Here’s the Scoop for These Hot July Days: Ice Cream Goes Way Back in Cecil County

These July days are an excellent time for enjoying that smooth and creamy summer treat, ice cream. That is especially true on hot, steamy Eastern Shore days like we are currently experiencing, as few pleasures are as comforting and cooling as a double scoop of the frozen dessert.

Ice cream has been the quintessential way to offset the summer’s heat for a long time –  so long, in fact, that it has a history as long as that of our country.  Ice cream was already a delicacy in the 1700s when the 13 original Colonies formed the United States.  George Washington served it at Mount Vernon.  When James Madison was elected president, his wife, Dolly, served the frozen dessert at the inaugural.

Back then, the frozen treat was complicated to make and preserve and procuring the necessary ingredients could be a problem.  One of the earliest problems was freezing the cream mixture when it was warm outside.  Then someone discovered that mixing salt with ice made a substance much colder, so the ice cream freezer was invented.  The first ones were called pot freezers.  The cream, sugar, and other ingredients were beaten by hand.  The mixture was then shaken up and down in a pan of salted ice until it was frozen.

Ice Cream in Cecil County

In the nation’s early years, the fashionable dessert was a luxury confined to the wealthy.  Martha Ogle Forman, who resided at a sizable Cecil County plantation on the Sassafras River, Rose Hill, wrote in her diary that she served “a large silver goblet of ice cream ornamented with a half-blown moss rose . . . .” at a dinner party on June 1, 1819.

In 1843, the hand-cranked ice cream churn, a device something like a butter churn, was invented.  The ice cream mixture was poured into a metal container set inside a salted ice tub.  A hand crank revolved inside the metal can, keeping the mixture in constant motion as it froze.  With this device, ice cream was more easily made. 

William J. Jones, a prominent 19^th-century lawyer, provided the first written account of ice cream being served in Elkton, around 1834:  “ . . . I have eaten ice cream of many flavors made by the most celebrated confectioners, but never any that compared with what I ate at Mr. Jones’s store on the Fourth of July fifty-one or two years ago, when I and another boy scraped up six cents and bought a fippenny bit plate with two spoons in it.  It was flavored with lemon; vanilla had not yet been imported into Elkton.”

Whether “Ellios Jones” or “John Stymus,” a baker, first sold ice cream in Elkton was an open question, Mr. Jones wrote in Elkton in the 1830s.

Ice Cream Season in Elkton

In succeeding years, ice cream lovers here eagerly awaited the warm season so they could again have the simple pleasure of tasting the cold treat.  One particularly hot June day in 1848, Editor H. Vanderford, Jr., of the Cecil Democrat, was in his office, “panting for a little fresh air,” as he plotted the “overthrow of the Whigs.”  As he poured over his exchanges (other newspapers), a smiling girl entered with a large vessel “filled to the brim with the most luscious ice cream.”  Editor Vanderford said that for at least a half-hour, as “he worked on the cream,” he thought no more of the Whigs, the “barnburners (a splinter group of Democrats),” or other such things.

The transition from the “season of coal stoves to the tropical heat,” which often put one in the “melting mood,” provoked a longing for the cold, sweet treat.  There is “nothing more refreshing in hot weather than a glass of delicious ice cream,” Editor Palmer C. Ricketts informed Cecil Whig readers in 1852.  He wondered who would engage in Elkton’s summer confectionary business that season.

He did not wait long for the answer.  Mr. J.  E. Brown soon came to the Whig office with “a glass a piece for all hands, and two for the Devil (printers’ assistant).”  Editor Ricketts heartily approved of the treat, saying he had always found Elkton’s ice cream superior to the same article in the cities.

A Business Opportunity for Elkton

The editor remarked that there was a business opportunity in Elkton: “An ice cream saloon, nicely furnished and with proper accommodations, would be a profitable enterprise.  The best arrangement . . . is a garden well supplied with trees and tables just large enough for two persons scattered about here and there among the trees and shrubbery.  We have seen such a place in a village, and though it offered a charming opportunity for a tete a tete.” 

Mr. Ellis Jones opened a spacious air parlor, which the newspaper predicted, would be a “most popular resort for ladies and gentlemen these warm evenings,” soon after the Whig made its suggestion.

With the thermometer often pushing 100 degrees during the scorching summer of 1853,  Editor Vanderford did not know how he would stand the heat were it not for the nearby Crouch’s Ice Cream Saloon.  A plate of vanilla was just the thing to keep him from “wilting into his boots.  There was no pleasanter place to “lower one’s temperature during the scorching weather than at Crouch’s,” he wrote.

For the delicacy of the warm season of 1859, luscious and tempting ice cream could be found at Mrs. C. H. Hall’s confectionery shop, nearly opposite the Elkton courthouse.  It was served “fresh and nice from the diary of Mr. J. B. Booth.” 

Ice Cream Industry After the Civil War

Later in the 19^th century, the ice cream industry blossomed as the dairy product became more readily available.  But in the years before the Civil War, when one of the few chances to cool off during scorching weather was to stroll over to the meadow by the Big Elk Creek and hopefully catch a puff of air, perhaps nothing said summer more than the churning of ice cream.  It sure said it to Cecil County’s two newspaper editors, Mr. Ricketts and Mr. Vanderford, for they always looked forward to testifying to the quality of the season’s first “manufactured” batch.