summer, to keep beer from going bad.
“Most sizable towns had a brewery,” she said, noting that Kingston had several breweries before Prohibition took hold in 1920.
The ice companies built huge wooden warehouses, 30 to 40 feet high and as long as football fields, with thick walls insulated with sawdust.
“Ice went up this conveyor belt,” she said. “From there, it was then pushed onto metal shoots like a slide.”
Once inside, workers used pike poles to direct ice into the area where they were filing. “The ice cakes themselves were covered in straw,” Lange said.
With mechanical refrigeration still in the future, the industry reached its heyday from the 1880s to the first decade of the 1900s, Lange said. During that time, five to seven ice houses operated in and around Kingston.
“It just got to be such a big industry,” she said. “People that owned the ice business (also) owned summer businesses, like brickyards. … They had property nearby and built an icehouse and used the same tugboats to ship ice. Barge builders who built barges to ship bricks made ice barges.”
Ice cutters operated mainly from Kingston northward, because that section of the river lacked large industries that were polluting the river and cities were not yet dumping raw sewage into that section, she said.
While ice companies avoided cutting in heavily polluted areas and any horse droppings from the horses that worked on the ice were cleared away, Lange said she would not have recommended putting the ice in a drink. It was only for cooling, she said.
Many of the men who cut ice were those who found themselves out of work when the brickyards closed for the season, the clay banks along the Hudson having frozen during winter. A few farmers joined the mix, too, Lange said.
An ice cutter’s day began around 5:30 a.m. and lasted until dark.
“You can imagine how charming it was being on the river with the wind blowing,” she said. “They had wool, but it must have been wicked. They did it to put food on the table.”
With the exception of the steam powered conveyor belts that moved ice blocks, called “cakes,” to the icehouse, everything was done with hand tools, Lange said.
Getting a paycheck week to week was no certain thing as the thickness of the ice varied year to year, even during a time when winters were colder.
“It was very limited season. You might have a two week season, or you might have an eight week season,” Lange said. “Freezes and thaws were bad because it affected the quality of the ice.”
The ice also had to be at least 10 inches thick before it could be cut. “They had to allow for a certain amount of melting in storage and transit,” Lange said. “It had to be a certain thickness to make it worthwhile and big enough to not melt in one day.”
Work often began by using plows drawn by horses and men to clear the fresh snow off the ice. Then, workers would make a “grid” by cutting grooves in the ice using horse draw plows, similar to those farmers used to plow the fields. Workers then brought in long-handled saws that were four or five feet long, with long teeth.
Canals were cut into the ice so the ice cakes, measuring two feet by 18 inches, could be floated back to shore by workmen using long pikes.
“Everyone was cold,” Lange said. “This was not a glamorous job.”
A day’s wages for this cold, hard work typically amounted to about $1.75. And there was always the danger of falling into the frigid river, or losing a valuable horse.
“They were equivalent to what a car or tractor would be worth today,” she said. In a few cases, she said, horses did fall under the ice and perish.
In a time before U.S. Coast Guard cutters, ice would all but close the river to shipping. Goods that move almost entirely by train and truck today were largely transported on the river in the 19th century, Lange said.
As temperatures warmed and the river started to thaw, typically in March, it came time to transport the ice to New York City, which was done almost entirely on the river via unique covered ice barges. The heavily insulated wooden barges featured pinwheel-like windmills that operated pumps that kept water out the barges. That was important, Lange said, because ice sitting in water would melt faster.
The barges, pulled by large steam tugboats, would be mixed with barges carrying bulk goods ranging from grain to brick in a large configuration called a “tow.”
Tons of these barges were built, including many that were built along the Rondout Creek in Kingston. Once in New York City, the barges were met on the docks by ice wagons that would take large blocks of ice to households and businesses.
Electric service and the perfection of practical mechanical refrigeration would spell the end of the ice trade. With electric refrigeration, people no longer needed to worry about filling an ice box with ice blocks and the industry began a long gradual decline in the first half of the 20th century.
Still, the decline lasted 30 to 40 years, Lange said. Initially, she said, only the wealthy could afford an electric refrigerator.
As the river became increasingly polluted, however, ice harvesting became less and less practical, and the Hudson River cutting industry was pretty much finished by World War I, Lange said.
Ice harvesting would continue on area ponds and lakes, like the Binnewater Lakes in Rosendale, until the early 1950s.
Lange said the industry hung on longer locally because electricity did not reach rural areas in the Hudson Valley until after Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act in the 1930s. Even then, electric refrigerators remained expensive and even homes with electricity would still get deliveries from the ice man.
After World War II, with the economy on the rise and prices of electric refrigerators becoming affordable for nearly everyone, the era of ice refrigeration in the Hudson Valley came to a close.
Fires and time ravaged the abandoned ice houses; Lange said none survive today. But ice harvesting is still demonstrated at a handful of museums, including the Hanford Mills Museum in East Meredith, Delaware County, she said.
The Hudson River Maritime Museum, currently closed for the winter season, will reopen on May 2.
