University Place

Harvesting Ice on Madison's Lakes

[Katie Schumacher, Wisconsin Historical Society]

Today, we are pleased to introduce 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 – to discuss ice harvesting on Madison’s lakes, please join me in welcoming Ann Waidelich.

[applause]

[Ann Waidelich, Madison Historian]

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.

[slide of an illustration of a man dragging a block of ice with a child lounging on it]

The next slide –

[slide with an illustration of children celebrating the arrival of an ice truck on a hot day]

– 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 –

[Anne Waidelich]

– 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?

[slide of Currier and Ives painting of men harvesting ice from a lake titled Getting Ice]

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 news – 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 waterpower and the raised water levels –

[Anne Waidelich]

- 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.

[slide of How Ice Was Harvested – scraping and scoring the ice with a photo of ice being 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 –

[Anne Waidelich]

– 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.

[slide with photos of three different ice plows with a photo of one attached to a horse]

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 – 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.

[slide of an illustration of Cutting Ice by Hand]

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.

[slide with a photo of men cutting ice with a cutting machine titled cutting ice by machine]

And then, and then sometimes these mechanical ice- 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.

[slide with a photo of men poling harvested ice toward the hoist]

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 –

[slide of a photo of Madison men poling ice at Fauerbach Brewery]

– 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 icehouse. Those small windows on the right is the icehouse that was attached to the Fauerbach Brewery. We usually see the Fauerbach pictures from the Williamson Street side. You don’t see this big icehouse 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 –

[Ann Waidelich]

– 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 –

[slide of the painting Filling the Ice House by Harry Gottlieb]

– 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 – I love this next sentence in the article. An indispensable aid to the harvesting was whiskey –

[laughter]

[Ann Waidelich]

– 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 –

[slide with photo of a newspaper article in a Madison newspaper in 1882]

– 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, the ice business – 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 coolers, 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.

[Anne Waidelich]

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 –

[slide with a photo of a residential ice box circa 1860]

– 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 and 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 –

[Ann Waidelich]

– 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.

[return of the slide with the photo of the ice box]

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.

[slide with a photo of an ice man servicing someones ice box]

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. But the iceman was responsible for much of the dissatisfaction occasioned by the use of his product.

[Anne Waidelich]

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 – 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 –

[slide with a photo of a GE Monitor Top refrigerator]

– 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.

[Ann Waidelich]

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.

[slide with a photo of a newspaper article describing the Allen and Pyncheon ice dealers]

And this was a newspaper article that was typed up on – onto a card, and it says, “P. H. 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.”

[Ann Waidelich]

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 icehouse was down there along Lake Monona off of Rutledge Street, near Orton Park.

And then, Kurtz and Huegel had an icehouse on Lake Mendota. And what I want you to look at is this railroad line, this – that small diagonal line in the upper right-hand corner.

[slide with a plat map of the Lake Mendota side of the isthmus in the 1800s]

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 icehouse 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.

[Anne Waidelich]

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.

[slide with a photo of the Breckheimer Ice House in Madison]

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 it worked – 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 –

[slide with a photo of the Fauerbach Brewing Company on Williamson Street in Madison]

– 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.

[slide with a newspaper photo of the Conklin and Sons Ice Business from the 1920s]

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 B. D. 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 icehouse 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.

[Anne Waidelich]

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 icehouse. 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 icehouse west of the Bernard boat landing, because a fire in 1891 had destroyed the previous icehouse.

And ice houses had a fire – 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, –

[return to the newspaper photo of the Conklin and Sons Ice Business]

– 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.

[Ann Waidelich]

Ice sold mostly for the local market. Conklin sold its ice to the Madison market and nearby. The other ice house – 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 icehouse burned down, actually.

[slide with a photo with a different view of the Conklin Ice House with a wagon in front]

This is another picture of the ice wagon, those 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 icehouse.

[slide with a photo of two teamsters and an ice cart titled Delivering Conklin Ice]

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.

[slide with a photo of firefighters battling the Conklin Ice House Fire in June of 1915]

And then, as I say, in June of 1915, the icehouse burned down for the second time. This is the Madison Fire Department trying to put out the fire on the Conklin Ice House.

[slide with a photo of the aftermath of the New Jersey Ice House fire in 1912]

And then I found this picture of an icehouse, after an icehouse 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, you know, they – they could use it with a little effort.

[Ann Waidelich]

So, it didn’t all melt.

And then the other thing about icehouses and trying to find pictures of icehouses 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.

