Loose Ends: The Ice House

Excerpts by Bonita Meyers

This January doesn’t seem to be the ‘mild’ month indicated by a weather map which hangs on my bulletin board. It is very freezy and breezy, a bone chilling blast reminiscent of childhood on a small farm in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Back then this kind of weather was expected. Our farm community was prepared for all seasons of the year including winter.

Winter Saturdays on most of the farms were set aside to fill ice houses with hefty blocks of ice, kept frozen by layers of covering sawdust. The ice house was a log building with a thick double roof.

Neighbors would go from farm to farm to harvest ice for the coming summer and fill each family’s icehouse to the ceiling. Nearly every farm had a pond, either man made or beaver made, usually with a creek running in and out. The pond was used for watering crops during the growing season, for providing pleasure to swimming kids or sweltering adults in summer or for ice skating in the winter except on ice cutting days.

On those days neighbors would arrive driving teams of horses which were hitched to a sledge loaded with crosscut saws, gaffs and huge ice tongs.

The men would cut a small square hole in the center of the pond which allowed an ice square to pop up. Then lines were drawn for oblong ice blocks, which were about 20 inches thick, by 20 inches wide and 30 inches long. Once cut the blocks were pulled in by a gaff, then two men would place ice tongs at each end and load the block onto a waiting sledge. A team of horses would take a full load to the farm ice house, where the floor was completely covered by ice blocks, then topped with sawdust. The next layer was done the same way, minus one row from the front, covered with more sawdust. The process continued that way until the ice house was full. The teams of horses and men appeared at every farm until the entire valley was assured of summer ice.

I realize now what hard work this was for the men, but if they complained no one heard it but the wives. And the wives by the way, provided lunches and hot drinks for the men. As for the kids, it was a day of running, yelling and sliding, along with fort building or warming oneself by an ever present campfire near the pond.

(The sledge was a platform perhaps four by eight feet or smaller, made of thick sturdy planks and mounted on low slider runners covered with metal. This vehicle pulled by a team of horses, was used to haul just about anything from wood for winter, rock for fireplaces or outside walls, slaughtered beef, or removal of soil. The kids could usually depend on a short ride around the barn yard as well.)

It was always fascinating to me that the blocks of ice would keep throughout the entire summer, with some perhaps left over come the cold days of fall. Sometimes we kids would seek relieve from summer heat by simply sitting in the ice house on a sawdust covered block of ice.

Saws used for ice cutting were the same saws put to trees for harvesting winter fuel. Following the use of the saws for any job, my Dad would bring the saws into the kitchen, wipe them down and then oil them – I think with animal suet. If a saw was dull, Dad was very proficient at sharpening and ‘setting’ the saw teeth and often performed this chore for neighbors.

After the men did their work, further care of the ice, such as getting it into iceboxes, became the work of the family kids. We would use an ice pick to chop a block of ice down the middle, hopefully to separate into same sized sections. My brother and I would pick up the fearfully sharp tongs, clamp them onto the half block of ice and with him on one handle and me on the other, we would then walk the heavy ice to the back porch, where it would be washed free of sawdust. Then, with much bragging about our muscles, we would heave the ice chunk into the ice box with a strenuous effort. We always had a reward for completion of this chore – small chips of ice in a glass were ours.

Though it was all those years ago, the awe inspiring transformation of pond water into solid, cold, wonderful ice, lingers still. The fun of those freezing, companion filled days, with the crisp sound of the rhythmic cutting of ice, the horses snorting vapor and stomping hooves, and the huge bobbing cakes of ice floating as in a ballet, are now wrapped in memories of an event gone away with the passing times.