This photo from the 1950s depicts the annual ice harvest in Montana for Western Fruit Express, which began in 1904 and peaked in the middle of the 20th century. PHOTO COURTESY OF STUMPTOWN HISTORICAL SOCIETY
To my grandmother, Opie, it
was always called “the icebox.” As my brother and I unpacked her groceries
looking for tasty goodies, we learned to read by identifying words on the labels
of the boxes and cartons in the brown sacks from the market.
“Oh, just put that’n in the
icebox,” she would say when we found something that needed to be refrigerated. We
always knew that she meant the giant humming Kelvinator refrigerator in the
corner of the kitchen, but as a carryover from her era in rural Montana, food
items meant to be kept cold belonged in the icebox.
It was one thing to have a
root cellar for onions and potatoes but quite another to have an icebox to
chill meat, eggs, butter, milk and cheese, and no well-appointed household
would be without one. It was a mark of prosperity.
In the early part of the 19th
century many homes had iceboxes and the cottage industry of ice harvesters occupied
the workforce alongside wheelwrights, teamsters, harness makers and livery
managers—now-forgotten working classes.
All across Canada and northern
states—anywhere there was water and cold winters—humans gathered ice to cool
their food.
The early 19th century ice
trade industry flourished, generating nearly $700 million in today’s value. It dramatically
altered the way fishing and meat packing businesses marketed their products. Most
of Montana’s ice harvesting was done on the local level with small commercial
markets, and the ice box became a common household appliance.
Eventually, electricity
replaced them with bulky refrigerator units, some with freezer compartments. But
for decades, households relied on Sears Roebuck catalogs to select that ideal
kitchen implement to keep things cool, with a block of ice resting on a grill
inside an insulated, tin-wrapped box.
Obtaining the ice required more ingenuity than real skill. Just about every harvesting method that could be thought of was used. Early on, lengthy hand saws with dual handles sliced through river and lake ice blocks of all sizes. Later, harvesters employed gas-powered saws and conveyer belts to increase productivity. Skilled farmers used their tractors, modified with powered belts to drive circular saw blades with special teeth for ice chipping.
Ice harvesters employed gas-powered saws and conveyer belts to increase their productivity. PHOTO COURTESY OF STUMPTOWN HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Most ranchers in Montana had
stock ponds for their animals and with homemade devices like these they could
not only secure ice for their home, but could also keep the ponds open as a winter
water source for their herds.
In town, small businesses
emerged to deliver ice, on regular schedules, to households in the same way
that milk, mail and newspapers arrived at doorsteps. The ice, after all, was
free to the harvesters and tidy profits awaited entrepreneurial souls.
Today, many small communities
in Montana have a museum with an antique icebox on display, relics of the 19th
century trade. The icehouse in Somers, Montana, just a short stroll from Del’s
Bar, is an industrial artifact of the state’s past that looms large over the
town. A paved bike path has replaced the old railroad bed adjacent to the
three-story, faded wooden structure with its 3-foot-thick walls lined with
sawdust and its louvered venting tower. Ice harvested from Flathead Lake was
stored there, awaiting shipment on Great Northern Railway “cooler cars” to
cities and towns along its northern routes.
As a young girl in Helena,
Opie recalled her mother using a cheese grater to shave the last melting chunks
of ice from the bottom of the tray to fill glasses with ice chips. Over that she
would pour Kool-Aid or lemonade—the original snow cone.
“Our chore was to check the
drip pan daily and empty it on the vegetable garden,” Opie told me. “If it
overflowed onto the kitchen floor we always got a scolding.”
In the Helena Valley, the winter
delivery of ice almost always came from blocks carved out of Canyon Ferry
Reservoir. Most of it arrived on wagons, or by sledges in heavy snow seasons. As
time went on, Ford Model T trucks with insulated bunkers brought the ice, and a
numbered card in the window would tell the deliverymen how many blocks to
deposit.
“They would sometimes leave
the block on the boulevard in front of the house and it was the job for us kids
to get it into the house before it melted. They were God-awful heavy!” Opie
recalled. “We would use our little wagons to get them to the back steps of the
kitchen.”
Opie lived to be 101, long enough to see modern refrigerators feature automatic ice makers and dispensers. I’m not sure how she felt about all that, but I do know that, to her last days, it was always “the icebox.”