In the days when the Iceman Cometh

I read an article a while ago that made me think of my childhood. The article was about “harvesting ice.”

Does anyone else out there remember the iceman? We had one of those old wooden iceboxes with the brass hardware. It sat next to the kitchen door, in the entryway – not the kitchen – because it was cooler in the entry, I suppose, especially in winter. And John Lotter would deliver ice on a pretty regular basis to all his local customers in the city and on the farms. The John Lotter family were our local icemen for as long as anyone could remember.

The iceman was almost like the Good Humor man in those days. When he’d pull into someone’s driveway, the kids would all run to meet him, and he never disappointed. He’d chip off a nice chunk of ice for us to suck on on the hot summer days. it was sort of magical to think that he had ice in the summer!

The Lotters lived on the edge of the Oconto River just above the dam and the swimming beach in Oconto Falls. During the summer, they rented fishing boats to area fishermen, but during the coldest part of the winter, you’d see them out on the ice “harvesting” big chunks of ice, which they stored in the big icehouse right on the bank.

I didn’t get to stand around and watch too often, but I remember seeing those guys out there working on days when I’m sure they’d much rather have been sitting inside where it was warm. The ice-harvesting process was pretty labor-intensive: It required quite a few men to do the work. First, they’d scrape the snow off the ice that could be anywhere from 6 to 30 inches thick. Next, they’d cut a small channel in the ice, which they’d use later to float the ice chunks in to the bank. Then they’d measure out grids on the ice, and horses would pull some kind of tool that cut grooves on the grid.

The next step was to cut through the grooves with a big saw that looked like a lumberman’s cross-cut saw (but it had a handle on only one end). Then, they’d use big bars to break the blocks off and they’d float them down the cleared channel to a chute, where they were hauled up and into the icehouse. Some of those blocks were huge; they must have weighed 75 or 80 pounds.

Each block was moved up a chute with hooks to various levels as the icehouse filled up with layers of ice. The tiers of ice were separated and surrounded by layers of sawdust the Lotters got from area sawmills. The sawdust served as an insulator and kept the ice chunks from freezing back together in the icehouse. If they hadn’t used the sawdust, the blocks would melt a little bit and then freeze together and they’d have one huge block the size of the icehouse. That sawdust would keep the ice through spring, summer, fall, and up to the next harvest, so if you had an icebox, you could have a steady supply of the natural refrigerant. (Sometimes, on really hot summer days, when we’d meet our classmate, Marvin Lotter, at the beach, he’d take us over to the icehouse and let us crawl around on the big stacks of ice. We’d come out with sawdust stuck to our swimsuits and bare feet, but, man, it was a “cool” thing to do!)

When the iceman would come, with his big flatbed truck loaded with ice covered in sawdust and a big tarp, we’d tell him just the size piece we wanted, and he would cut the piece we needed with a chisel and ice axe, bring it into the entryway with his big iron tongs, and put it in the icebox for us. That chunk of ice would melt gradually, and the icy water would trickle down through the tubing in the tin-lined walls and cool the space. And every day we’d have to empty out the pan at the bottom of the icebox where the water collected. The ice would last about a week, and then Lotter’s truck would come around again to replenish us.

Sometimes, Mom would order a little extra ice so we could make homemade ice cream in the old-fashioned wooden bucket ice cream maker we had. I don’t remember exactly how it was done, but I remember she’d collect some of the cream from the milk cans in the milk house, and mix that with eggs, sugar, and vanilla, and dump that mixture into the inner metal bucket. Then she’d pack in a bucketful of ice chips and add some rock salt to the ice (there’s some physics or chemistry thing going on here – something about transferring heat from the mixture through the metal liner? – I don’t know), and my sister Joyce and I would get to crank the paddle in the bucket of the ice cream maker until that yummy mix turned almost solid in the bucket. After about a half-hour of cranking, we’d have apple pie ala mode – with hot pie straight from the oven! My dad was a real ice cream aficionado.

But the iceman’s days were numbered when the REA brought in power lines to rural Wisconsin and people started buying electric refrigerators. A centuries-old industry was pretty much wiped out by the modern-day appliances, and our local iceman and his family had to find other jobs.

Contact Roger VanHaren at rjmavh@gmail.com.