[slide with a photo of the Conklin icehouse having been razed in 1939]

So, it’s very hard to find pictures of them. And this is what Conklin built after the fire.

The icehouse 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 icehouse was torn down and the land sold to the city. As I say, it became a part of James Madison Park.

[Ann Waidelich]

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.

[return to the photo of the razed Conklin icehouse]

But I like the picture because it shows the Conklin icehouse in the background with these 1930 automobiles.

[slide with a plat map of Madisons 16th Ward in the late 1800s]

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 icehouse on Lake Wingra.

[slide with a photo of the Knickerbocker 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 icehouse, which is what I wanted the picture for.

“Conklin was pushing construction of its immense new icehouse 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.

[Ann Waidelich]

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 –

[return of the slide of the photo of the Knickerbocker Ice House]

– the ice will be shipped to Chicago and the southwest, as well as to the south along the Illinois Central Rail line.

[slide with a photo of the ramp and workers at the Knickerbocker Ice House]

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.

[slide with a photo of an ice wagon titled The Big Three, Roy Clark and Ned Smith, 1915]

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.

[Ann Waidelich]

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 icehouse was torn down after a windstorm tore it apart. The property was sold to the city for Wingra Park in 1937.

[slide with a photo of the wind damage done to the Conklin Ice House in August of 1932]

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.

[slide with a plat map of Madison showing the north side of Lake Monona in 1899]

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 North rail – 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.

[slide with a photo of a newspaper photo of the Esch Brothers and Rabe Ice House in 1910]

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.

[slide of a photo of Fred Walterscheit in 1972 at the age of 84]

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 icehouses. 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.

[Anne Waidelich]

And then this is a plat map that shows what we sometimes call Ice House Hill.

[slide with a plat map of Ice House Hill with the Jefferson and Knickerbocker Ice Companies]

It’s the sledding hill at the end of where Atwood Avenue and Lakeland Avenue come together. The Ice House Hill and – 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 icehouse on this right-hand side. And in the – the middle, the – the diagram in the middle was the bunkhouse and, actually, the May family home.

The – again, I’ll read a – a bit from the Wisconsin State Journal in March of 19 – 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 icehouse is 130 feet wide and 408 feet long –

[return to the slide of Ice House Hill]

– 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 –

[slide of a photo of the James and Ellen May family]

– 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 icehouse.

[slide with a photo of the home at 3159 Buena Vista Avenue in Madison]

And then the fun thing is that that icehouse 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 that – you can see that it’s an odd-looking house because the bunkhouse would have been up at on the top level and then the May family living in the lower level.

[slide with a photo of the U.S. Sugar Company building in the early 1900s]

Now, as I mentioned, this was moved to behind Garver, which started out as the U.S. Sugar Company from 1905 to 1924. Remnants of that building are still standing, and the city is trying to find a reuse for it. But the – and the reason I’ll mention why I’m talking about the sugar beet factory.

[Ann Waidelich]

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 –

[slide with a photo of the Central and Northwest Railroad Ice House on Brearly street]

– with fruits and vegetables that were being grown in the south in the wintertime and bring them back up north. So, they built icehouses in between railroad tracks. And the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad icehouse is that reddish building behind this picture of the Byrns Oil Company. Again, the icehouses are always in the background. And this icehouse was in operation from 1927 to 1943 when a fire destroyed it in 19-, 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.

[slide with an aerial photo of the Oscar Mayer plant in the early 1900s]

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 Far – Farwell’s Point there and Mendota State Hospital on that point sticking out. But this was an early picture of Oscar Mayer.

[slide with a photo of the Reynoldson home in Maple Bluff with an electric Oscar Mayer truck in front with an ice delivery man along side. A photo of an ice delivery bag is inset]

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 they – 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.

[Ann Waidelich]

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.

[slide with three photos of Oscar Mayer Ice – one of ice carver Joe Matts, one of an ice bowl and one of ice cubes]

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.

[slide with a photo of a built-in ice box in a residential kitchen]

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.

[slide with a photo of the outside of the house with the ice box showing the door where ice would be delivered]

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 –

[laughter]

– in the upper part and these large pots and pans that you never know where to put in the lower level.

[Ann Waidelich]

And then I’d like to close with this picture and another quote from a book.

[slide with a photo of a loaded refrigerator with the doors open and a boy lying prone eating a sandwich in front of it]

“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.

[Ann Waidelich]

As for the icehouse 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.

[applause]