One of the things that fascinates me about local history is the number of once-thriving major businesses that not only no longer exist, but of which barely any evidence of their existence remains.
The once-extensive interurban trolley system, the infrastructure for all the horses that once powered America from blacksmiths to wheelwrights, and the network of factories in virtually every small town in Kendall County that processed farmers’ milk and cream into butter and cheese have all completely disappeared from the landscape without leaving a trace.
Looking out my window at the couple inches of snow on the ground here at History Central this morning reminds me of another industry of which no trace remains. The ice harvesting business employed dozens of men every winter and was big business. For decades, thick ice was cut above the dams that dotted the Fox River, stored in giant icehouses, and hauled to market in rail cars. The industry’s rise and fall makes for an interesting bit of local economic history.
In 1870, when the Ottawa, Oswego, and Fox River Railroad finally reached Aurora, running from Streator and Ottawa through Oswego and Yorkville, residents in both Oswego and Yorkville had hopes its economic impact would be significant. And their hopes were realized.
As soon as the rail line opened, farmers began shipping livestock and grain from stops along the line north to the Chicago market and south to the Illinois-Mississippi river system. The new line was closer to almost all the Fox Valley’s smaller towns south of Aurora than the main line of the Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad, which lay two miles west of both Oswego and Yorkville. And farmers living east of the Fox River no longer had to cross the river to get their livestock, grain, and other produce to market.
Not only did the line haul produce and livestock to the Chicago market but it also delivered coal, lumber, and other necessities, reducing the costs of both vital commodities.
Entrepreneurs began eying the two villages for new business opportunities as soon as the first trains rolled. And as luck would have it, the new retail ice business was then just getting off the ground as growing numbers of householders demanded ice for their new kitchen ice boxes. At the same time, Chicago pork and beef packers were trying to expand production outside their normal winter work season.
For decades, ice had been harvested in New England and sold as far abroad as India. But it was what economic historian William Cronon calls a large-bulk, low-value commodity. With the terrible roads of the era, it was expensive to haul large quantities of ice to market. So in New England ice was harvested on rivers and ponds close to seaports where it could be easily shipped. Out here in the Midwest, ice was harvested on lakes, ponds and rivers near rail lines, but that production quickly proved inadequate, especially for the meat shipping market—it took 4,000 pounds of ice and 700 pounds of salt to keep a reefer railcar of dressed beef cold from Chicago to New York—and ice dealers started looking farther and farther afield.
When the Fox River Branch of the CB&Q was opened, serving as it did towns up and down the river valley, most with dams and mills, ice company owners saw an opportunity. The first to take advantage of the combination of the new rail line and the untapped resource of mill dams in Kendall County was the Caledonia Ice Company of Chicago. Owner Robert Hutchinson began work on a major ice storage facility in Yorkville in the fall of 1872, just two years after the rail line opened. Hutchinson situated the new facility on land along the south bank of the Fox, leased from Jacob and Elias Black, owners of the Paris Paper, Grist & Saw Mills, just upstream from the dam. Workers finished a block of four interconnected ice houses, 20 feet high and the group measuring a total of 100×100 feet, in time for the winter ice harvest. The CB&Q, owners of the Fox River Branch line, built a new siding for the ice company’s use.
As the Kendall County Record reported on Oct. 24, 1872: “The [ice] cakes are cut 22 inches square…the ice will be cut by ice plows, of which five will be used, each drawn by a horse. About 30 men will be employed through the winter and four to five in the summer. The company expects to ship three carloads, or 30 tons, to Chicago every night during the summer in cars fitted for the purpose.”
How did the process of harvesting ice from the Fox River work? As the Record explained about the ice harvest in an 1872 story: “It will be taken from the river by a new style of elevator never before used in the West, consisting of a heavy endless chain running over two large iron pulleys weighing 1,100 lbs., and propelled by a steam engine. This chain carries a series of hooks that, as they revolve, grab a cake of ice from the river and carry it up the elevator in grooves that act like a railroad track, to its proper platform, where it is received by a man who pushes it along the track to the door at which it is to be received These tracks on each platform, have “switches” at each door, and by turning the switch the cake is dropped into any door desired. There is no handling of the ice; all is done by machinery, by these tracks, and by the men with pointed poles pushing the ice to its resting place in the house. The cakes are cut 22 inches square and each room is 12 cakes wide so that everything is done systematically. The house will hold 7,000 tons—14 million pounds—and all this can be stored by two men as it comes up the elevator.
