The icebox was massive – and it was made of wood. I came upon it under a large shed that held box lots, tools, cheap art prints, books and everything else the auction house could stuff under the roofed building without walls.
It was at the far end, its commanding presence making it seem like a king. It was big and it was beautiful. A sign on one of the doors identified it as an “Oak Ice Box,” and it was to be sold at noon the next day.
It must have weighed a ton, and it looked more like a tall dresser than something made to help keep food from spoiling. Now it was an anachronism, pushed out by equipment less bulky and a lot more efficient.
I stopped to admire the icebox – with its six doors, and brass handles and hinges – because of its clean appearance. It stood with its back against the Sunday sun as if it were expecting to be bought and certainly not ignored. In its day, I’m sure it demanded a high price. It bore the nameplate “Pictet.”
I grew up in a household where we always called our white electric refrigerator the icebox. That’s what my grandparents and the adults in the family called it, and the name was surely a holdover from the years when they actually had an icebox in their kitchen.
Before there were iceboxes, though, ice was stored in ice houses and underground pits. Wooden iceboxes first arrived in homes during the early part of the 19th century, and were made of such woods as oak and walnut. Their walls were hollow, and lined with tin or zinc and packed with such materials as sawdust, seaweed and cork for insulation. The ice box had two compartments – one for storing ice and the other for holding food. Water from the ice drained into a pan, which had to be emptied often.
The ice was delivered daily in chunks by the iceman, first in horse and wagon, and then by truck. A family would leave a card in a window indicating how many pounds of ice it wanted (ice was sold by the pound). At an auction, I came across an ice pick holder that I’m sure many folks hung near their iceboxes with ice picks to chip at that chunk of ice.
The ice was harvested from lakes, rivers, streams and ponds during the winter, then stored in buildings where it was insulated with sawdust and grass.
By the 1920s, refrigerators began replacing iceboxes, and by the 1940s and 1950s, iceboxes had almost disappeared. At another auction a few years ago, one of those early refrigerators came up for sale. It was just as lovely as the oak icebox in its design. It was a GE Monitor Top refrigerator manufactured around 1925. It had a compressor on top that resembled the gun turret on the USS Monitor, a Union Navy ship during the Civil War.
