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A C.F. phoenix: The Ice House
Restorations keep history alive
By Times Staff
7/24/2010 12:00:00 AM
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The Ice House, 1920s [courtesy of the C.F. Historical Society]
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BY DAVID WHITSETT
Most residents of Cedar Falls are probably aware that the Ice House Museum was among the structures in our town that fell victim to the flood of 2008 and that a campaign is now underway to bring it back even better than it was before.
What many may not know is that this is at least the third time the Cedar Falls community has rallied in support of this venerable building. This is the story of those three events.
The first began on the night of Oct. 22, 1921 when Hugh Smith, the proprietor of the Cedar Falls Ice and Fuel Company was sitting next to his wife at a choral performance at the Cotton Theater (now the Oster-Regent Theater). Smith’s young son rushed in and told him that their wooden ice house was on fire.
Consequently, Smith had no difficulty in recruiting help to rebuild his business. In fact, over the next few days, more than 200 volunteers helped clear the rubble and, almost immediately, a building engineer was brought in from Chicago to help Smith prepare plans for a new ice house. Less than a week after the fire, footings had been poured for a new building.
It was to be circular and was to be constructed of vitrified hollow clay tile which were reinforced with steel ties. The plans called for it to be one hundred feet in diameter and 30 feet high, which would give it a capacity of over 6,000 tons of ice.
It was essential that the building go up promptly in order for it to be ready for the ice harvest around the first of the year. It was expected that the ice on the Cedar River, which was the source of the town’s ice supply, would be between 8 and 10 inches thick by then and the harvest could begin soon after.
Those predictions turned out to be quite accurate and, on Jan. 10, 1922, preliminary work began on the first ice harvest to be placed in the new building, which had been completed just five days earlier. Smith’s work crews (many of whom were local farmers) began by scraping the snow from the frozen river surface with a horse-drawn snow plane.
Then they layed out and marked the boundary lines of the area to be harvested. The cutting itself began on Jan. 16 and soon hundreds of ice blocks, about 30 x 24 x 12 inches and weighing about 200 pounds each, were riding up Smith’s new chain-conveyor elevator and into the new building. The blocks rode up the conveyor at intervals of about 5 feet and the machinery could carry about 20 blocks per minute.
Workers inside the building stacked the blocks and used hay and sawdust to cover and insulate the ice and to keep the blocks from fusing together. The work went quite quickly and, before the end of January, with the ice house completely filled, construction workers laid the structure’s huge circular roof in place while standing directly on the top layer of ice blocks. Then the building’s doors were closed and sawdust was tamped into any openings or cracks to keep out drafts. The building then remained tightly sealed until spring, 1922, when the horse-drawn ice wagons began their first deliveries from our town’s new ice house.
Five horse-drawn ice wagons delivered six days a week and, to receive an ice delivery, customers placed an “ice-card” in a window indicating how many pounds of ice they needed. They paid with pre-purchased coupon books. The cost for a 25 pound block was 15 cents.
Each year for 12 more years, until the spring of 1934, deliveries from the ice house continued. However, mild winters in 1932 and 1933 afforded small ice crops and this, combined with the country’s economic depression and the increasing availability of electric refrigerators resulted in Smith losing his business. Cedar Falls Trust and Savings took over the building at that point and it was used as a livestock sales pavillion and an ice rink until 1938. In that year, it was taken over by the Cedar Falls boat club for use as a boat house and served in that capacity until 1976, at which point it had deteriorated to the point at which it was deemed unsafe and was therefore marked for demolition.
Thus we come to the second time our community came to the aid of the ice house. The Cedar Falls Historical Society’s board of directors, led by the Society’s President, Nancy Redfern, undertook a campaign to save the ice house and convert it into a museum. The city of Cedar Falls allocated $30,000 in block grant funds to the project and the town’s citizens came through in a variety of ways: individual citizens and businesses contributed funds, school groups held bake sales and bottle drives, service clubs helped with fund-raising events, Ice House pins were made and sold, etc.
A total of over $70,000 was raised and added to the block grant money. In July of 1977, the ice house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places and, in the summer of 1978, a new cement floor, a new electrical system and major roof repairs were completed. Many residents of our town and the surrounding area contributed items for display in the museum and on June 24, 1979 it was opened to the public. It remained a source of pride and pleasure for almost 30 years and then came the flood of 2008 and the third example of our town’s efforts on behalf of the ice house.
When the Cedar River began to rise, hundreds and hundreds of volunteers turned out to fill and place sandbags along the river and around the ice house. School buses gathered on the UNI campus and ferried individual citizens, students from area schools and church groups to downtown Cedar Falls to help in fighting the water. The efforts went on for days. Bags were placed several feet high all around the ice house, up to the highest water levels that had ever been seen. However, the river rose to new record levels and water entered the ice house to a depth of just under five feet, destroying or damaging many of the exhibits.
The sandbagging had, nevertheless, succeeded in preserving the building itself. A few days later, when the river receded, volunteers began the arduous tasks of emptying the museum of the damaged exhibits and working at cleaning off the mud and debris to salvage as much as possible. This work went on for many weeks and many of the museum’s contents were saved.
Once again, a fund-raising campaign is underway to renovate the ice house. The floor has already been raised 5 feet to help prevent future flooding and many new exhibits are being constructed. So, Cedar Falls has come to the aid of the ice house three times and it has become evident that many people in our town place great value on this special building.
David Whitsett is a volunteer historian for the Cedar Falls Historical Society. For more information on the Society's activities, visit www.cfhistory.org.
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