Ann Waidelich as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture series.
The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter
and are not necessarily those
of the Wisconsin Historical Museum
or the museum's employees.
Ann came to Madison in 1964
to be a reference librarian at the Madison Public Library.
In the process of answering
patrons' questions about Madison,
she became interested in Madison history
and has adopted Madison as her hometown.
Since retiring in 1999,
she has made the study and teaching of Madison history
her chief occupation.
Here today to discuss ice harvesting on Madison's lakes,
please join me in welcoming Ann Waidelich.
(audience applauding)
- Yes, thank you very much.
And as I say, it is an honor to be here today.
The title slide is a Henry cartoon
drawn by a cartoonist, Carl Anderson.
And Mr. Anderson was a Madison resident
and drew the Henry cartoon series.
The next slide is another cartoon
done by a man by the name of Claire Briggs,
who was born in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, and this--
He was born in Reedsburg in 1875.
He was a newspaper cartoonist both in Chicago and New York.
And the boys and children climbing on the ice wagon,
they're saying, "Yoo-hoo, ice,"
you know, calling all their friends to come around
and get some chunks of ice.
The housewife says, "I want an extra piece.
"We're going to make ice cream."
And the iceman says, "All right,
"I guess I can spare you an extra chunk.
"Have a nice morning."
And then, in 1926, the Madison police chief
wrote in the newspaper a warning to Madison parents
to keep their kids from jumping on the horse-drawn vehicles.
Complaints came from a local ice companies
who say kids jump on wagons to get small pieces of ice.
And did some of you do that?
Hmm?
This is a lovely Currier and Ives painting
called "Winter in the Country: Getting Ice."
And at this point, I'd like to read a little bit
from a magazine article, "The Wisconsin Ice Trade,"
an article that appeared
in the Wisconsin Magazine of History
back in the summer of 1965.
"Wisconsin's lakes were often an ice-cutter's delight.
Many of them had been dammed at their outlets
soon after settlement
and in order to provide water power
and the raised water levels eliminated
much of the marshy shore
and very shallow, weed-infested waters.
Most had sufficient water movement
to provide solid, clear ice
without the inclusion of the air bubbles
which characterized so-called pond ice.
The ice was nearly always at least 12 to 14 inches thick,
which meant that it packed easily
and did not shift unduly in shipment.
In fact, Wisconsin and Maine ice
was mentioned repeatedly in the trade journals
as representing the desirable standard
of hardness and thickness."
"The tapping of the lake country of southern Wisconsin
was made economically possible
by the widespread railroad lines
of the primary ice carrier,
the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad,
the expanding tracks of the Chicago
and Northwestern Railroad,
and the extension of the Illinois Central Railroad
to Madison in 1887.
Lakes near railroad lines throughout this whole region
were only overnight from Chicago,
a vital consideration for the summer transport of ice."
"In Wisconsin, the primary reason for the rise
of a large-scale harvesting and shipping of natural ice
was the expansion of the brewing
and meat-packing industries.
The development of a large, beer-drinking population
and the transfer of popular preference
from heavy and more alcoholic malt liquors
to the lighter, more effervescent beers
at once helped to make Milwaukee famous
and created an important demand for ice.
Ice was required
in the manufacturing of light or lager beers
and in the maintenance of low temperatures
during the aging process.
It was also indispensable
in preserving these beers in transit,
and it cooled the beverages
to the temperatures popular with Americans,
already regarded as curious in Europe
for their preference for iced drinks.
Even more significant
in the increase of the harvesting of Wisconsin ice
was the growth of the great meat-packing firms of Chicago
and, to a lesser extent, of Milwaukee and Madison.
The development of an efficient, refrigerated railroad car
was a long, haphazard, and murky process,
but the success of Gustavus Swift,
the Chicago packer,
in devising a practical system for shipping
refrigerated meat by rail rapidly brought
about the wide use of fresh meats."
And now we're going to talk about
how ice was actually harvested.
In harvesting ice,
it had become a very efficient process by the 1850s.
If snow had fallen on the lake,
preparation began by clearing it away
with scoop-like wooden scrapers,
which you see in the lower left there,
pulled by horses.
