Steamtown's curator Sarah Smith is creating an exhibit on ice and the economic importance of that product in the days before refrigeration. It will open in early February.

Along with park ranger Kenny Ganz, Sarah glues acrylic ice blocks together to show in miniature how the blocks would be stored in a typical ice house.

This is what the finished product looks like. The floorboards, atop a cinders and stone foundation, along with sawdust would keep the ice from melting throughout the year.


Some of the tools needed would be ice claws to walk on the ice, and even a thermometer to tell the temperature of the inside of the icehouse.

An N-scale icehouse and refrigerated boxcars for keeping meats and other perishables cold while being delivered.

Delivered to the ice chest at your house for keeping butter and milk and eggs cold. Other artifacts of the 'ice age' are being put in place. If you are going through Scranton through the Spring, stop by to check out this interesting piece of our collective past.

Brings back some memories for me, although not particularly railroad related. From 1955 until 64, I worked for my dad at a dock in San Diego where we fueled private boats. Most boats had ice boxes instead of refrigerators. We got ice from the Union Ice Co, whose main business, I think, was icing reefer cars. They made the ice in 300 lb. blocks that were scored so they could be broken into as many as 12 25-lb blocks, using an ice pick. Depending on how large the boat's ice box was, we'd bring down a 25, or 50 lb block (once in a while, 100 lb.). Of course we handled the ice with ice tongs, like in one of the photos.

Across the causeway from our dock, was a dock that serviced commercial fishing boats. While the larger tuna clippers had mechanical refrigeration, the smaller albacore boats still used ice. The 300 lb blocks were fed into a chipper (similar to what tree-trimmers now use), and blown through a hose into the fish hold.

A few houses in my neighborhood still had ice boxes. The home owners had a Union Ice sign hanging in a front window. They'd flip in to one side if they needed ice, the other side if they didn't. So, the ice man could drive down the street, and wouldn't need to stop if they didn't need any.

When I was in college, a bunch us us rented an old house the had a big built-in ice box. Along with doors in the kitchen for the housewife to access it, there was also a door on the outside for the ice man to load the ice. That way he didn't need to come into the house, dripping water all over the place.

Jim -

When my family moved back to the south side of Chicago when I was a kid, the ice man still came down our street as a few people still had ice boxes either in their basements or on the back porch. The sign that the folks put in the window had numbers on each side; 25, 50, 75 and 100 as I recall. Whatever number was at the top, is what the ice man delivered. Fortunately for us kids, the guy went around the back for the delivery so we could jump on the back of the truck to get some of the chips that were laying around from when he "customized" the larger blocks. These chips were great on a hot summer day! As I recall, the last of the customers stopped using their ice boxes after that first summer, and the ice man no longer came!


Les

It is now finished, and open for your pleasure.
http://www.nps.gov/stea/parknews/ice-in ... bit-pr.htm