The Rocheport Ice House

The Friends of Rocheport has preserved one of Missouri’s few remaining ice houses.

The structure was used from 1870 to the 1940s to store large blocks of ice cut from the Missouri River, Moniteau Creek and area ponds. Men would use ice saws to cut the blocks, which were transported by horse and wagon to the ice house. A block and tackle was used to lower the huge blocks into the chamber, where they were covered with sawdust and straw for insulation.

This ice later was cut into smaller blocks to be used in ice boxes, which cooled foods before electricity arrived in Rocheport in the 1940s. Early photographs show several of these “roofs sitting on the ground” located throughout town.

The Friends of Rocheport structure was built by Grover Young, W. W. Scobee and Will Sampson. The three families shared the ice, which they used in ice boxes.

Mr. and Mrs. Grover Young donated their ice house to the Friends of Rocheport in the early 1970s. Marie Gardner, the Young’s daughter, later said she and her husband used the ice house until the 1940s, when electricity from REA came to Rocheport.

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An Ice House Story

By Monette Lite

Hugh! Hugh! Are you all right?” asked his wife Marie. Hugh Gardner lay at the bottom of this 25-foot-deep icehouse, laughing hysterically. Hugh and Marie’s cat has disappeared, and they found him stuck in the icehouse, where he had gone to try to catch one of the many birds that nested there. As Hugh descended the old ladder into the brick-lined well a rung broke, Landing him across two bales of hay at the bottom. His fall caused the cat to gain momentum around the walls in a frantic effort to get away from the man who only meant to save him.

The History of Natural Ice

By Eric Sloane

Only 50 years ago, the cutting of natural ice in American was big business, but today it has almost vanished. Gone are the huge icehouses, so cavernous that clouds formed inside them and rain fell. Gone are the itinerant ice cutters, their skills forgotten. The simple tools of their trade have already become antique shop items.

Until the 1800s Americans were content to cool their food and drink in cellars or springhouses. An iced drink in summertime was a strange and wonderful experience to be enjoyed only in the big city. But by the late summer of 1850, James Fenimore Cooper was writing in his diary, “Ice at the stable still. We Americans probably use more ice than most people . . .” The shipping industry was handing more tons of ice than any other commodity, save cotton.

By that time, of course, every farm with a pond or stream nearby had an ice house of its own—often double-walled and insulated with hay, the ice being packed in sawdust, to be rinsed off later. The commercial ice houses, built of double-walled brick, were often as much as 500 feet long, with railroad spurs leading right to their doors. With the problem of storage solved, the business was ready for costal and even overseas deliveries.

One of the earliest recorded shipments was from New York city to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1799. The records simply say the voyage was successful, which means some of the ice was left when the ship docked. There was no mention of profit.

The first man to make the ice shipping business pay was Frederic Tudor, who in 1806 sent 130 tons ofice in the brig Favorite from Boston to Martinique in the West Indies. At the close of the War of 1812, Tudor made a deal to supply the Cuban government with ice. By 1833 he had contracts in Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. On the eve of the Civil War, Boston, the center of the trade, was sending nearly 150,000 tons of ice a year to 53 different countries.

The men who supplied this growing industry—hardy men who each winter cut the ice from ponds and lakes and floated it to the icehouses—were a fabulous race, akin to the river men and lumberjacks of the time. In the mid-century the ponds around Boston employed about 1,000 of them—in the whole of New England there were perhaps as many as 10,000. Their salaries commonly included room and board. Since there were only about 20 or 30 days of the year suitable for cutting ice, the gathering and managing of a work crew must have been a problem.

The work itself demanded a variety of skills. Where the ice was covered with snow, the first step was to scrape it off with a horse-drawn snow plane. Next the area to be “harvested”—in the larger ponds, a huge square 600 feet on a side—was surveyed and its four boundary lines marked with a hand cutter.

Then came a cutter with two runners 44 inches apart. One blade was a guide plane, the other a large-toothed edge that made a preliminary groove two inches deep. This implement criss-crossed the ice, tracing a pattern on the surface. It was followed by another twin-bladed cutter that cut more deeply. Finally came an all-iron ice plow, its bladed saws and long-handed spades and fork bars. Large sections of the 600-foot-square were cut away, and the men rode them like rafts, dividing them into smaller pieces as they floated toward the ice house.

Modern refrigeration killed the natural-ice business, of course. It spelled the doom of the family icehouse as well, but a few of them are left, and the pleasure of using one’s own clear pond water for chilling a summer drink has not been entirely lost. In Vermont there are even a few ponds that produce enough natural ice to maintain small commercial icehouses, and enough high school boys and antiquarians can still be found to bring in the harvest for them.

The horses that pulled the plows, planes, and cutters are, alas, gone, but the men and boys who work the ponds know the thrill of striking a scored sheet of ice with a chisel that rings in the winter air and cuts clean and sharp.