Ice Land

June 7, 2023 7:51 AM

By the 1820s, the cubes that clinked in glasses of iced tea in Charleston, the ice that cooled hospitalized patients in Savannah; the ice that formed ice cream in the White House during the hottest months of summer—all of it from New England. Ice was so unusual (and expensive) in the South that locals called it “white gold" ... Ice continued to obsess America. from Is Ice America’s Most Literary Element? by Amy Brady [LitHub]

An interview with Amy Brady: ‘His peers thought he was a madman.’ The weird, wonderful history of ice

posted by chavenet (8 comments total)

America's recently popular lyrical poet, able to cook MC's like bacon, had thoughts on ice. Ultimately, ice, it turns out, is too cold.
posted by srboisvert at 8:08 AM on June 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

On the same subject but focused particularly on the development of the ice industry in New England: The Frozen Water Trade.
posted by madcaptenor at 8:14 AM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thoreau approached the ice-cutters, but the men didn’t stop working. Instead, they joked that he might like to help them cut the ice in a “pitsaw fashion,” which, in the parlance of the day, meant that he would be standing underwater and freezing to death. Burn.

This was just two years after Thoreau set the woods on fire just to watch them burn, deliberately creating a massive conflagration that destroyed some of the last remaining old-growth forest in the region.

All I'm saying is that Thoreau is definitely that guy who calls the city to complain that your unmowed lawn is offending him.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:25 AM on June 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

Thoreau set the woods on fire just to watch them burn,

Sorry, where is that supported in the link? At least by his account it was a campfire that got out of hand. Maybe his insistence that he didn't feel guilty about it is a bit much, but that's not at all the same thing.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:35 AM on June 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

Thoreau approached the ice-cutters...

Maybe he was actually on his way home carrying his washing for his Mumsy?

*not a fan of Thoreau
posted by BlueHorse at 10:24 AM on June 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

Have you seen the sunlight map differences between the US and Europe? The north east gets more sun than most of Spain, so I'm not surprised that an ice containing and transporting system originated in the US, nor that ice cubes are deemed unnecessary across most of the Europe. Even in Thoreau's day, plenty of people lived in parts of the US that are extremely sunny for much of the year.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:09 PM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

All Massachusetts ponds are good, but some are great, and that made all the difference in an 1890 ice-harvesting ruling by the Supreme Judicial Court (what Massachusetts calls its highest court).

Sprague Pond, split by the town line between Hyde Park (then a town, now part of Boston) and Dedham (still a town), was a designated "great pond," which means it was considered a public pond open to everybody (under a law that dated to a colonial ordinance issued in the 1640s relating to, among other things, ponds of 10 or more acres).

One winter, a Hyde Park ice harvester marked off an area on the Dedham side of the pond where it was planning to carve out some ice. But before it could do so, a Dedham company harvested the ice. The Hyde Park company sued. In People's Ice Co. vs. Charles E. Davenport (scroll down to page 323), the court ruled that since the pond was "great" and therefore public, you snooze, you lose (OK, not in those exact words), because you couldn't set aside part of a "public" asset for future use - you either harvest the ice right away, or risk having somebody else get to it before you.

Bonus fun fact: The pond is right next to the Northeast Corridor train tracks. In 1834, when the Providence and Boston Railroad was building the line that would eventually become the corridor, it sent out a train loaded with supplies with a locomotive that turned out to be too heavy for the temporary tracks by the pond. The tracks gave way and the locomotive sank into a marshy party of the pond. The locomotive was never recovered and supposedly it still lies buried there.
posted by adamg at 1:00 PM on June 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

*not a fan of Thoreau

You mean the guy who was jailed for protesting slavery and the Mexican-American war? What a jerk he is for relying on family support!
posted by Literaryhero at 6:01 PM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]