One of the first acts of the US Quartermasters after the fall of Nashville in January 1862 was to refurbish the icehouse on the River front.
Did it get cold enough? Ice used to be harvested from the river down the street from me--the ice had to be so thick that men and all their implements could work on it. It takes pretty cold weather to do that.
Mrs Chestnut & other lady chroniclers of the era speak glowingly of the restorative effect of a iced drink. Cold compresses were a welcome solace to fevered brows. A trip to one of the new ice cream parlors was memorialized in many a young lady’s journal. Having a store of ice laid in to last summer was an essential element of a civilized life.
The ice harvest was a major industry in New England. During the winter, highly organized work gangs sawed ice on lakes & ponds into blocks. By hand or with teams of horses, the blocks were taken to a ramp that led to an insulated ice house.
The discovery of the insulating property of an air gap/void was what made the ice industry possible. Even in the hottest of climatic conditions, what amounted to a building within a building was an extremely effective insulator.
Special built fast schooners carried tons of New England ice to New Orleans, as well as the other eight seaports in the South. There were huge ice storage facilities in N.O. The ice would be transferred to special built ice barges. The barges would then be towed to points northward for distribution.
I assume that there was a similar ice business upriver as well, but I have never had reason to investigate it. No doubt someone on CWT is conversant on this topic.
Here in Murfreesboro TN, private homes had ice houses. I don’t have to imagine how thankfully a cool drink or compress would have been during the summer months.
To give an illustration of how important ice was, at one point during the Vicksburg Siege, Grant turned over 40 barges of ice to the US Sanitary Commission for distribution to hospitals. The US Hospital Ship Red Rover had been a luxury packet boat. It had both a built in ice house & dedicated dumbwaiters to bring the ice up to the wards. The restorative effect of cooling drinks & ice water towels were an essential part of the Red Rover’s impressive recovery rate.
During the siege of Nashville in 1864, a very fancy ice cream parlor was having its grand opening. There was also a circus with a long list of attractions performing three times a day. Restaurants offered oysters that had been packed in barrels of ice & shipped from N.E. A soldier with a pass could have treated himself to ice cream, a delightful circus performance, a full course meal including oysters & ended his evening at a legal brothel where a frosted julip cup would have resorted him for the taxi ride back to camp. All of this was advertised with pages of adds in the Nashville Union Banner News Paper.
What, exactly Hood’s starving “besiegers” thought about that when they read paper & heard the steam calliope from the circus is anyone’s guess. They did, however, get plenty of ice on their own. One of our indescribable ice storms turned their world into glittering glass.
Note: The Union Banner News Paper for the CW period is available from the Library of Congress. It makes for a chronology of what soldiers knew about what was happening. Official reports are printed entirely. Soldier’s letters are very frank. The adds are a revelation. Had things gone wrong with his visit to the brothel, clinics specializing in cures for STD’s offered very reassuring adds.
One aspect of the ice trade that is highly improbable involved tea clipper ships. Ordinary cargo would have left malodorous evidence of months in the holds of China bound clippers. One solution was to deadhead outbound in ballast. That, of course, was not profitable. Just who it was that came up with the bright idea of shipping ice to China is lost to history. Packed in insulating straw, N. E. ice sold for premium rates when off loaded in Canton.