The main supplier of ice to the South Bend community during the late 1800s and well into the 1900s was the ice house along the bank of Crooked Creek upstream from the mill, along the pool of water backed up by the dam.
The icehouse requires a special kind of construction to keep the ice from melting during the spring and summer after being harvested during the winter. Super-insulation was achieved with double or triple framed walls, solidly packed with an insulating material which was usually sawdust. Because of the extraordinary loads it had to bear when it was solidly stacked with blocks of cut ice, the foundation of the icehouse had to be substantial. Stone foundations, immune to water rot, were deeply laid to support the ice house structure.
Oscar Wherry recalls:
It is hard to imagine a world without instant access to the ice cubes and cold bottles which make the summer heat bearable, much less a world without refrigerators. Until the electrification of America, the ice box reigned supreme, and the principal supplier of ice for its well-insulated oak interior was the natural ice industry.
"In the winter when the creek had frozen solidly, the cutting of ice and filling the ice house took place. At first they cut the ice by hand with a crosscut saw, then later we had an ice cutter hauled by a horse. The ice was often as thick as 2 feet above the dam. We could drive the horses onto the ice and load the sled, often filling the ice house in one day. The ice house was built with double walls with sawdust between, then the ice blocks were packed in sawdust. As the ice house got emptier in the summer, it got to be more of a chore to dig out the blocks, so we located them by pushing a post digger down through the sawdust until we struck one."
