The Ice Was Nice and Thick in the Mid-1800s

The Ice Was Nice and Thick in the Mid-1800s

The ice house at Oatlands in Leesburg.

By Lynne Kaye

Talk about climate change.

A new book, “The Diary of Elizabeth O. Carter, Loudoun County, Virginia, 1860-1872,” offers a new and very different understanding of one of the hot button issues of 2022.

The entries in Elizabeth Carter’s diary paint a picture of a Virginia climate back then that more closely resembles that of New England today, particularly her descriptions of the annual ice harvests in the mid-19th century.

On December 22, 1862, Elizabeth Carter described the first step in harvesting ice— checking the ice on the family’s “ice pond.” That day, she recorded “getting ice about 4 inches thick.” By January 8, 1863, the ice had thickened enough to be harvested, probably at least eight inches thick and sturdy enough to hold several tons of weight.

That depth of ice is astounding considering that, today, local ponds rarely freeze thick enough to support the small amount of weight of even one ice skater.

Back then, pond ice was thick enough to harvest. A grid was etched in the ice using a specially designed, horse-drawn “ice plow.” Workers, usually enslaved men, used the grid as a guide for cutting blocks of ice using single-handled, five-foot long hand saws. Sawed blocks were pried out of the ice sheet using thick, metal

“breaker bars.” A typical block of ice was a 22-inch square that could weigh between 250 to 300 pounds.

Individual ice blocks were floated on top of the water to the shoreline, where they were hoisted out of the water. The blocks then were loaded onto a waiting horse or ox-drawn wagon.

Wagon loads of ice were driven from the ice pond to the ice house. There, the blocks were unloaded and stored, surrounded by straw for insulation. The ice house at Montpelier, for example, required 70 wagon loads to fill.

While Elizabeth does not say how many wagon loads it took to fill her family’s ice houses, judging

by the size of the ice house at Oatlands, it took quite a few. (The Oatlands ice house is the stone structure with a slanted roof at the end of the brick bank barn known as the “Carter Barn”.)

Ice harvests were dangerous, 24-hour-a-day, allhands-on-deck affairs.

Elizabeth Carter recorded that the 1861 ice harvest began on February 8, a day that was “3 degrees below zero at 6:30 A.M.” The harvest continued through February 11. Ice sheets periodically cracked and broke, plunging men and horses into the freezing water. Prior to the Civil War, enslsaved men provided much of the labor for Virginia’s ice harvests.

Heat was the greatest enemy of an ice house. Luckily, Virginia summers were cooler in the 1860s than they are today. Imagine living in a Virginia where 90-degree summer days were rare. That’s the climate Elizabeth Carter recorded. During the 13 summers covered by her diary, she only recorded seven days with a high of 90 or above.

Surely, it kept the ice nice in ice houses all around.

Lynne Kaye is a member of the Middleburg Sustainability Committee and has been instrumental in developing the town’s cigarette butt recycling agenda as well as the recently passed EV (electric vehicle) charging station program. She serves as the treasurer on the executive committee at Oatlands.