[AT] Putting the tractor to use - Ice Houses

[charlie hill]

My memory is foggy on this but I want to say I can remember
when the Milk truck in our area still used blocks of ice to keep the
milk cold.  I was born in 1950 and I'm sure it wasn't much later
when refrigerated trucks took over so maybe not.  Maybe I'm 
remembering people talking about it. 

I surely remember
when we had an ice house in town with blocks of ice.  It had a 
crusher mounted on the outside of the house for folks that needed
to crush their ice or you could buy blocks.  Daddy used to buy blocks
of ice and put under the salt bench in the smoke house when we 
were salting and smoking pork in the winter.  The bench was used to
salt down the hams, shoulders and sides of bacon.  It was built just
the right height for a block of ice to slide under it.  

Charlie

-----Original Message----- 
From: Chuck Bealke 
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2014 12:19 PM 
To: Antique tractor email discussion group 
Subject: Re: [AT] Putting the tractor to use - Ice Houses 

On 6/15/2014 11:13 PM, Ralph Goff wrote:
> On 6/15/2014 7:25 PM, Mike wrote:
>> If I'm not mistaken they used to pack the ice in sawdust to keep it from
>> melting, maybe that's why it's lower. I'm not old enough to remember any
>> of that, but some of the guys might be.
>>
>> Mike M
> Yes, sawdust or straw was used to insulate the snow/ice that was put in
> the ice house in winter. We used to have a nice little log ice house
> here when I was a kid .. Long gone now but I have dreams of building a
> replica of it some day..
>
> Ralph in Sask.
Ralph,

Remember a neighbor talking about storing ice sawed off ponds in such 
houses.  Another trick his family used to preserve vegetables was to 
store them under a huge straw pile. He remembered this well, as one of 
the men that would roam looking for work (depression in the 30's?) on 
farms got mad about his dismissal (for reason) after being hired for a 
while and sneaked back at night and torched the tall straw pile they 
had.  It had wisely been situated well away from buildings.
As you probably know, there was a huge worldwide ice trade in the late 
1800's.  Found a nice taste of that in Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade

Chuck Bealke



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