If water had mingled with the snow and subsequently frozen,
the resulting snow ice was removed with an ice plane,
a horse-drawn frame which mounted a steel cutting edge
capable of removing the snow ice to the depth of two inches.
The scrapes were then cleared away with the snow scraper
and the field was ready to be marked for cutting.
To begin the harvesting operation proper,
a single straight groove was made with a hand tool.
Then the surface was marked into squares of grooves,
22 inches on a side,
by means of a swing guide marker.
And that swing guide is on the far side of these,
what were called ice plows.
Instead of having two lines of cutting teeth,
the swing guide marker had only one line of teeth
and an iron guard which fitted into the groove already made.
The next step was to draw ice cutters
through every other groove in each direction
to cut two-thirds through the ice.
The cutters were plow-like devices
with a single line of cutting teeth
that increased in length from front to back.
And you can see that in these ice plows.
After the cutters had done their work,
large strips of ice were sawed off.
And you see these saws
sometimes in antique stores or museums,
and they don't look like lumberjack saws.
They have the handle, a long, skinny handle,
going up from them,
and it's because they're sawing up and down,
not sawing horizontally.
And then, sometimes these mechanical
ice-cutting machines were made.
I don't know that they were ever manufactured.
I think they were more homemade versions.
They would mount an engine on a sled
and hitch it to a blade there on the left,
and they could cut it mechanically.
After the cutters had done their work,
large strips of ice were sawed off
and floated through channels
to a basin near the elevator,
where they were split with iron bars into cakes
usually 44 inches square.
And here they're floating it,
and here's an elevator.
They would float it up,
and the elevator had a chain on it that would grab them.
Now, this happens to be the Fauerbach
Brewing Company and their ice house.
Those small windows on the right
is the ice house that was attached to the Fauerbach Brewery.
We usually see the Fauerbach pictures
from the Williamson Street side.
You don't see this big ice house
that was on the Lake Monona side of the Fauerbach Brewery.
The elevator was an inclined plane
on which moved a steam-powered endless chain.
As the cakes moved up,
they were drawn under an adjustable blade
which shaved them to the thickness desired,
leaving two raised ribs of ice
which kept the blocks from fusing when stacked.
So, on the bottom side and, of course, the top side,
there would be ribs of ice left
so that they wouldn't fuse together when they got stacked.
There would be a little bit of space.
When the blocks reached a suitable elevation
above the level of the top of the ice in the storage house,
they were removed from the elevator
and allowed to slide down a ramp into the storage,
where the workers guided them into position.
And then, I love this next sentence in the article.
An indispensable aid to the harvesting was whiskey...
[laughter]
which steeled the workers against the rigors of winter.
Because they did not have the wonderful,
insulated clothing that we have today,
and they were working on the colder the weather,
the better it was for ice harvesting.
So it was a very...
cold thing to do.
Now I'll talk about the selling and the using of ice.
This was a notice that appeared in the Madison newspapers
back in March of 1980, or, excuse me, 1882.
"Owing to the increased price of labor,
"feed for the teams of horses that were involved,
"and all incidental expenses in the ice business,
"we, the retail ice dealers of the city of Madison,
"have been compelled to adopt the following scale of prices:
"one house piece averaging 20 pounds per day,
"50 cents a week or $2 a month;
"one house piece four times a week,
"40 cents per week or $1.50 a month;
"one water piece, $1.50 per month."
And that would have gone into one of those cooler,
those jug coolers that they would have had.
"One water piece, $1.50 a month;
"a single house piece, 50 cents;
"a single water piece, 5 cents.
"You could also order per hundred pounds for 20 cents,
"a ton to the regular customers is $3,
"a ton to the transient trade only $4,
"extra charge 100-pound rate for extra ice."
And these were three of the ice dealers
who would have cut and stored ice
in Madison back in the 1880s.
And then the icebox.
Not technical shortcomings,
but deficits in the refrigeration service given the customer
were important in explaining the difficulties
in which the ice industry found itself
in the 1920s and 1930s.
These defects were of primary significance
for they helped prepare the way
for the enthusiastic reception by the public
to the domestic electric refrigerators.
