Today – especially in January – we take ice cream for granted.

If we wish to have a cone, a sundae or even a quart or two, we simply go to our favorite store and buy some of the easily available product in several flavors.

Such was not always the case.

It was not that long ago – and for most of human history – that frozen desserts were the advantage of the wealthy or of people who lived in perpetually very cold places. People in America who wanted ice cream in the middle of the summer either were fortunate enough to live near a source of ice or knew people who did.

To this day, we can purchase manual ice cream machines consisting of a bucket full of ice and a tin can with the fixings hooked to a crank turned by hand with the ice chilling the mixture into ice cream. Done correctly, the result is perfect ice cream. Done not so well, the results are not pleasant.

But to make that ice cream, ice was needed.

Given the predilection of people to desire ice and there being a lack thereof, it was not long until enterprising folks in Columbus and central Ohio began looking to ways to meet that need.

The easiest recognition came from the fact that there was a lot of ice in frozen rivers and streams in central Ohio in the winter. Harvest that ice, store it in a cold place and it could be sold to – well, ice cream seekers – and others throughout the year.

And that is exactly what began to occur.

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As early as the 1820s in Columbus and probably even earlier in frontier Franklinton across the river, people began to find frozen parts of the nearby rivers too narrow or obstructed to be sought by the many ice skaters. It was at these places that large numbers of men would gather and, using large, lengthy saws made for the task, they would cut pieces of ice from the river – 2 feet by 2 feet and 1 foot thick.

The block would weigh about 100 pounds and be carried to a ramp, where workers moved it up to an icehouse above the frozen stream. It was there that the blocks of ice were lowered into a pit full of ice, left on a bale of sawdust and then covered with the same.

It was this “cut ice” that would meet the needs of Columbus residents for many years. The ice in the storage houses, properly insulated, would last well into the summer – if one were willing to pay the price for late summer ice.

To help the average homeowner meet the need for ice at a reasonable price, entrepreneurs beginning in America with Thomas Moore in 1802 in Maryland developed a wooden cabinet lined with tin, with an upper shelf able to hold a 50-pound block of ice and a lower section for one’s perishable food.

The icebox stayed around until well into the 1900s. But a population with a lot of iceboxes required a lot of ice. And all those icehouses were not able to meet the need.

Inventors and entrepreneurs had tried to invent ice machines that would create the ice of frozen rivers without the frozen rivers. The machines – largely using dangerous ammonia – worked but were not popular. In the years after the Civil War, the demand for ice was so great that ice machines became economically feasible and profitable.

A good example was the Crystal Ice Co. in Columbus. The company was the joint venture of J.F. Cannon and brothers Joseph and Bill Bott of Columbus. The brothers had come to Columbus in 1876 and opened a saloon on North High Street. By 1890, their establishment had become Bott Brothers Cigars and Billiards on North High. It still is there. Over the years, it became the Clock Restaurant and later the Elevator Brewery & Draught Haus.

Successful at their business, the Bott brothers and friends went into the ice business. The Crystal Ice Co. building on West Broad Street opened in 1891 and soon was making 250 tons of ice a day, with cold storage available for 100,000 tons more. Since 1978, the building has been the home of the Spaghetti Warehouse.

Crystal and companies like it ended the need for river icing, and soon the introduction of home refrigeration with machines like the Frigidaire ended the need for the icebox. It is interesting that even at this late date – with refrigerators that talk to us and can be controlled by our phones – that some still call the machine in the kitchen an icebox.

Local historian and author Ed Lentz writes the As It Were column for ThisWeek Community News and The Columbus Dispatch.

This article originally appeared on ThisWeek: As It Were: Harvesting chunks of frozen rivers put Columbus on path to ice production

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