Ice trade
The ice trade, also known as the frozen water trade, was a 19th-century and early 20th-century industry, primarily catering to demand on the east coast of the United States. Ice was both harvested locally in the winter months and stored for later sale in the summer, and was also imported from polar regions where it could be sourced year round, with Norway becoming the largest exporter of ice.
The trade involved the large-scale harvesting, transport and sale of natural ice, and later the making and sale of artificial ice, for domestic consumption and commercial purposes. Ice was cut from the surface of ponds and streams, then stored in ice houses, before being sent on by ship, barge or railroad to its final destination around the world.
The trade was started by the New England businessman Frederic Tudor in 1806. Tudor shipped ice to the Caribbean island of Martinique, hoping to sell it to wealthy members of the European elite there, using an ice house he had built specially for the purpose. Over the coming years the trade widened to Cuba and Southern United States, with other merchants joining Tudor in harvesting and shipping ice from New England. During the 1830s and 1840s the ice trade expanded further, with shipments reaching England, India, South America, China and Australia. Tudor made a fortune from the India trade, while brand names such as Wenham Ice became famous in London. Increasingly, however, the ice trade began to focus on supplying the growing cities on the east coast of the U.S. and the needs of businesses across the Midwest. The citizens of New York City and Philadelphia became huge consumers of ice during their long, hot summers, and additional ice was harvested from the Hudson River and Maine to fulfill the demand. Ice began to be used in refrigerator cars by the railroad industry, allowing the meat packing industry around Chicago and Cincinnati to slaughter cattle locally, before sending the dressed meat onward to either U.S. domestic or international markets.
Networks of ice wagons were typically used to distribute the product to the final domestic and smaller commercial customers. The ice trade revolutionized the U.S. meat, vegetable and fruit industries, enabled significant growth in the fishing industry, and encouraged the introduction of a range of new drinks and foods. It only flourished in the time between the development of reliable transportation and the development of widespread mechanical refrigeration. Chilled refrigerator cars and ships created a national industry in vegetables and fruit that could previously only have been consumed locally. U.S. and British fishermen began to preserve their catches in ice, allowing longer voyages and bigger catches, and the brewing industry became operational all-year round. As U.S. ice exports diminished after 1870, Norway became a major player in the international market, shipping large quantities of ice to England and Germany.
At its peak at the end of the 19th century, the U.S. ice trade employed an estimated 90,000 people in an industry capitalised at $28 million, using ice houses capable of storing up to 250,000 tons each; Norway exported a million tons of ice a year, drawing on a network of artificial lakes. Competition had slowly been growing, however, in the form of artificially produced plant ice and mechanically chilled facilities. Unreliable and expensive at first, plant ice began to successfully compete with natural ice in Australia and India during the 1850s and 1870s respectively, until, by the outbreak of World War I in 1914, more plant ice was being produced in the U.S. each year than naturally harvested ice. Despite a temporary increase in production in the U.S. during the war, the interwar years saw further developments which caused the total collapse of the international ice trade. In some isolated rural areas without access to electricity, the lack of which precluded the use of refrigerators, and also where plant ice was typically not economically viable and where natural ice was usually free of pollutants, ice continued to be harvested and sold at the local level until after World War II. Today, ice is occasionally harvested for ice carving and ice festivals, but little remains of the 19th-century industrial network of ice houses and transport facilities.
History
Pre-19th century methods
Prior to the emergence of the ice trade of the 19th century, snow and ice had been collected and stored to use in the summer months in various parts of the world, but never on a large scale. In the Mediterranean and in South America, for example, there was a long history of collecting ice from the upper slopes of the Alps and the Andes during the summer months and transporting this down into the cities. Similar trading practices had grown up in Mexico during the colonial period. Akkadian tablets from the late Bronze Age attest to ice houses on the Euphrates River built for storing ice collected in winter from the snowy mountains for use in summer drinks. The Russians collected ice along the Neva River during the winter months for consumption in Saint Petersburg for many years. Wealthy Europeans began to build ice houses to store ice gathered on their local estates during the winter from the 16th century onwards; the ice was used to cool drinks or food.Some techniques were also invented to produce ice or chilled drinks through more artificial means. In India, ice was imported from the Himalayas in the 17th century, but the expense of this meant that by the 19th century ice was instead produced in small quantities during the winter further south. Porous clay pots containing boiled, cooled water were laid out on top of straw in shallow trenches; under favourable circumstances, thin ice would form on the surface during winter nights which could be harvested and combined for sale. There were production sites at Hugli-Chuchura and Allahabad, but this "hoogly ice" was only available in limited amounts and considered of poor quality because it often resembled soft slush rather than hard crystals. Saltpeter and water were mixed together in India to cool drinks, taking advantage of local supplies of the chemical. In Europe, various chemical means for cooling drinks were created by the 19th century; these typically used sulphuric acid to chill the liquid, but were not capable of producing actual ice.
