Our fresh-butchered meat stayed frozen on the back porch shelves, while milk and eggs were kept from freezing in our pantry behind the kitchen cookstove. A left-over roast would freeze overnight on the screened porch and be good for a few days unless Penny, our yellow English-Fido cattle dog, snuck onto the porch for a midnight snack.

   But then as spring rolled into summer, nature's icebox went on vacation. Then it was a continuous headache improvising ways to extend the life of milk and meat on the farm. The challenge was keeping fresh food edible.

   Often when the whole milk started clabbering, Mom made cottage cheese with it, so the milk wasn't entirely wasted. She'd put the curdles in a little white bag sewn from a flour sack and hang it on the clothesline to drip dry.

   So, without electricity, how did we keep our perishable food cold in the summertime down on the farm?

   Enter the piece of furniture called the icebox. Every up-to-date kitchen had one of these varnished wooden cabinets, garnished with snazzy brass handles to brag about but the icebox came with a price. The wood on the icebox could even be selected to match the oak on the sideboard and the solid oak table and chairs . . . that is, if your cookie jar bank would permit it.

   However, the real price came in keeping the prized object fed with ice. As the weather got hotter, the icebox got hungrier! Spring and summer were especially busy times when field work was tacked onto the chores: Milking morning and night, slopping the hogs, feeding the chickens and gathering eggs, haying the horses, and making sure all the animals had water to drink.

   So you see, garnering ice came with a high price in intensive labor, that is, getting the ice and emptying the drip pan.

Cold of Winter Captured

   The icebox became a necessity in capturing the cold of winter and introducing it to the heat of summer. Natural ice was the answer for both the farmer and his city slicker cousin. Artificial ice had to wait until electricity arrived, and wait until refrigeration was invented, and then, the farmer had to have enough silver dollars to rub together to afford it.

   Since the ponds, lakes, and river were frozen in the winter, why not cut ice, haul it, store it, and then cool the icebox with it in the summertime? So that's what pioneers in the cold-winter states did, including our homesteaders in Hamilton County from the 1870s to the 1930s.

   They harvested corn, oats, wheat, barley, and alfalfa in the summer to provide food for themselves and their animals in the winter. Then they harvested ice in the winter to keep their household food cool in the summer. For some farmers, ice became another cash crop by selling it to neighbors. Some even had a special wagon pulled by horses for delivering ice to customers in Aurora and its sister villages.

   How did we store winter's ice on the farm so that it wouldn’t melt in warm weather before we could use it? The answer is the ice house, some of which were in hillsides, but most were 50 to 75-foot deep silos lined with bricks. The ice was packed in wheat or oat straw for insulation and to prevent the blocks from freezing together. The roof of the ice house was A-framed with a block and tackle pulley system to lower or hoist the ice -- just like we used for silage for the cows.

   This farm boy remembers discovering an ice house in the early 1940's at the James McKeand homestead along the Blue River west of Stockham. I was in the garden eating extra-ripe strawberries as fast as I could pick them and spied this A-frame building at the corner of the garden fence with the roof almost touching the ground.

   My young brain told me either a shed sank into the ground or a tornado blew the roof off a nearby building. I asked Grandpa Joe (Delano), who was renting the farm, and he told me it was an ice house. "A house for ice?" I asked, thinking the kidder was at it again. Grandpa opened a swinging door of the ice house for me and it looked like a regular brick silo but located too far from the barn for livestock. What an ice chest!

Farmers Helping Farmers

   Harvesting ice was a neighborhood project, much like when farmers helped each other in threshing time, or when shelling corn, or at harvesting bees.

   "Icing" was hard work, but a lot cooler than laboring in summer's heat. The cold winter time has always been considered as down time on the farm, so days were spent sawing the frozen rivers and ponds into blocks of ice, then transporting it on sleds or wagons pulled by horses. A hayrack of straw was stationed beside ice house door so the ice could be layered.

   Ice harvesting was also a great time for the wives to chat while preparing hot food and soup for the hungry cold workers. Young boys scampered about the farm, watching their dads work, skating on the ice, or having jumping contests in the haymow. When jumping from the rafters, straw also made soft landings . . . besides insulating the stored ice blocks.

   Progress brought harvesting ice slowly to an end as (1) horseless carriages arrived (2) electricity was wired into towns, and (3) refrigeration became commercially profitable.