One group of faults
stemmed from the inherent characteristics of the industry
of the ice as the refrigerant.
For one thing, ice was expensive.
At least in the minds of consumers,
who always tended to think that 60 cents a hundredweight
was a lot to pay for frozen water.
High charges prevailed
not because the ice companies made unconscionable profits,
but because distribution costs were heavy
for a product of such bulk, weight,
and relatively low value,
and because enough money had to be made during the summer
to pay the fixed cost during the long off-season.
And also the fact, you know,
that they were cutting and paying all these men
to cut the ice in the winter but with no income,
and they had to make all the income in the summer.
Although ice had great merits as a refrigerant,
it was not perfect.
It melted and had to be replaced and it made the consumer
dependent upon the visits of the iceman.
Moreover, it did not provide, at least conveniently,
the freezing temperatures,
which were increasingly in demand.
The quality of the ice
was not always what it should have been.
Sometimes dirt, splinters,
or even spiders were frozen in.
The cheap iceboxes that dominated the market
toward the end here in the 1920s
had inferior insulation and inadequate provision
for air circulation.
The ice chambers were often too small
in relation to the refrigerator compartment.
So the ice chamber is the little door on top,
and the food chamber is the one on the bottom.
And sometimes so irregular,
the ice being so irregular in shape,
that an ice cake of standard size wouldn't fit.
And here we have
a picture of the ice boy, iceman,
trying to stuff a piece of ice into the top compartment.
The water is dripping on the floor.
The pan underneath is to collect the melting ice.
There's chicken laying on top of the refrigerator,
and then this other chicken in the third,
middle drawer there.
I like the wine on the bottom shelf, I think.
The iceman was responsible
for much of the dissatisfaction
occasioned by the use of his product.
And I do apologize if any of you had
relatives or even you yourself
might have been an iceman delivering ice
because the article goes on to say,
"He was apt to be a rough, uncouth individual,
"whose route across the kitchen floor
"was marked by dirty footprints and puddles of water
"and who too often would fail to make delivery
"when the need was greatest.
"The iceman was apt to give short weight.
"It was a simple matter to cut a 300-pound block of ice
"into seven 50-pound pieces instead of six
"and pocket the extra 50 cents."
And so the iceman often didn't have a very good reputation.
But,
then...
the mechanical refrigerator came along.
Throughout the 1910s and 1920s,
companies made an effort to manufacture
small, reliable, mechanical refrigerators for home use.
Finally, when GE introduced
its electric monitor top refrigerator in 1927,
which enclosed the compressor in a globe on top of the box,
this eliminated the problems of noise,
oil leaks, and maintenance on previous models.
By 1930, more mechanical refrigerators
were sold than iceboxes.
Prompted by the electric utilities, of course,
because they wanted you to buy more electricity.
The cost of a refrigerator in 1920 was $600,
but the cost came down in 1940 to $154
with a greater demand for the mechanical refrigerators.
So, in Madison, one of the early,
a couple of the early ice harvesters
was this Allen and Pyncheon.
And this was a newspaper article
that was typed up onto a card,
and it says, "PH Allen and John Pyncheon
"are busy constructing and filling a large ice house
"near the residence of the former Mr. Allen,
"beyond the graveyard in the third ward.
"The ice down there is very fine."
And this was published in the State Journal,
the Wisconsin State Journal , March 4, 1876.
And then, just a week later,
"Closed up, one firm, Allen and Pyncheon,
"have succeeded in storing away 500 tons
"of good ice in their house beyond the graveyard,
"and are taking a rest."
Now, the graveyard that they're referring to
was Madison's original graveyard,
which is now Orton Park
on the east side, the near east side of Madison.
And that was originally the third ward.
Today it's the sixth ward or the sixth aldermanic district.
But the ice house was down there along Lake Monona
off of Rutledge Street, near Orton Park.
And then, Kurtz and Huegel
had an ice house on Lake Mendota.
And what I want you to look at is this railroad line,
that small diagonal line in the upper right-hand corner.
This is a plat map of Madison.
And then you see a railroad spur
going off through the words "Lakewood Land Company."
And that it is odd, when you look at these old maps.
Why would a railroad spur be going to the lake?
