page_title: Ice trade
section_title: Peak of the trade, 1880–1900
hierarchical_section_title: Ice trade / History / Peak of the trade, 1880–1900
caption_attribution_description: English: Wolf Lake, Indiana, 1889. Harvesting ice at Wolf Lake, Indiana, in 1889, showing the conveyor belts used to lift the product into the ice house
context_page_description: The ice trade, also known as the frozen water trade, was a 19th-century and early-20th-century industry, centring on the east coast of the United States and Norway, involving the large-scale harvesting, transport and sale of natural ice, and later the making and sale of artificial ice, for domestic consumption and commercial purposes. Ice was cut from the surface of ponds and streams, then stored in ice houses, before being sent on by ship, barge or railroad to its final destination around the world. Networks of ice wagons were typically used to distribute the product to the final domestic and smaller commercial customers. The ice trade revolutionised the U.S. meat, vegetable and fruit industries, enabled significant growth in the fishing industry, and encouraged the introduction of a range of new drinks and foods.
  The trade was started by the New England businessman Frederic Tudor in 1806. Tudor shipped ice to the Caribbean island of Martinique, hoping to sell it to wealthy members of the European elite there, using an ice house he had built specially for the purpose.
context_section_description: Although the manufacture of artificial plant ice was still negligible in 1880, it began to grow in volume towards the end of the century as technological improvements finally allowed the production of plant ice at a competitive price. Typically ice plants first took hold in more distant locations where natural ice was at a cost disadvantage. The Australian and Indian markets were already dominated by plant ice, and ice plants began to be built in Brazil during the 1880s and 1890s, slowly coming to replace imported ice. In the U.S., plants began to become more numerous in the southern states. The long-distance transportation companies continued to use cheap natural ice for the bulk of their refrigeration needs, but they now used purchased local plant ice at key points across the US, to allow for surge demand and to avoid the need to hold reserve stocks of natural ice. After 1898 the British fishing industry, too, began to turn to plant ice to refrigerate its catches.
  Plant technology began to be turned to the problem of directly chilling rooms and containers, to replace the need to carry ice at all. Pressure began to grow for a replacement for ice bunkers on the trans-Atlantic routes during the 1870s. Tellier produced a chilled storeroom for the steamship Le Frigorifique, using it to ship beef from Argentina to France, while the Glasgow-based firm of Bells helped to sponsor a new, compressed-air chiller for ships using the Gorrie approach, called the Bell-Coleman design. These technologies soon became used on the trade to Australia, New Zealand and Argentina. The same approach began to be taken in other industries. Carl von Linde found ways of applying mechanical refrigeration to the brewing industry, removing its reliance on natural ice; cold warehouses and meat packers began to rely on chilling plants.
  Despite this emerging competition, natural ice remained vital to North American and European economies, with demand driven up by rising living standards. The huge demand for ice in the 1880s drove the natural ice trade to continue to expand. Around four million tons (four billion kg) of ice was routinely stored along the Hudson River and Maine alone, the Hudson having around 135 major warehouses along its banks and employing 20,000 workers. Firms expanded along the Kennebec River in Maine to meet the demand, and 1,735 vessels were required in 1880 to carry the ice south. Lakes in Wisconsin began to be put into production to supply the Midwest. 1890 saw another ice famine hit the east: the Hudson harvests failed entirely, causing a sudden rush by entrepreneurs to establish operations in Maine, where ice had successfully formed. Unfortunately for investors, the following summer was quite cool, suppressing demand for stocks, and many businessmen were ruined. Across the U.S., an estimated 90,000 people and 25,000 horses involved in a trade capitalised at $28 million ($660 million in 2010 terms).
  The Norwegian trade peaked during the 1890s, with a million tons (900 million kg) of ice being exported from Norway by 1900; the major Leftwich company in Britain, importing much of this, kept a thousand tons (900,000 kg) of ice in store at all times to meet demand. Austria entered the European ice market behind Norway, with the Vienna Ice Company exporting natural ice to Germany by the end of the century.
  There was considerable conglomeration in the US ice trade towards the end of the century, and foreign competitors, such as Norway, complained of US collusion. Charles W. Morse was a businessman from Maine who by 1890 had used questionable financial processes to acquire control of the New York City Ice Company and the Consumers' Ice Company of New York, merging them into the Consolidated Ice Company. In turn Morse bought out his major competitor, the Knickerbocker Ice Company of New York, in 1896, giving him control of around four million tons (four billion kg) of the regional ice harvests each year. Morse incorporated his few remaining rivals into the American Ice Company in 1899, giving him control of all of the natural and plant i
caption: Harvesting ice at Wolf Lake, Indiana, in 1889, showing the conveyor belts used to lift the product into the ice house
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