   By the time this farm boy came on the scene, ice harvesting had all but died out. I was told about the good old days on the ice. Oh, there was still plenty of free ice on the rivers and ponds, but the farmers learned during their trips to market their crops that the modern city slickers had the latest fangled things available.

   On the north side of the Aurora square, E. R. Springer’s storefront was entirely glass to display his latest wares -- both gas and electric washing machines, gas cooking stoves, and that wonder of all wonders, a refrigerating machine called the Frigidaire. Just think, wives could keep their milk and Jell-O (which was important to this young farmer) cold year-round without hauling ice and emptying the drain pan (the latter chore which was also a real pain to this young farmer). The machine could even keep ice cream frozen until you wanted to eat it. No waiting for Ol' Man Winter when you were the proud owner of this fabulous invention.

   But on the farm, we could only dream about owning this refrigerating machine (that's what the originals were called) -- once we learned how to pronounce refrigeration . . . and could afford it!

   We still used kerosene for lighting and we used wood, coal, and cobs for heating. In the late 1940's, electricity was working its way out from Aurora on lines being installed by the federal REA project. (That's the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 administered by the Department of Agriculture. I learned that much later. I just knew it as REA.) I remember seeing crews across the road from our farm in 1947 digging wide deep holes along the ditch next to barbed-wire fences. I really wondered what kind of animals they were going to put in the pasture that needed tall poles like that.

   I was a 9-year-old supervisor watching them raise the big post with a crane, drop it in the hole, pack it, and then watch as men would somehow step slowly up the giant post, and add little wooden wings at the top with glass caps. This much excitement on the farm ranked right up there with Christmas, or having the grandparents come to the farm for Thanksgiving dinner. Climbing trees was also a challenge to me, but I couldn't go up one as fast as these pole climbers. I couldn't see that they had any special thing on their boots.

   The REA crew returned soon and started unraveling wire along the road. The men somehow walked up the pole again and attached the wire to the glass caps. Weeks later, as I was walking down the road, I kept hearing what I thought were muffled voices singing. I discovered that the sound was from the wires and that this stuff called electricity must be passing through.

   But, alas, the electricity didn’t turn into our farm. It just hummed on by. In the meantime we had to keep our icebox fed with ice when summer was hot upon us. Where did we get the ice? From the Aurora Ice Plant, located behind the Aurora Electric Company in the alley between K and L streets by 13th Street. The giant Aurora city water stand pipe was next door.

   In the hottest weather, a trip north into town to the ice plant was required every third day. City slickers who couldn't afford a refrigerating machine had their ice delivered first by horse and dray wagons, and then on flatbed trucks. However, we on the farm had to drive to town, taking care of any business first -- maybe even getting a five-cent double-dip ice cream cone from Fairmont's if Mom’s pocketbook still had a few coins -- and then as we left town, stop to get the ice. Then we headed straight home before too much of the ice melted.

Ice Man Appears

   Ordering ice at the ice plant was always a mystery to me. Dad worked hard on the farm, so it was Mom's job to get ice. She would drive up to the waist-high dock in the alley, get out and push a black button. After a few times, I pushed my shyness aside and pressed my luck on the magic button. A few minutes later, a man would appear dressed in winter coat and hat during our hot summers. He'd also be wearing a long canvas apron. He’d ask "What size?" We had a 50-pound icebox, so Mom would say "50." The ice man would disappear and then return in a few minutes dragging the ice block with tongs. He'd jump off the dock, place the ice on the floorboard of the back seat of our 1934 Chevy, take a coin from Mom, and then hop back up on the dock and disappear again into the darkness. I don't remember the price, but it must have been around 25 cents. My sis Pauline tell me his name was Mr. Swanson, but my mind goes blank on his title.

   Dad had always been a Ford man -- with his Model T and his Model A -- but he regretted buying this Chevy when it threw rods twice while he was gunning the motor trying to drive through the deep mud ruts on our rural roads. Despite that few county roads had gravel, we had to get ice no matter the weather. Mom said to make sure the handmade rug covered the ice entirely so it wouldn't melt so fast. Somehow, my lips turned ice cold on about every ice trip. My brothers and sister Pauline didn't tattle on me because we took turns, but if you were lucky enough to be riding shotgun in the front passenger seat, you "got no licks." It would be a dead giveaway leaning over the seat.

   So, it's now 1947. Electricity is across the road, but we still have our old wooden icebox. It's about 4 feet square with four doors held by brass clasps. The inside is lined with sheets of galvanized metal covering the insulation. The big door on the left is where the block of ice goes. The smaller door below holds the drip pan catching the melting water.

