For much of the late 1800s and early 1900s, one of Lebanon County’s hottest industries was ice — and January was prime time for harvest.
The thirst for ice was fed by inventions in the 1840s and ’50s that facilitated the preservation of food. Refrigerated boxes or rail cars with walls filled with ice could move food, notably meat, across the country. Hardwood cabinets with blocks of ice — that is, iceboxes — to protect perishables became common in homes and commercial establishments, such as taverns and inns.
And Americans had fallen in love with iced water, chilled drinks, and yes, ice cream.
By the 1880s, ice had become indispensable. With cold winters and abundant springs and creeks, Lebanon was in the thick of it. Companies were formed, ice houses multiplied, and a new class of entrepreneur — the ice merchant or ice dealer — emerged.
“Years ago, ice was such a common commodity and the winters so long, that few persons saw money in it, but within the past few years many fortunes have been made out of the sale of it,” noted an 1892 story in the Lebanon Daily News.
Cold storage
For centuries, people had recognized cold storage could help preserve food, but the difficulty was how to preserve the cold when the mercury topped 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
Enter Frederic Tudor, the “Ice King.” In the early 1800s, the Boston-born Tudor saw an opportunity to build a market for New England’s abundant supply of ice. With his associates, he developed new tools for harvesting ice, new designs for ice houses that reduced melting, and new consumer demand for ice and iced products.
By the 1860s, Tudor had grown the ice trade into a multi-million-dollar business.
In Lebanon County, the ice industry began heating up in the late 1880s and early 1890s. As demand surged beyond the existing supply, dams were built on springs and creeks to create ice ponds.
The Lebanon Brewing Co., for instance, built the Ebenezer dam so as to enable beer-making year-round — and to no longer buy ice from Maine. For its first ice harvest, the company advertised for 100 men to work from daylight until 6 p.m. for 12.5 cents an hour, according to the Lebanon Daily News.
Lake Conewago in Mount Gretna was created when the Cornwall & Lebanon (C&L) Railroad dammed the Conewago Creek. A swimming and boating mecca in the summer, the lake froze in the winter, and the Conewago Ice Co. formed in 1889 to harvest the ice.
Not far from the lake, the Conewago was dammed a second time in 1888, specifically to make an ice dam. Known initially as the Colebrook dam and later as Lake Duffy, the ice pond was very shallow, facilitating ice harvest and even allowing multiple harvests.
Read More: Gretna’s now-gone Lake Duffy was named after a Lackawanna County WWI hero
Buoyed by the growing ice market, several companies formed in the late 1880s — some leasing ponds and lakes and others concentrating on storage. How much the companies overlapped between cutting ice and storing ice isn’t clear.
One company that appears to have operated in both the harvest and storage markets was the Mount Gretna Ice Co. Appearing for the first time in the Directory of Lebanon City and County, 1889-1890, the company had ice houses in Colebrook, Mount Gretna, and Stoever’s Dam, as well as a storage house on the C&L Railroad near 10th Street.
“We are now prepared to deliver at short notice to any part of the city and its surroundings ICE FROM THESE NOTED AND POPULAR SPRINGS,” the company declared on Aug. 7, 1889. One of those customers was the National Guard of Pennsylvania with its summer encampment in Mount Gretna.
By 1892, the Mount Gretna Ice Co. had grown its operation and “taken a lease on every dam possible within a prescribed limit of Lebanon,” according to the Lebanon Daily News. A year later, the company was managing nine ice houses with a total capacity of 90,000 tons. Several houses were at Stoever’s Dam as well as at Mount Gretna, Ebenezer Dam, and Gloninger’s Spring ice company.
In January 1893, the Mount Gretna Ice Co. was harvesting “thousands of tons of ice at Colebrook and other dams,” declared the Daily News. “Ice is 17 inches thick.”
How many competitors the Mount Gretna company had isn’t clear. Directories listing Lebanon city and county businesses from the 1880s and ’90s never mention the Conewago Ice Co. The Lebanon Ice Co., granted a charter in December 1892 with a capitalization of $50,000, also never appears in those directories.
Winter bust
Temperature, wind, sun, water depth — each of these contributes to ice formation, but air temperature matters most.
Days of below-freezing temperatures cool lake and pond water sufficiently to form surface layers of ice. Because ice is less dense than water, the ice floats. The longer frigid air remains, the thicker the ice grows.
A minimum of 4-inch-thick ice is considered safe and could be harvested. But back when the ice industry was cooking, ice dealers preferred thicker blocks.