Because there was an ice house there,
and they took the ice and loaded it onto railroad cars
and shipped it further.
The Kurtz and Huegel Ice Company
was located along the eastern shore of Lake Mendota.
Next to the ice company was a slaughterhouse
run by Mr. Hoven.
Undoubtedly, one of the reasons for locating
near the ice company was to obtain ice to chill the meat
and ship the meat that they were slaughtering.
Cattle were grazed on the high ground
of what is now Lakewood region of Maple Bluff.
And then when Stanley Hanks built his house
on Lakewood Boulevard some years later,
they dug up more bones than dirt
when they went to build the basement
because it had been a slaughterhouse there.
The railroad spur lasted into the 1920s.
It's not there any longer.
But that's why that little railroad
in the upper right-hand corner of the picture
has a railroad spur to collect the ice.
And then the Breckheimer Ice House
was on East Wilson Street,
just as it comes into King Street.
And the funny thing here is its long, skinny door.
And you see the little hinges along the right-hand edge
because each section had its own door to open
because they would load the ice first from the bottom
and fill it up and close that bottom door
and then open the next door and fill it up
and the next door,
as the ice was stored on its way up.
Breweries harvested their own ice.
And in January 11th, 1905,
Madison newspaper articles said that the Breckheimer
will be the first to start the ice harvest this year.
Two ice houses will be filled.
The Hausmann Brewing Company will cut as usual.
Their ice is cut on Lake Mendota
and hauled to the ice house on sleighs.
The Fauerbachs will also have their ice houses filled
within a few weeks.
And this, again, is the backside of the Fauerbach Brewery
and the lower building on the right.
And you see those long, skinny door/windows there,
and that's how they would fill up the ice houses
by opening those sections one at a time.
James Conklin came to Madison from Vermont in 1848.
He started by buying and selling wheat and grain
and then added wood and coal.
In 1886, he purchased the ice house owned by BD Miner
at the foot of North Butler Street on Lake Mendota.
He also bought the Miner home for his family.
In 1890, Conklin bought the Schwenum ice house next door
on Gorham and Hancock Streets.
And so, you see the men pushing the ice
up onto that elevator to get it into--
Now, the Conklin Ice House
was in what used to be called Conklin Park.
We now know it as James Madison Park.
And it was at the western end of
Conklin or James Madison Park
where the Gates of Heaven Synagogue is now.
That was a great big, huge ice house.
And in 1901 there was an article in the paper that said
about 100,000 tons of ice
will be drawn from the three lakes.
Conklin ice will come from Lake Mendota.
It will be packed in the new ice house
west of the Bernard boat landing,
because a fire in 1891 had destroyed the previous ice house.
And ice houses were a fire hazard,
particularly in the summer when the ice was more gone.
They were made out of wood.
They had sawdust for packing or straw
for packing around the ice, and it would catch fire easily.
The new building, which is pictured here,
is 170 feet long, 150 feet wide, and 40 feet high,
and it will store 15,000 tons.
They also have six smaller ice houses
with a total capacity of 7,000 tons,
three on Lake Monona and three on the Catfish Marsh.
And you know that the catfish
is the original name for the Yahara River
and marshes around the Yahara River.
Men are paid 15 to 20 cents an hour,
and they worked 11-hour days.
Ice sold mostly for the local market.
Conklin sold its ice to the Madison market and nearby.
The other ice companies that we'll talk about
shipped their ice on those railroads.
The ice sold mostly to the local market.
Prices in 1900 were $1.50 a month
for seven deliveries a week of 35 pounds each.
They employed 12 teams of horses and wagons and icemen
to deliver the ice in the summertime.
12 teams going out every day delivering ice in Madison.
The business was won by Conklin's sons
after his death in 1899
and then by the grandson, James Conklin.
In 1915, the ice house burned down, actually.
This is another picture of the ice wagon,
that was scrapes of the ice to get it clean.
You can see the ladders
and how they would put these platforms at different levels
and raise and lower that platform to fill
up the ice house.
And then, delivering ice in the summertime,
put a cover over the wagon
so it didn't melt quite so quickly.
The horses have these fly disturbers
I don't know what they're called.