Hutchison filled his Yorkville houses that winter with the expected 7,000 tons of ice he planned to market to retail customers in Chicago, along with ice from his other harvesting and storage operations in Naperville and closer in to Chicago.
Starting in 1870, the ice business had begun a rapid expansion all over the country, and especially in Chicago. That year, there were seven retail ice dealers in Chicago. By 1875, the number had more than doubled to 15 and rose to 26 by 1885. Some of this expansion was driven by the vast quantities of ice required by the meatpacking industry, but much of it was also due to the introduction of home iceboxes that could keep food from spoiling.
Perfected in England, the home icebox concept was quickly exported to the U.S. Iceboxes of the era were about five feet high and consisted of a wooden cabinet with an insulated double-walled metal lining. Icebox cabinets were generally oak or walnut, with four to five compartments, each with its own door and polished brass hardware. Ice blocks were placed in the top compartment. Grilles allowed the chilled air to sink down through well-ventilated compartments below where food was stored, as warmer air rose to be re-chilled in the ice compartment. Melt water from the ice was either piped outside or dripped into a pan under the unit, which had to be emptied daily.
Primitive by modern standards, iceboxes nevertheless created a food revolution. Their use meant reduced food spoilage and waste, which changed Americans’ shopping habits, saved huge amounts of money, and made life not only easier but healthier for virtually all walks of life.
So it didn’t take long for other Chicago ice merchants to get into the Kendall County ice business. In November 1873, the year after Hutchinson began operations in Yorkville, Esch Brothers & Rabe, another Chicago ice company, announced plans to build an ice harvesting and storage facility, this time at Oswego.
The company was established by brothers William, Frederick, and August Esch and their brother-in-law, Frederick Rabe. While William and August Esch and Rabe continued to live in Chicago, Frederick Esch moved to Oswego to oversee operations on-site.
The company initially built four connected ice houses that first year, each 20 feet high, 20 feet wide and 50 feet long. The houses were situated on a parcel of land they bought in the old village of Troy just north of the William Parker & Sons Furniture Factory and Saw Mill. Within a few years, they expanded the number of houses to 14, and in 1883 the company built six more houses. Eventually, they operated more than 64,000 square feet of ice storage space on the banks of the Fox River north of Oswego. The icehouses were serviced by a new rail siding on the Fox River Branch line.
Esch Brothers & Rabe bought out Hutchinson’s ice company at Yorkville in the late 1870s, and expanded their operations there as well. By 1886, Esch Brothers operated 12 ice houses on Hutchinson’s old site at Yorkville.
Ice was getting to be a bigger and bigger business as time went on. In 1881, Esch Brothers & Rabe shipped 581 railcars of ice from their siding in Oswego alone. Demand for ice was spiking.
And as demand spiked, so did the number of ice companies. By 1900, 76 ice companies were doing business in Chicago.
With so many new companies, competition was cutthroat, something the established companies dealt with by creating a secret ice cartel in violation of state law. Esch Brothers, along with Griffin & Connolley and other Chicago ice firms formed the Chicago Ice Exchange. Exchange members paid $50 per ice wagon with the promise they would not poach other members’ customers.
Meanwhile, in the Fox Valley things were going great guns. Each January, Esch Brothers & Rabe employed up to 75 men in both Oswego and Yorkville to harvest ice. After scrapers pulled by horses cleared snow off the 15-inch thick ice above the two towns’ dams, horse drawn ice plows cut deep parallel grooves into the ice. Each day, a channel was cleared from the millpond to the shore-based ice house steam elevator. Huge cakes of ice in uniform sizes were floated along the open channel to the ice elevator on shore, where an endless chain propelled by a steam engine raised the ice up out of the water and sent it up an incline to the icehouses where it was planed to a standard thickness. The blocks were stored in layers, each insulated with layers of straw or sawdust. On good days, 1,000 tons of ice were cut and stored.
In 1880, Esch Brothers & Rabe had shipped 581 railcar loads of ice from their Oswego siding. By 1884, storage facilities and productivity had both increased, and the company reported shipping 1,089 railcar loads of ice from their busy Oswego siding.
