It’s Wayback Wednesday, sponsored by Pharmasave Huntsville!
Imagine having to rely on the deep cold of winter to keep your food fresh. Ice was cut from the lakes in winter, stored in sawdust-insulated warehouses, and delivered to households to keep their “iceboxes” cool. In this 1902 photo, Walter Galt poses with his load of ice. (Photo: Muskoka Heritage Place; details from Huntsville: With Spirit and Resolve)
Last week we shared this photo:
Long before there were iPods there were portable record players. In this ca. 1928 image by John Boyd, people at a camp somewhere in or near Huntsville listen to a portable record player. We don’t know anything more about this photo. If you do, leave a comment below! (Photo courtesy of Archives of Ontario)
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The ice house!! I well remember helping as a little kid with the cutting of ice on the lake. The Farnsworths used to come with a heavily modified model T Ford with a giant saw blade. They would cut the ice in a grid pattern, but stop about maybe a couple of inches short of actually going through the ice.This way their saw stayed dry and did not throw a spray of water about. Also, since the cut was dry it did not refreeze so fast and they could cut a larger area.
Once this was done then we had to cut that last inch or two by hand with a good old ice saw. This was a heavy beast!
At this point they took the saw blade off the cutting rig and attached a conveyor to it that could lift the blocks of ice out of the water so they could be grabbed with ice tongs and put on a truck or sleigh to take to the ice house.
Once we had a bit of an open water area we would usually cut the ice into long strips, these had the cross cuts in them already and once maneuvered to the conveyor with a long pike pole the blocks could be separated with a quick jab of an ice chisel or any other semi sharp object, like an axe.
Since I was the tiniest helper, being about 6 to 10 years old at that time, it was soon discovered that I could work right on the edge of the pre-cut strips of ice without breaking them and falling in so I got the job of moving the ice to the conveyor quite often. Do you know that a small kid can walk around on about a half to 3/4 inch of good blue ice? Bet you didn’t know this but one can and one only falls in occasionally. Nobody in sight had a life jacket… hey those things only work in summer right?
Anyway, the ice eventually made it’s way to the ice house where it was carefully packed in sawdust, all round so it would not stick together and with lots of sawdust on the outside. A huge pile of it!
You can tell an ice house as it has walls built “backwards”. The sheeting is usually strong boards and they are all on the inside of the studs. The outside is just left open so you see the studs. I guess they did not care much about aesthetics and lacking good foam insulation for the wall we relied only on the sawdust inside. Why bother with an outside wall covering was the logic.
Now for the good part. In July and August, when the resort was full of happy campers the youngest on the management totem pole, me, got to crawl into the ice house each morning, uncover some ice, push it out onto a wash stand, hose it off to get rid of the sawdust, break it into smaller chunks with a saw or chisel and then deliver it to each cottage ice box before noon. We did this every single day regardless of weather or anything else. Of course the ice box, although cool, could never be colder than maybe the high 30’s Fahrenheit so there was no freezer section. If you wanted ice cream you had to make it with an ice cream maker.
Do people know how ice cream makers work?
Well if you put the ice cream in the middle in a small container with a sort of paddle in it that you can crank around and then fill the annular space around it with broken up ice you get the cream cold to start with. The outer case is usually well insulated by the way, in some old ones it was made of wood.
The way to get the cream cold enough to actually freeze was to add salt to the ice. The salt melted the ice but if you study physics and heat transfer you will realize that the heat to melt the ice has to come from somewhere. The heat is not magically “in the salt” but rather it is in the environment surrounding the ice to be melted. If your MTO and toss salt on a road, the heat comes from the air moving over the road. In the ice cream machine it comes from the cream as it is in the closest proximity to the melting ice and remember the outside is insulated so the melting ice is looking for any form of heat it can find and if that outside insulation is working the heat must come from the cream. So the cream freezes. The temperature will actually go quite a bit below the normal freezing temp of 32 F if all is working well and this is why salt on a good old MTO road will work down near to 0 F (I did not look the actual minimum temp up)
At the end of the process you get ice cream… a treat after a lot of work.
As a bit of an aside note here, your car does not rust away due to the actual salt. Everyone blames the salt and they are sort of correct but it is not the salt that eats your fenders. If you go to a place like a dessert or into a dry salt mine you will see salt all over the place and yet the machinery does not rust much at all. This is because there is no water available. It is the water that rusts your car! The salt merely attracts the water. The salt is a bit like those silica gel packs you get with products delivered by Amazon from China. It attracts and absorbs water. In Amazon’s package case the water stays in silica gel pack to keep the product “dry”. The trick is to place something you don’t care about (like silica gel) in a package so it absorbs the water and keeps your computer dry. Sadly with MTO road salt, it sort of makes a liquid mist on the road, gets into every little space in your car and then just lays there attracting water for the rest of eternity and that water eats your car into rust and then you get to buy a nice new Ford!! and start the process all over again. An expensive hobby.
I’m a bit far from the ice house at this point…. sorry it’s Dec in Muskoka and if you look outside you will realize there is not a heck of a lot to do.
As a little one, I remember playing in the ice house. Although empty, it was still cool. Nice on a hot summer day.
ellen