News From the Past

100 Years Ago – 1905

“J. E. Uplinger put 21 men and eight teams to work on his ice Monday morning and succeeded in getting about 100 tons of fair ice in the house by Wednesday evening when he was obliged to stop for the present on account of the soft weather.” -- St. Francis Herald , 2005

I remember when neighbors got together to “put up ice.” The ice was cut in squares or maybe a more precise term would be “rectangular solids”. Workers with ice tongs would load it on wagons or trucks and haul it to the ice house on one farm. ( I don’t know how they decided on which farmer’s ice house was to be filled first.) They would work until they all had ice in their icehouses. They would eat dinner at whatever home they were delivering to that day. They would start early in the morning. The colder the weather, the better. If the ice started to thaw the least bit, their mittens or gloves and sleeves would get wet. Also, if it was put in the ice house melted the least little bit, it would freeze the blocks together in the ice house.

We Crabtrees had an icehouse and in later years Rich and I did too. I remember both. The neighbors ate dinner at our house. When I was about 8 or 9, or maybe sooner, I remember Mr. Barber sat on a bench behind the table in our dining room. I don’t remember who else was there, but know that it had to be other neighbors and uncles.

On our Gregory farm, we put up ice, but soon Servel refrigerators came in and made the ice house and "ice boxes" obsolete. That summer, we got totally hailed out, but cut enough wheat to get a load of wheat on our rented place. Rich took it to Haigler and brought home a Servel (gas) refrigerator. The ice house ended up as a trash dump. I don’t know what happened to the roof. It was still deep enough to take refuge in during the summer that a tornado went past our farm and destroyed the Prairie Bell schoolhouse and our south windmill.

-- Alice (Crabtree) Gregory

Editor's note: I ran across this clipping and note my mother wrote about collecting ICE back in "the old days" and thought you'd like to read what she remembered about it.