II Remember...The Ice Age  

by John William Houghton
published in the Culver Citizen ca.1974-1974

What is it that was harvested from fields, but never planted? Was found only in winter, but used mostly in summer? Was stored at Culver , but used across the country?

Well, I'm not very good at asking riddles, because I always tell the answer right away. In this case, it's "ice."Last September, before I left for school, I talked to Bill Easterday, Bess Easterday and Sam Medbourn about the ice business in Culver . This article is a summary of what they told me

The ice trade had its modest beginning when a man named Holt built an ice house (that is, a place to store ice after it had been harvested) on the west shore of the lake, north of the outlet. The Easterdays' father helped in this construction project by digging out the site with a horse-drawn scraper (this was-a thing like the shovel of a b ulldozer, attached to some rigging so that the horse could p ull it across the ground, scraping up dirt as it went).

The manager of Holt's ice house was Samuel E. Medbourn, and it was he who developed the ice business into a successful industry. But before I can tell you what Medbourn did, I should describe the way in which the ice was harvested.

The source of the ice, as may or may not be obvious, was the lake, which each year conveniently produces a new crop of the chilly stuff. When the ice was thick enough to support the men and horses involved (at least nine -inches) the harvesting could begin.

A channel about two feet wide was cut in the ice, working out from a point on the shore closest to the ice house. This channel increased, to three or four times its original width after it was a few yards long; farther out still, the channel was widened again. At this point, the first field was cut. Each additional field was cut away from one edge of an earlier field.

The ice to be cut was first scored by an ice plow, a set of spikes a little bit like a harrow, which left grooves about a foot and a half apart behind them as they were p ulled across the ice by a horse. The plows were taken back and forth in the same grooves until the ice was more than half cut through. This scoring was done in perpendic ular directions, so that a checker board pattern was made, with each square one and a half feet on a side. Each of these squares would become a one hundred and twenty pound block of ice.

Every now and then, one of the horses used is this operation fell into the lake, but to the best of Medbourn's recollection, none of them drowned. To save a horse from drowning, it turns out. You throw a noose around its neck and tighten the noose until the animal stops struggling. You can then use ropes and planks to p ull the unconscious horse out of the water, being caref ul, of course, not to choke the beast for any longer than is absolutely necessary.

After a considerable area of ice (called a field) had been scored, large pieces (containing as many squares as could be managed at once) were broken loose along the scored lines with saws and pike-poles. These large chunks were then pushed up the channel towards the shore; men standing on planks put over the channel like bridges at each of the narrowing points, used pike-poles again to break the ice into sets of squares small enough to fit into the next part of the channel. The last of these men produced pieces one square wide and several squares long, which were shoved on in to shore.

This is where Samuel E. Medbourn's great contribution was made. Holt's ice house was cut off from the lake by the railroad tracks (as any building between the outlet and Jefferson St. would be). This meant that the ice had to be carried over the tracks. In Holt's system, the ice was broken into blocks at the water's edge, and there loaded on a conveyor belt which carried it over the railroad to the ice house, down to the lakeshore. This meant that work had to be halted and the tracks cleared of fallen ice every time a train was due. Now at that time, a drainage ditch ran down Madison St. through what was then a swamp behind the present sites of the Park and Shop parking lot and the Farm Bureau Co-op. It continued under the railroad tracks and down to the lake shore.

Medbourn realized that no efficient harvesting could be done as long as the work had to stop for trains, and he saw that this opening under the railroad was just what he needed. He bought up the swamp, built an ice house on it and used the ditch (along with his natural talent for business) to such advantage that he was soon able to buy out the competition and become the proprietor of both of Culver 's ice houses. After the Medbourn Ice Company became a prosperous enterprise, cement channels were built to lead from the house, under the railroad, to the lake at each of the sites, and these channels can still be seen today.

In the Medbourn system (and hereafter I'll be talking about the ice house in the swamp unless I say otherwise) the ice was brought into the cement channel where it was broken into blocks 18 inches square and nine inches thick. These blocks were then pushed on the conveyor.

This conveyor was a 1200 foot-long belt of iron links with oak four-by-fours fastened across it at reg ular intervals. It weighed several tons, and ran from the channel directly past the front of the ice house to a separate building containing the steam engine which powered it. From the engine building it returned to the channel.

(The ones he missed fell on the ground.) The Medbourns only found only one man who could do this job with real skill. That man was Buster French. Legend says that French was a little over-fond of liquor, but that when he was sober, he was the best worker in the business. Sometimes the other p ullers would each let a block or two go by, just to see what Buster would do. They say Buster swore a blue streak when this happened, but he never missed a block of ice.

All of this work was done in the three or four weeks of the dead of winter. In a good year, as many as 300 of the neighboring farmers (who had little else to do at that time of year) would be employed. If the weather stayed clear and cold, it was possible to take two or three crops of ice out of one field (These later crops, having frozen more uniformly, were often almost perfectly clear.)

When the house was being filled, a man (called a "p uller") stood in front of the lowest door into each room. His job was to use a pike-pole to p ull ice from the conveyor belt onto a slide which led into his room. When the lowest level in all of the rooms had been filled, the belt was lifted so that it would pass in front of the second level doors, and the process began again.

Since there were eight p ullers, the first man was expected to p ull in every ninth block, the second man every eighth, and so on. This meant that, in theory, only one block out of every eight would stay on the conveyer long enough to get to the last man in line. In practice, however, things didn’t always work out so well, and the last p uller sometimes had to work pretty fast to gel in every block

Medbourn estimates that the two houses together held nearly half a million tons of ice. Some of this was sold in Culver , some from the Medbourn Company's retail outlets in South Bend, Mishawaka and Logansport. The remainder was sent out by the railroad to other cities in Indiana and even to other states, especially those in the south.

Culver ’s ice age ended in 1934, when the Medbourn Company closed up. One of the ice houses was blown down, they say, in a windstorm; the other was used (or so I’m told) for the storage of vegetables, and burned down one year when it was f ull of onions…I’m not sure whether or not that’s true, but it’s a nice story.

tenn `annkennuvar