Strings hanging down from their harnesses
to shake the flies off the horse
That's a nice picture of those too.
And then, as I say, in June of 1915,
the ice house burned down for the second time.
This is the Madison Fire Department
trying to put out the fire on the Conklin ice house.
And then I found this picture of an ice house,
after an ice house fire in New Jersey in 1912.
Now, the interesting thing
is that the ice doesn't necessarily melt
because it is so packed together, there's so much of it.
Maybe they got to the fire soon enough
and didn't let it burn too long
that you could actually reuse or use some of that ice.
They'd have to chip it apart
because it probably did melt a little bit together.
But they could use it
with a little effort.
So it didn't all melt.
And then the other thing about ice houses
and trying to find pictures of ice houses
is that they're not architecturally designed.
You know, the fancy architect does not build ice houses,
and they have no windows, they have no eaves,
they have no decoration.
So it's very hard to find pictures of them.
And this is what Conklin built after the fire.
The ice house was rebuilt,
and then they finally caught on
that it was tile covered on the inside
and stucco on the outside.
So maybe it wouldn't burn.
Conklin stopped cutting ice about 1937.
The ice business was turned over to Oscar Mayer,
which we'll talk about,
and the ice house was torn down
and the land sold to the city.
As I say, it became a part of James Madison Park.
And the fuel part of Conklin and Sons
was sold to the Fiore Coal and Oil Company in 1945.
So this is really a picture of this young man in the boat.
That's what they were taking a picture of.
But I like the picture because it shows
the Conklin ice house in the background
with these 1930 automobiles.
Now, the Knickerbocker Ice Company
was over on the west side of Madison
and cut ice from Lake Wingra.
And here, again, you see the Illinois Central Railroad,
that curving line in the lower part of the map,
and, again, there's a siding
going off of that railroad line, down to Lake Wingra.
The Illinois Central Railroad came to Madison in 1887
and built the rail spur to the shore of Lake Wingra in 1894.
And this is an 1895 article that appeared in the newspaper.
"Conklin was pushing construction
"of its immense new ice house on Lake Wingra."
And, again, this is a picture of the development going on
off of Monroe Street and the houses,
and wouldn't you like to build your house here?
In the background is the ice house,
which is what I wanted the picture for.
"Conklin was pushing construction
"of its immense new ice house on Lake Wingra.
"300 feet by 150 feet.
"Timbers are oak.
"Those on the runway standing at 40 feet high,
"and at the lake end on piles
"driven 30 feet into the marsh.
"A well-built boarding house and lodging house
"is also being completed."
Because the men who cut the ice out of these lakes
were often displaced farmhands.
They were single men.
They would work on the farms and then they harvest,
but then they didn't really have anything to do in the winter.
So they would hire themselves out
to be ice cutters in the wintertime.
So, often these ice companies would provide a boarding house,
a rooming house for them to live in
in these weeks that they were spending cutting the ice.
And then they would also build a stable
for the horses needed to draw those ice plows
through the ice to cut it.
And here the article went on to say
that the ice will be shipped to Chicago and the southwest,
as well as to the south
along the Illinois Central Rail line.
And here's another picture of Knickerbocker.
It was a huge operation,
and it's where the Wingra Boat folks are
today there on Lake Wingra.
In 1913,
the Knickerbocker consolidated
with the Chicago City Fuel Company
and became known as the Consumer Ice and Fuel Company.
They sold both natural and manufactured ice.
The manufactured ice was often tainted with ammonia
and contained occasional drops of oil.
It could be no purer than the water from which it was made.
And here, this is a postcard,
and on the back of the postcard it talks about the big three.
Now, the big three are the horses.
These big, wonderful matched set of black horses here.
And then the two men in the back of the wagon there
are Roy Clark and Ned Smith, and it was dated 1915.
But that's the Consumer Ice and Fuel Company delivering ice.
So the Consumer Ice and Fuel Company lasted until about 1920
when Conklin bought the property
and took over the ice harvesting and delivery.
Then, in 1932, the old Conklin ice house
was torn down after a windstorm tore it apart.
The property was sold to the city for Wingra Park in 1937.
Again, in the summertime it would have been almost empty.
