Frozen water—so simple, yet so taken for granted. It conquers a sizzling day like water extinguishes fire, and wherever there’s electricity, there’s ice—in just about every home, restaurant and grocery store.
The sweltering truth is that for most of Texas’ history, there was precious little ice to tame the dog days of summer. In fact, until the mid-1800s, the only ice in Texas—except during winter—came from cold-climate northern states. It was cut from frozen lakes and rivers up north, then shipped to ports like Galveston.
The ice trade helped preserve food and drink for a growing coastal population. Inland families were left to rely on the time-tested preservation methods of drying, smoking, salt-curing and pickling the foods they raised.
During the Civil War, Union blockades of Confederate ports cut off the northern ice supplies. So in the early 1860s, desperate Texans smuggled in—via Mexico—an ice machine designed by French inventor Ferdinand Carré that used ammonia to absorb heat and freeze water. Around 1865, Daniel Holden redesigned and installed a more commercially promising Carré machine in San Antonio.
The artificial ice cost 5 cents a pound, half the high rate of New England ice at the dock. But with beefsteaks selling for 2 cents a pound, artificial ice remained, according to a local newspaper, “one of the greatest luxuries of civilization.”
Shortly after the Civil War, ice in the Alamo City was so important that the city sported three of the nation’s eight ice plants. Texas’ passion for human-made ice led to many firsts in the artificial ice industry.
The first refrigerated slaughterhouse opened in 1871 in Fulton. The first commercial ammonia-compression plant was built in 1873 in Jefferson. That same year brought the first cross-country refrigerated meat shipment, by rail from Denison to New York.
During the late 1800s, as railroads cobwebbed across Texas, railcars began transporting perishables refrigerated by ice blocks enclosed in insulated corner bunkers. The melting ice had to be replenished, so ice plants and storage houses popped up all along the rail lines.
Assured of cold shipment to far-off buyers, Texas’ beef, fruit and vegetable industries expanded like never before.
Today, one of the few remaining southeast Texas icehouses sits beside the railroad tracks in Silsbee, north of Beaumont.
The original icehouse, incorporated in 1909, burned, but in 1915, it reorganized as Silsbee Ice, Light and Power Co. Gulf States Utilities Co. took it over in 1926 and constructed the current building. The Spanish Revival-style structure with a red-tile roof was described as “beyond a doubt the most modern structure in Silsbee.”
Now the distinctive facility is home to the Ice House Museum and Cultural Center, which tells the story of ice and illuminates other little-known topics of regional history.
It looks much as it did a century ago. Near the entrance sits the original well, well house and water lines that carried water to the icehouse. Other original lines lead toward the adjacent railroad sidetrack, where locomotives took on water for their steam engines, according to Susan Shine Kilcrease, museum director.
The building boasts the original loading docks where a dozen or so employees catered to local customers and loaded ice blocks into insulated railcars for shipment.
“It was a very busy place—a community gathering place, really,” says Kilcrease, a Silsbee native with deep local roots. “When I was a kid, I remember coming to the dock and ringing the service bell. I was fascinated when a huge block of ice would slide out of the chute, and we’d load it onto our truck.”
In addition to selling ice and chilled bottled beverages, the icehouse also had hooks inside where locals could temporarily hang a side of beef or a deer. Seasonally the icehouse kept watermelons cold for sale, a rare treat before home refrigeration.
Inside today’s museum, information panels detail the artificial ice production process.
Well water was filtered and pumped into galvanized cans that could each hold 312 pounds of ice and required cranes and hoists to move. It took 36 hours to freeze the facility’s 336 cans. The process produced an average of 30 tons of ice a day.
To meet growing home demand for cold goods, icehouses began delivering ice blocks door-to-door to subscribers. Made of wood, lined with tin or zinc, and insulated with materials such as cork or sawdust, iceboxes contained one compartment for ice and another for food. A drip pan collected water and had to be dumped periodically.
Messy as it was, this appliance transformed ice from a luxury to a necessity. Its legacy lives on every time a Texan says “icebox” instead of refrigerator. In front windows, customers placed a square cardboard sign with numbers—10, 20, 30 or 40—informing the delivery crew how many pounds of ice to bring inside.
The iceman’s job could prove a slippery challenge, explained Darrell Shine, Kilcrease’s father, in a 2000 interview. As a boy, Shine delivered ice seven days a week each summer with his grandfather Jim Shine, who drove Silsbee Ice Co.’s delivery wagon.
Shine remembered that at 10 or 12 years old it was hard to carry a 50-pound block and work around the ice hook to get it into the icebox. “Sometimes you’d accidentally knock stuff out,” he said. “Many a time I’ve cleaned up milk spilled on the kitchen floor.”
Rural electrification and the widespread use of electric refrigerators eventually reduced the need for block ice. In response to the changing marketplace, ice manufacturers zeroed in on cubed and crushed ice.
Indeed, record-setting Texas heat still seems to fire up our collective gratitude for one of life’s most common luxuries—clear, cold ice!