   When Mom spies water running across the kitchen floor, it means that this young drip named Rex hasn’t been watching the pan close enough. Every time that water runs across the floor, the kitchen gets a scrubbing so it wasn't that bad -- just an inopportune time, I guess.

   Half of the icebox is taken up by the ice and pan, so there wasn’t much room left for food. Keeping milk, cream, butter, meat, salad, plus setting the Jell-O, was pretty much all that was in the ice box. Eggs were kept in the pantry or cellar in either a 15-dozen crate or a 30-dozen crate, depending how many hens we had and how many were molting.

   Much of the food in the summertime was eaten fresh so the icebox wasn't really overloaded. Vegetables were eaten from the big garden, plus extra seeds were planted so Mom could can the vegetables for the dinner table in the wintertime. Boiled beef was also canned. The cellar was the home for all the canned goods plus the potatoes, onions, and apples. No problem with freezing in the winter because the temperature stayed at 55 degrees year-round in the cellar. In tornado weather, the cellar was also home many a night for our neighbors and our family. We kept a kerosene lamp and matches in a fruit jar for such scary times.

Meat Kept Fresh on "Hoof"

   For fresh two-legged meat in summer, we’d get 200 male chicks in late winter and raise them in the hot brooder house. It was always so much fun to watch the chicks turn from a fluffy yellow to white miniature roosters. In 6 to 8 weeks, we’d have fried chicken for dinner -- the noon meal. No refrigerating machine was needed when the meat was walking about . . . waiting their turn.

   When Mom asked for a rooster, my brother Steve and I would grab a leg hook and I’d toss out a handful of corn for "The Last Meal." We had a tree stump which we called the execution block. We took the fryer to Mom, who had a pail of boiling water waiting that she'd heated on the wood-burning stove. After a few minutes of dipping, she would tie its feet to the clothesline and I'd start pulling out the feathers, dropping them into a bushel basket to be used later for stuffing pillows and mattresses.

   Mom would singe the plucked chicken over the kitchen stove. She’d remove a lid from the big cast-iron cookstove, drop in a few more cobs to get a high flame to burn off the tiny fuzzy feathers. Within a few minutes, the naked bird was all cut up and the rooster sure wouldn’t recognize himself. The pieces were rolled in flour and fried in a large black iron pan. Oh, what good eating! There’s nothing like the wonderful taste of eating chicken that went from hoof to plate in an hour.

   Meat wouldn’t stay very fresh for long in the icebox because it just wasn’t that cold. Whenever we wanted chicken for dinner -- which was at noon -- we simply went outside and got one. As the 50-pound of ice became 25 pounds, or 5 pounds, the cold air in an icebox would disappear. It would be time to head toward the Ice Plant again.

   Maybe you were wondering what happened to a whole beef frozen on the back porch? One family couldn’t eat a butchered beef or pork fast enough before it spoiled. This is where the practice of curing the meat in salt came about to prevent it from spoiling. When they wanted to eat it, they boiled the meat for a long time and kept changing the water to get rid of extra salt. This farm lad saw some smoke houses where some neighbors smoked and salted pork, but not beef.

   So, how did we preserve half a beef in the summertime?With electricity and refrigeration in Aurora came the arrival of something called "lockers." The Farmers Union Creamery at 9th and G streets had one and so did Van Housen's Café on the east side of the square. Large rooms were insulated and turned into freezers with individual wire-cage boxes for rent made from unpainted 2x4's and chicken wire.

   Our rented unit -- about 3 foot -- square had a latch where we could place our own padlock. Talk about a cool spot in the summertime!! This young lad would go into the locker barefooted and shirtless -- my summer attire, except for Sunday-Go-Meetin’ at Prairie Gem Church. The locker would be just like winter on our back porch . . . in the summertime.

   In 1950 when our house was wired, the folks bought a Leonard refrigerator. It was my measuring guide as I was growing. It wasn’t very tall, but I couldn’t see over the top. In two years I was a foot taller and thought it had shrunk. We had several refrigerators over the years, but Dad called all of them the icebox, or Frigidaire - no matter what brand.

   I cherish the memories of the icebox I once knew but I don’t desire to live with it again. That drip pan was a pain in the . . . . back when you had to empty it when full . . . without making a mess on Mom's clean floor!

©: Rex L. Salmon 2002