The sawmill from which author Whobrey's father hauled sawdust for his ice house.
BY ANNABELLE SCOTT WHOBREY
Many times, a necessity becomes the incentive to invent; my father's appetite for homemade ice cream caused him to create an icehouse. Sadly, we lived some twenty miles from an ice company and driving a wagon and team that far was out of the question so Father set about to solve the situation so in the summertime we could cool off with ice cream!
A small sawmill was set about a mile from our farm and anyone could have any amount of sawdust by hauling it away. Thus, my father hit upon a plan to build an icehouse and we could live more like city folk! He erected a little low building about ten feet square with double walls; the word, "insulation" was a foreigner, but looking back, his icehouse was insulated.
Father allowed me to ride along in the wagon to haul the sawdust and it was a jubilant journey over to the sawmill. He took his automatic loader along - a big, burly boy and a heavy ol' scoop shovel! This young fellow had happened by our place hunting a home and agreed to work for his room and board so Sammy was automatically appointed to the business end of the shovel to fill the wagon bed with sawdust. It was quite a chore, because the wagon had sideboards; Father figured on having to make only one trip to the big sawdust pile!
I made the painful mistake of standing down wind from the wagon and getting an eye full of scratchy sawdust. Father furthered my misery by poking around in my eye with his old red bandana handkerchief. My, how I wished for my mama; she knew exactly how to handle my accidents with expertise! Well, this kid cried a lot while Sammy scooped the sawdust and it seemed like a long afternoon!
Until Mama removed the mote from my eye, I had to miss out on the progress at the icehouse. They tamped the sawdust tightly into the walls with a post mall and Father fashioned a door made similar to the walls. He kept reminding us that his icehouse must be airtight and he lined the walls and ceiling with tar paper. This was an old standby for keeping the cracks in the buildings from leaking.
With the icehouse completed, it was wait and see how it worked; winter weather would have to freeze our supply of ice.
Sure enough, a long deep freeze nearly froze our big pond dry and Father chopped out big blocks of ice for storage. The ring of the axe on the ice rang out on zero mornings, telling the neighborhood that the Scotts were filling their icehouse! When Father had an ample supply, he wrapped the whole "berg" in tar paper and covered it all in sawdust.
Needless to say, when summer arrived, we were pretty popular; folks came calling in hopes we'd have the ice cream freezer in use! If not, we children drove ol' Daizy in for a mid-afternoon milking, Mama headed for her hen house to gather fresh eggs, and Father fetched a block of ice. All the ingredients in the ice cream were home grown; the only thing "boughten" was the stock salt coming from the barn!
This youngster no longer envied her city cousins with their newfangled icebox and door-to-door delivery. We were living in luxury down on our farm! Years later, an ice company ran a route in our rural area until rural electricity hit the farm front, but Father's homemade icehouse was the talk of our community for awhile. I agreed his lust for ice cream sure paid off in delicious dividends!
Back to Hard Times