I would imagine that someone who has grown up in the age of electricity is wondering why anyone would want to harvest ice. The closest reference we have today is going camping for a weekend and wondering if our high tech insulated cooler will keep the ice long enough to make sure the refreshments stay cold!

But it wasn’t until the 1940’s, and for some even as late as after WWII, that a refrigerator as we know it today was common place. For most of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people depended on simple “iceboxes” to store and refrigerate food – heavily insulated containers made out of wood or metal with space enough for food and a large block of ice. To get those large blocks of ice, people harvested it from clear lakes in the winter, hence the 3 ice houses on Big Lake in operation through the late 30’s.

I’ve assembled an album of all the photos and information gathered about Big Lake ice houses. Boy what monstrous ugly things they must have been, I can’t imagine the outcry today if someone proposed building one of these on our shoreline! The most interesting facts I think are: 
* sawdust kept the ice from melting as they packed it into railroad cars to be shipped into the cities – genius.
* the work provided seasonal income for local farmers, 
* it had to be dang hard work, 
* I can’t figure out how they didn’t fall in the lake,  
* there was a tunnel under highway 10 to move the ice to one of the buildings (don’t ask me how that worked), 
* the buildings burned a lot, 
* if you google ice harvesting, there’s lots of it still being done around the United States and lots of information out there about it.

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