Opening up the trade, 1800–1830
The ice trade began in 1806 as the result of the efforts of Frederic Tudor, a New England entrepreneur, to export ice on a commercial basis. In New England, ice was an expensive product, consumed only by the wealthy who could afford their own ice houses. Nonetheless, icehouses were relatively common amongst the wealthier members of society by 1800, filled with ice cut, or harvested, from the frozen surface of ponds and streams on their local estates during the winter months.Around the neighboring New York City area, the hot summers and rapidly growing economy had begun to increase local demand for ice towards the end of the 18th century, creating a small-scale market amongst farmers who sold ice from their ponds and streams to local city institutions and families. Some ships occasionally transported ice from New York and Philadelphia for sale to the southern U.S. states, in particular Charleston in South Carolina, laying it down as ballast on the trip.
Tudor's plan was to export ice as a luxury good to wealthy members of West Indies and the southern U.S. states, where he hoped they would relish the product during their sweltering summers; conscious of the risk that others might follow suit, Tudor hoped to acquire local monopoly rights in his new markets in order to maintain high prices and profits. He started by attempting to establish a monopoly on the potential ice trade in the Caribbean and invested in a brigantine ship to transport ice bought from farmers around Boston. At the time, Tudor was regarded by the business community at best as something of an eccentric, and at worst a fool.
The first shipments took place in 1806 when Tudor transported an initial trial cargo of ice, probably harvested from his family estate at Rockwood, to the Caribbean island of Martinique. Sales were hampered, however, by the lack of local storage facilities, both for Tudor's stock and any ice bought by domestic customers, and as a result the ice stocks quickly melted away. Learning from this experience, Tudor then built a functioning ice depot in Havana and, despite the U.S. trade embargo declared in 1807, was trading successfully again by 1810. He was unable to acquire exclusive legal rights to import ice into Cuba, but was nonetheless able to maintain an effective monopoly through his control of the ice houses. The 1812 war briefly disrupted trade, but over subsequent years Tudor began to export fruit back from Havana to the mainland on the return journey, kept fresh with part of the unsold ice cargo. Trade to Charleston and to Savannah in Georgia followed, while Tudor's competitors began to supply South Carolina and Georgia by ship from New York or using barges sent downstream from Kentucky.
File:Slaves Unloading Ice in Cuba 1832.jpg|thumb|left|Spanish slaves in Cuba unloading ice from Maine
The price of the imported ice varied according to the amount of competition; in Havana, Tudor's ice sold for 25 cents per pound, while in Georgia it reached only six to eight cents. Where Tudor had a strong market share, he would respond to competition from passing traders by lowering his prices considerably, selling his ice at the unprofitable rate of one cent per pound ; at this price, competitors would typically be unable to sell their own stock at a profit: they would either be driven into debt or if they declined to sell, their ice would melt away in the heat. Tudor, relying on his local storage depots, could then increase his prices once again. By the middle of the 1820s, around 3,000 tons of ice was being shipped from Boston annually, two thirds by Tudor.
At these lower prices, ice began to sell in considerable volumes, with the market moving beyond the wealthy elite to a wider range of consumers, to the point where supplies became overstretched. Ice was also being used by tradesmen to preserve perishable goods, rather than for direct consumption. Tudor looked beyond his existing suppliers to Maine and even to harvesting from passing icebergs, but neither source proved practical. Instead, Tudor teamed up with Nathaniel Wyeth to take advantage of the ice supplies of Boston on an industrial scale. Wyeth created a new form of horse-pulled ice-cutter in 1825 that cut square blocks of ice more efficiently than previous methods. He agreed to supply Tudor from Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reducing the cost of harvesting ice from 30 cents a ton to only 10 cents. Sawdust to insulate the ice was brought from Maine, at $16,000 a year.