Until two centuries ago, ice was a nuisance side effect of winter.
In the early 1800s, one man saw opportunity in frozen ponds. Frederic Tudor introduced the world to cold glasses of water on hot summer days and created a thirst people never realized they had.
In 1805, two wealthy Boston brothers at a family picnic were enjoying luxurious cold beverages and ice cream and joked at how thrilling their chilled refreshments would be for colonists sweating in the West Indies. That random remark stuck with one brother - Frederic. Thirty years later, he shipped almost 200 tons of ice halfway around the world, becoming the “Ice King.”
Tudor was an unlikely scion of industry. He was a Harvard drop out who drifted for several years until he retired to his family’s country estate to hunt, fish, and try his hand at farming. After his brother William's quip of harvesting ice from the estate’s pond to sell in the West Indies, Frederic, with little else to do moved forward seriously.
He convinced William to join him in a scheme to ship ice from New England to the Caribbean. He reasoned that once people tried it, they would never chose to live without it. For six months, the brothers pooled money and laid plans to ship ice to the French island, Martinique, hoping to create a monopoly..
Typically, no one believed their idea would work.
In fact, no ship in Boston would agree to transport the unusual cargo. Frederic spent nearly $5,000 (a massive investment), to buy a ship of his own and on February 10, 1806 - The Boston Gazette reported, “No joke. A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons of ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique. We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.”
The ice arrived in Martinique in perfect condition but no one wanted to buy. Tudor desperately explained how the cold blocks of ice could be used in the stifling Caribbean heat, but islanders were unconvinced.
After this inauspicious start, William withdrew from the partnership. The following winter, Frederic drummed up enough money to send another shipment to the Indies.
A trade embargo left much of the Caribbean off limits for two years and Frederic was forced to wait while the Tudor family fortune dwindled after a dubious real estate deal in South Boston.
Despite his financial woes, Frederic persisted, and his ice business finally turned a profit in 1810. A sequence of occurencies—including war, weather, and the needs of relatives—kept him from realizing a fortune and between 1809 and 1813, he landed in debtors’ prison three times and often hid from the sheriff.
By 1821, Tudor’s business had strengthened. He had created real demand in Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans, and Havana but still needed to refine his operation.
Nathaniel Wyeth was an innovator who became Tudor’s foreman in 1826. Using a horse-drawn plow to cut the ice into large grids, Wyeth invented a faster harvesting method and implemented an assembly process. Labourers sawed the blocks apart and floated them downstream to a conveyor belt that hoisted the blocks from the water to the icehouse to be stacked up to 80 feet high.
Wyeth’s ingenious methods were a major improvement on harvesting practices. With Wyeth on board, Tudor asserted his long-fomenting monopoly, becoming the “Ice King.”
Tudor’s reputation solidified in 1833 when he shipped 180 tons of ice halfway across the world to British colonists in Calcutta. The venture was so successful that it reopened trade routes between India and Boston.
At home, Tudor also dominated the market. By 1847, nearly 52,000 tons of ice traveled by ship or train to 28 cities across the United States, nearly half of this ice came from Boston, most of which was Tudor’s.
He maintained ice-harvesting rights to key ponds throughout Massachusetts. Frederic Tudor died in 1864, once again a wealthy man. By then, everyone with access to a frozen body of water was in the ice business. Ice boomtowns sprouted along the Kennebec River in Maine, where farmers found year-round employment.
The 1860s became the peak competitive period of American ice harvesting, and Tudor’s company prospered. During the Civil War with the South cut off from ice supplies in the North, the ice industry continued to grow in New England and in the Midwest.
As American society grew accustomed to fresh meats, milk, and fruit - the ice industry expanded into one of the most prosperous and powerful industries in the United States.