There are big, hollow, not well-constructed building,
and it just blew apart in a windstorm.
Then, over on Lake Monona, there were quite a few ice houses
located at this eastern end of Lake Monona.
Again we have the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad
going diagonally through the picture,
but the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad makes a curve
and comes more along the side of Lake Wingra,
and then the two rail spurs coming off.
And then you can even see, I think,
where it says Ice Company on the upper one
and Ice Company on the lower one.
This picture--
Oh, then I want to go to this one.
So, the caption here reads,
"This picture, taken about 1910,
"is of the Esch Brothers and Rabe ice house,
"located close to the present site
"of the East Side Businessman's Clubhouse."
Ice houses commonly bulged
and planks are shown supporting one wall.
Again, they're not fancy buildings.
It is a summer scene, with ice being taken out
to fill a freight car standing on the railway spur.
The horse is used to pull the cakes of ice into the car,
the little horse there on the far left,
and these cute little railroad boxcars.
Nowadays the cars are so huge.
The early real estate records are very confusing
as to who was operating how many ice houses
on the east end of Lake Monona.
John and Margaret Walterscheit,
and this is their son Fred Walterscheit,
who had a farm along Atwood Avenue,
rented and sold property to several Illinois firms
for the purpose of constructing ice houses.
And a rail spur from the Chicago
and Northwestern Railroad's main line was built
in order to harvest ice and ship it south to Chicago
and other cities.
And Fred Walterscheit, who was born in 1888,
was interviewed in 1972
about his work for the Esch Brothers and Rabe Ice Company.
And this is a quotation from an article
that appeared in the newspaper.
"I had to get up early
"and be out on the ice at three a.m. with my horses,
"scraping off the snow and are plowing the ice
"so the men could go to work at seven a.m.
"It was hard work and cold,
"but it had its moments of excitement.
"Onlookers came to watch
"and sometimes witnessed an accident,
"a man or a horse falling into the frigid water."
And he was 18 years old at the time,
and he got paid $5 a day
to do this preliminary work of cleaning the ice.
And then this is a plat map
that shows what we sometimes call Ice House Hill.
It's the sledding hill at the end of
where Atwood Avenue and Lakeland Avenue come together.
The Ice House Hill and the hill is more to the left.
But the Jefferson Ice Company was on the left-hand side,
and the Knickerbocker Ice Company
also had an ice house on this right-hand side.
And in the middle, the diagram in the middle
was the bunkhouse and, actually, the May family home.
Again, I'll read a bit
from the Wisconsin State Journal in March of 1890.
The Wisconsin State Journal reported
that they and the Madison Democrat, another newspaper,
visited the Knickerbocker Ice Company
on the northeast shore of Lake Monona.
"115 men and quite a number of teams of horses
"were at work constantly cutting the crystal cakes
"over a half a mile out in the lake.
"The ice house is 130 feet wide
"and 408 feet long
"and 36 feet high,
"storing 100,000 tons of ice."
And they're describing this big block
on the right-hand side of that diagram.
And, as I say, the May family lived in the bunkhouse,
and this is a picture of the family.
They lived on the first floor of that bunkhouse building.
Ellen May, the wife, cooked, did the laundry,
and took care of the living quarters
for the men who cut the ice,
but she also ran a separate butter-making business
which she stored in the ice house.
And then the fun thing is that that ice house was moved.
And this is it,
standing on the corner of Buena Vista and Garrison Streets,
sort of behind the Garver Feed
and the Olbrich Gardens.
And you can see that it's an odd-looking house
because the bunkhouse would have been up at the top level
and then the May family living in the lower level.
Now, as I mentioned, this was moved to behind Garver,
which started out as the US Sugar Company from 1905 to 1924.
Remnants of that building are still standing,
and the city is trying to find a reuse for it.
And the reason I'll mention
why I'm talking about the sugar beet factory.
The sugar beet factory opened in 1906
to manufacture sugar from sugar beets.
But it began to deposit its waste into Lake Monona
via the Starkweather Creek.
This degraded the quality of the ice in Lake Monona,
and, in 1908, the Chicago domestic market
was closed to ice from all of Madison's lakes,
with the exception of Lake Wingra,
by order of the Chicago Board of Health.
