On hot, sweltering summer days in the years before electric refrigerators, the iceman was a welcome sight in Cecil County towns. Plowing through dusty streets on a wagon, people could hear the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves, as the deliveryman approached.
Making his way slowly along the street, the deliveryman stopped at virtually every household, dropping off cakes of ice to homemakers. The rattle of the tongs and the rumble of the wagon called out to children. They would gather around as the driver chopped off an order, hoping for a small frozen chip.
This precious commodity had been harvested months earlier. Once crews cut blocks of it from frozen waterways, workers packed the product in sawdust, storing it away in icehouses. There it waited for the coming Maryland summer.
As winter eventually warmed into spring, the thermometer climbing ever higher folks began calling for the cooling product. And at the top of the Chesapeake, the season for the iceman was soon in full swing
Deliveries to houses, restaurants, hotels, and taverns were what those lazy, hazy days of July and August called for. After each stop, the quickly melting blocks were stored away in iceboxes. Today, of course, we go to the freezer to grab a cube or two. However, in this age long-ago age, these cooling cubs were not readily available.
This made the annual ice harvest an important cash crop, turning some area waterways into seasonal factories. So, what is the history of this once scarce product in Cecil County?
A shortage of ice had been a ‘”customary complaint” in Elkton during warm weather for years, the Cecil Whig remarked in 1866. Yet there was a “good omen” for a stock company, an ice company, had been formed to supply “the summer luxury.”
On hot summer days that year, an ice wagon traveled Elkton streets. In succeeding years, as the time approached when people required ice the company would announce it had plenty stored way if the winter had produced a strong extended freeze. From then on, the ice harvest was quite an enterprise in the county seat.
Demand for the product of summer must have been good. In 1867, the distributor had a “city style” ice wagon built, its bell-laden horses traversing the town. Elkton was rapidly putting on “city-airs,” the Whig’s editor stated.
The commodity depended on mother nature, and sometimes even 19th-century winters were just not cold enough. Dealers having exhausted the home supply by June 1876 had to make other arrangements so Joseph McNeal imported a fine quantity of the summer item from suppliers in Boston. It arrived in town on the railroad, no doubt having been heavily wrapped in sawdust and sacks.
Nine years later, as spring weather approached, icehouses and no ice, so the anxious dealers hoped for a cold snap. Commenting on the lack of the commodity, the Whig observed: Ice nowadays has become a necessity, and a failure to secure a home supply would greatly increase its cost as to rink it as a luxury among poor people.
Harvesting on the Susquehanna was a major commercial operation. There, when winters were cold enough, the America Ice Company cut river ice with horse-drawn saws, hauling huge blocks of it to large icehouses. The enterprise harvesting winter’s product on the river employed 50 to 100 men and many horses, the Cecil Whig reported. From then, until the arrival of warm weather, winter’s natural refrigerant stayed stored away in insulated structures at the edge of Perryville. At just the right time, it was shipped to Baltimore dealers.
Elkton received its first shipment of manufactured ice in January 1890. That winter, good ice making weather failed to arrive, and dealers exhausted their supplies. To satisfy the local market, one distributor, George Booth, purchased a ton of “artificial ice” in Wilmington, the Whig informed readers.
Viewing the approach of warm weather in 1909, consumers were anxious. While ice dealers had failed to secure a supply of natural ice, they had no reason to worry for the enterprise of Davis & Vinsinger had solved the problem. At the corner of Delaware Ave. and Howard Street in Elkton, they built an artificial ice plant and soon were making deliveries around town.
Henry Metz recalls that in 1926 when the Elkton Supply Company acquired the ice business from Newton-Mitchell Company, the successor of Davis and Vinsinger, delivery was by horse and wagon. Elkton Supply maintained two routes, which were driven by Edward Fleming and Charles Baader, he notes. Sometime after this trucks become standard equipment. And the once familiar sight of ice wagons passed from the Elkton scene.
Fresh ice had to be bought every day, and the shallow drip pan underneath the icebox had to be emptied, recalled Helen Keene Warburton. In the era before World War II, Warburton remembers ice being delivered. Each day, except Sunday, he “dropped off a 25- pound block of ice.”
Out in the country, it was a different story. Living on a farm north of Chesapeake City, Betty Eliason remembers her father, Frank Hutton, going to town each Saturday to buy a 100- pound block. “We had to make it last since that is all we had for the week.”
Home refrigerators eventually started plugging everyone into year-round ice. As the popularity of this appliance caught on, especially considering the ease with which it froze the water, the market for home delivery melted away in Cecil County.
Also, See
Ice was a Summer Luxury Photo Album with more images on Facebook
ice cream in Cecil County, a blog post