The Big Chill at the Clements

continued

refrigeration.

A 1915 photo that shows workers in nearby Manchester pushing giant blocks of ice from a runway onto skids leading into an ice storage house introduces the once enormous, now vanished, industry of ice harvesting. Other images show horses on frozen ponds scoring the ice into grids with multitoothed plows (above) and icemen sawing gridded ice into rafts to maneuver to the ice house, where it was chopped into blocks and moved inside by hand or on tidy ice escalators.

"I am afraid that we will not get any ice this winter," reads one 1862 letter sent from young Robert Herbert Gorden to his father imprisoned in Boston for allegedly being a Confederate sympathizer. "We will have to eat Boston ice. The idea is perfectly chooking [sic] to put Boston ice in my mouth."

In contrast, many artifacts rave about home refrigeration's ability to make late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century life dainty and novel, as summed up in one cookbook title, Ices Dainty and Novel. Another cookbook depicting a baroque pink-and-yellow dessert proclaims, "The puddings represent the highest attainment in Ice Cream art." One flapper greeting guests on the cover of Hints for Hostesses becomes a superhero: "Everyday problems solved by Isobel Frost and her Ice-O-Lator."