In 1911, the Wisconsin State Legislature passed a law
under which it was forbidden
to use ice taken from Lake Monona
because Madison sewage effluent,
along with the sugar beet effluent,
was being discharged into Lake Monona.
We did not have a sewage treatment plant
until later on in the nineteen-teens, early '20s,
before there was really good sewage treatment.
And they just poured the sewage into Lake Monona,
and, obviously, it was not good for the ice business.
In 1912, Knickerbocker sold its land
to the Sunset View Land Company,
and in turn, they sold it to Michael Olbrich,
who was creating a park along the eastern edge
of Lake Monona.
And then I mentioned the railroads shipping ice south,
but then they discovered that they could
pack these refrigerated railroad cars
with fruits and vegetables
that were being grown in the south in the wintertime
and bring them back up north.
So they built ice houses in between railroad tracks.
And the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad ice house
is that reddish building behind this picture
of the Byrns Oil Company.
Again, the ice houses are always in the background.
And this ice house was in operation from 1927 to 1943
when a fire destroyed it,
and then a fire destroyed that ice house in 1957.
So it is no longer there.
And this is where that great central park
is being developed.
And then Oscar Mayer.
Oscar Mayer came to Madison in 1919,
purchasing the closed Farmers Cooperative
Ice Packing facility.
They first cut ice from Lake Mendota
and hauled it to the plant by horse and wagon.
And so Sherman Avenue
is the line diagonally through the middle of the picture,
and that's Lake Mendota on the far side
with Farwell's Point there
and Mendota State Hospital on that point sticking out.
But this was an early picture of Oscar Mayer.
And then Oscar Mayer decided to--
They installed a modern $100,000
artificial ice plant in May of 1922
because they couldn't cut enough ice
for their meat-packing operations.
And this new artificial ice plant
produced 440-pound blocks of ice.
And at first it was only for the company to use,
but then employees began to ask to take some ice home,
and then their neighbors also wanted some.
So the company started to deliver ice to the east side
and again to the rest of the city of Madison
by horse and wagon.
But they also tried electric trucks,
but they couldn't manage the steep hills
and often ran out of battery power.
We think electric vehicles are so new.
They, in the '40s, tried electric vehicles.
But you see the ice delivery man in a nice, clean uniform
delivering ice with one of these bags over his shoulder.
You see the little handle there.
This bag is from the Mazomanie Historical Society.
I don't know whether the Wisconsin Historical Society has one.
If any of you have one, I'm sure they would like to see it
and maybe try to talk to you out of it
because it says Oscar Mayer on the bag.
I don't know if that's too visible.
So, by 1950, Oscar Mayer was producing
20,000 tons of ice a year for Oscar Mayer
and much more for the commercial and residential trade.
But they also got into ice carving.
And some of you may have had an ice bowl
at one of your receptions or parties.
And then this lower right picture is of ice cubes in a bag.
They would deliver ice cubes to those machines
that were next to grocery stores,
and even today you can buy
ice out of the machine but not Oscar Mayer ice anymore.
And then a woman that I know
on the west side of Madison
said, "You know, I've got a built-in icebox
"in my kitchen still."
And these are modern day pictures.
She just sent them, you know, a year or so ago.
The upper door is where the ice would go,
and the lower larger door
is where the food would be kept.
So then she sent me a picture of the outside of the house,
the little door there where the iceman could deliver
without having to tromp through the kitchen, very modern.
And today, she has her microwave
(audience laughs)
in the upper part and these large pots and pans
that you never know where to put in the lower level.
And then I'd like to close with this picture
and another quote from a book.
"When a housewife returns from the supermarket
"and whisks things into her refrigerator
"and closes the door,
"she has closed the door on the spring house,
"the milk and butter pantry,
"the root cellar,
"the cheese room,
"the smokehouse,
"and the covered well.
"At the same time, she has turned her back
"on the preserving kettle,
"the pickling crock,
"the pudding bag,
"and the vinegar barrel.
"As for the ice house and the ice wagon,
"she has put them behind her too.
"Ice does not make her storage box cold.
"Instead, the box makes ice for all her needs."
Thank you.
(audience applauding)