Once ice measured 4 to 6 inches thick, crews of icemen sawed it into blocks of 200 to 300 pounds each. Those would then be covered in sawdust for insulation and tightly packed into ice houses that could hold hundreds of ice blocks. The ice would be sold by the day or week for as long as supplies lasted.
Winters can be fickle — and sometimes an abnormally warm spell can occur known as “January thaw.” A little more than a year ago, for instance, the temperature reached 60 degrees in nearby Lititz.
Similar conditions occurred during the winter of 1890 when it was uncommonly mild up and down the East Coast. “What weather! Where has the New England winter gone? What is the matter?” ran a January 1890 story in the Boston Globe.
Not a week later, the Globe declared that despite the mild temps, an ice famine wasn’t imminent: “There is plenty of time yet for enough weather to give us more ice than the companies will know what to do with.”
As predicted, the mild weather did snap but not until March in Lebanon County. On March 12, Butcher Kline of Palmyra “has succeeded in filling his icehouse with a supply of ice from three to four inches in thickness,” according to the Daily News.
By April, temperatures had warmed again, and hopes for a bountiful ice crop evaporated. With the failure of the crop, ice had to be bought and brought to the county.
Locally, the Mount Gretna Ice Co. contracted for hundreds of tons of Canadian ice, which it “disposed to dealers in this city and county,” including the Lebanon Brewing Co. and Robert H. Coleman of Colebrook, according to the Daily News.
As might be expected, with scarce supply, the price of ice rose although “not a great deal to consumers,” according to the Daily News, as Lebanon ice dealers now charged 50 cents per week for 5 pounds daily, or $1.25 per week for 15 pounds daily. Hotels and ice cream dealers buying in bulk paid 90 cents per 100 pounds of ice.
Rise of refrigeration
Throughout the 1800s and especially during the Civil War, ice was a staple in patient care used to lower fevers, stop bleeding, and reduce swelling from wounds, so it’s no surprise that a physician is credited with inventing a machine that cooled air and produced ice.
John Gorrie was granted a patent for his artificial ice machine in 1851 but was not able to commercialize it. Some historians suggest that the titans of the ice industry froze Gorrie out of the ice market.
But the growing demand for ice coupled with the unpredictability of winter rekindled interest in Gorrie’s invention. In the decades after Gorrie’s death in 1855, other inventors tweaked his design, and artificial ice, air conditioning, and mechanical refrigeration were born.
While popular elsewhere, artificial ice didn’t become a hot commodity in Lebanon County until the 1890s. In January 1890, before the failure of that year’s ice crop, the Lebanon Brewing Co. took the plunge into the artificial ice market and invested $25,000 into the purchase of an ice machine that would make 25 to 30 tons of ice every 24 hours, claimed a January 1980 Lebanon Daily News article.
If other businesses followed suit, local newspapers didn’t report it.
Ads for artificial ice didn’t appear in local newspapers until 1894, and by that time, the natural ice companies made sure consumers knew that their product was “pure” and “noted for its purity.”
Still, by the summer of 1898, artificial ice held the edge. Crop failures of natural ice in 1900 and 1903 helped to solidify artificial ice’s market dominance.
At the same time, the ice trade was consolidating. In 1896, the Lebanon Ice Co. bought the Mount Gretna Ice Co. and took over its ice houses and ice leases. By 1902, that company held the contract to supply ice throughout Lebanon city.
That same year, the United Ice and Coal Co. of Harrisburg acquired the Conewago Ice Co., its ice houses, and the rights to harvest ice on both Lake Conewago and the Colebrook dam. United Ice and Coal controlled the ice trade in Harrisburg, Carlisle, and Middletown, as well as part of Lebanon County.
But even more important in dampening the natural ice market than either consolidation or artificial ice was the electric refrigerator. While invented in 1913, it took more than a decade of innovations before domestic refrigerators were both reliable and affordable.
Lebanon County didn’t warm to refrigerators until 1925 if advertisements in local newspapers are to be believed. A North Eighth Street ice cream parlor boasted in April of installing a “New Frigidaire Electric Iceless Refrigerator.”
Only a few months later, electric refrigerators were touted as “bringing the North Pole right into your kitchen,” according to an ad from the Metropolitan Edison Co. on Chestnut Street. “Kelvinator Electric Refrigerator on demonstration now. Come in and see it,” encouraged another ad.
By the 1940s, it is estimated about 85 percent of American homes had refrigerators.
Even so, the market for ice hung on — at least for a bit. Long-time residents of Mount Gretna remember when their parents bought ice for cottage iceboxes in the early 1950s from an iceman who parked his truck near the Mount Gretna Roller Rink.
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