Not that there weren’t serious business hazards, of course. In 1887, after the Record reported the largest-ever ice harvest at Yorkville, Esch Brothers & Rabe’s ice houses were destroyed by fire. According to the April 13 Kendall County Record: “There were about a dozen large houses all connected and filled with hundreds of tons of splendid ice…The loss is estimated at about $5,000.” That’s $164,000 in today’s dollars.
In 1890, the ice harvest was poor due to warmer weather, and then in March 1891, 14 of the company’s older icehouses at Oswego burned to the ground. “The scene was grand, yet of a weird appearance, the whole region around being lit up with a red glare, ” the Record’s Oswego correspondent reported.
Low water in the Fox hampered the ice harvest in January 1893. Ice was cut at Oswego, but there wasn’t enough water in the river to float the cakes to the elevator on the shore. And then at Yorkville, the dam was damaged by the spring flood in 1901 causing Esch Brothers & Rabe to scramble to get it repaired in time for the winter ice harvest. By November, Record Editor John R. Marshall could report: “Chicago people will get good ice from Yorkville. The water in the Fox River at this point has been very clear and clean this year.”
But in June 1902, the ice houses at Yorkville burned yet again after being struck by lightning. The fire was visible for miles, the Record’s Specie Grove correspondent writing: “Many of our people saw the ice-house fire at Yorkville. Being awakened by the storm, the light through the windows drew their attention to the fire.”
The company immediately rebuilt to carry on the Yorkville operation. In Oswego, however, damage to the dam halted operations there. Then in August of 1904, the rest of the Oswego icehouses burned to the ground, probably from a spark from a passing locomotive. Ironically, eight of the railroad’s freight cars on the ice company siding were also consumed by the fire.
Fire and flood were not the only hazards facing Esch Brothers & Rabe, however. In 1897, a new, much larger “ice trust,” the Knickerbocker Ice Company, was established in Chicago with the goal of eliminating competition so that prices could be raised. Like the Chicago Ice Exchange, the new cartel was also illegal, but it had real money behind it and it quickly gobbled up smaller ice companies. And just as quickly, prices were sharply raised. To persuade smaller companies to join, the trust also tried direct action, such as damaging dams the companies depended upon, including those at Yorkville and Oswego.
In January 1907, Esch Brothers admitted defeat and finally sold out to Knickerbocker.
But by then, the days of natural ice production were nearly over. Not only was the Fox River becoming badly polluted by the turn of the 20th Century that ice harvested on it was nearly unusable, but the development of ice making machines precluded the need for harvesting natural ice. At first, customers were leery of machine-made versus natural ice, but gradually the purity of manufactured ice began making serious inroads in the ice business.
In the 1890s, the “Pure Ice Movement” began agitating to have ice tested for purity. The result was that many ice harvesting operations throughout the nation were closed by public health officials due to polluted streams and lakes on which it was harvested. By 1910, several of Chicago’s 71 ice dealers were advertising manufactured ice.
Strangely, this once-flourishing industry has left virtually no trace of itself behind on the Fox Valley’s landscape. The giant ice houses, workers’ boarding houses, stables, rail sidings, and steam ice elevators are the stuff of a long past generation’s memories, although the old Esch Brothers boarding house still stands on Van Emmon Street in Yorkville.
But while it lasted, it was a rousing, exciting time, when men harvested winter and sold it in summer.
historyonthefox 
Great article, Roger. My grandfather was born in 1888 and spent his early years in Yorkville. He used to tell me stories about the ice harvesting and the process used to transport the product into the large houses. Imagine how much colder the winters were over 120 years ago for the Fox River to freeze and produce this much ice! Are there any records detailing how the ice was kept clean and sanitary while the horses worked the ploughs?
Don, thanks for the kind words! The ice blocs went through a planer to make sure they were a consistent size when they reached the top of the steam elevator, and that would have gotten rid of any nasty bits on the surface. And years ago, I suspect sanitation wasn’t quite as rigorous as it is these days. By the early years of the 20th Century, though, the water in the Fox–and other area streams, lakes, and ponds–was so polluted that the ice was giving off bad odors, which was one of the things that led to manufactured ice.