Before Refrigerators, How Did Americans Keep Food From Spoiling?

For a century the cold in an American kitchen was cut from a river, carried up the steps by a stranger, and priced by men who could double it. This is how American families kept food from spoiling before the refrigerator, and what it cost them when the cold ran out. It starts in the ground, with the springhouses and root cellars at Harpers Ferry, the salt and smoke and sugar that stood in for cold, a 279-pound barrel of sugar bought in Indiana in 1841, the milk sickness that killed Abraham Lincoln's mother in 1818, and the screw-top jar a New Jersey tinsmith named John Landis Mason patented in 1858. Then the ice harvest: 135 ice houses on the Hudson, 20,000 men cutting the river every winter, 2.5 million tons a year for New York, and the iceman with a sheepskin pad on his shoulder and a scale in his pocket, reading the card in your window. Then the three things the system depended on fail. In 1858 Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper exposes the swill milk of the New York distillery dairies, and the New York Times counts 8,000 dead children in a year. By 1909 the state is condemning ice houses on a polluted Hudson. In 1900 the American Ice Company more than doubles the price of a family's ice and the mayor of New York turns out to hold its stock. The video follows the machine that ended all of it, from the toxic refrigerants of the 1920s to Thomas Midgley breathing a lungful of Freon in front of the American Chemical Society in 1930, the refrigerator's strange boom in the middle of the Great Depression, the Rural Electrification Administration, the 1940 census in Chicago, and what Americans stopped doing once the cold stopped being something they had to buy. If you want more stories about how ordinary American life worked before the things we now take for granted, subscribe and hit the bell. #history #americanhistory #refrigerator #icebox #iceman #icetrade #foodhistory #historydocumentary #documentary #hudsonriver #newyorkhistory #chicagohistory #greatdepression #1900s #masonjar