Frederic Tudor, the Ice King

Tudor hatched a clever plan: In cold weather, he would harvest ice for cheap, and then sell it all around the world when it was hot, singlehandedly turning ice into a commodity and becoming vastly wealthy in the process.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcomed the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Most of the
profiles of Frederick Tudor that are floating around the web

(00:23):
some of his story like this. In the early nineteenth century,
he noticed that one thing Massachusetts had a lot of
in the wintertime was ice, and so he hatched a
clever plan that in cold weather he would harvest that
ice for really cheap, and then he would sell it
all around the world when it was hot, single handedly
turning ice into a commodity and becoming fastly wealthy in

(00:47):
the process. Uh. As so often happens with our show,
it is way more complicated than that, beginning with the
fact that it was not even his idea in the
first place. Like I, I saw articles and a lot
of I mean, generalist publications, mainstream stuff, but all repeating
the idea that this was his idea. But it wasn't. Uh.

(01:11):
He also didn't do it alone. He had a lot
of help from things like tax incentives and economic systems
that ultimately skewed things in his financial favor. So we
are going to look at that more complicated story than
is often in the one page right up today. Yeah,
he really doesn't. I mean I haven't had not read
a lot about him, but he really does. Usually get

(01:32):
lauded as like this really insightful idea man who took
this one concept and ran with it, and wasn't he
an entrepreneur And it's like, oh, yeah, apart from that,
we're going to talk about some other issues. Yeah, uh so.
Frederick Tudor was from a prominent Boston family. His father, William,
had gone to Harvard, had studied law under John Adams,

(01:55):
and had been in George Washington's Continental Army during the
Revolutionary War, including Irving as its judge advocate, and after
marrying Frederick's mother, Delia Jarvis, in seventeen seventy eight, he
left the army to set up a law office, and
he would also go on to serve in the Massachusetts
legislature and as Secretary of the Commonwealth. William and Delia

(02:16):
had six surviving children between seventeen seventy nine and seventeen
ninety one, and Frederick was born on September four, sevree.
Their family was comfortable, but it wasn't really until seventeen
ninety six, when William's father died that they became truly wealthy.
William inherited in a state that was worth about forty

(02:37):
thou dollars, which was a lot of money at the time. Uh.
I didn't try to translate them and to did it
today's dollars, because that is always it's tricky, and it's
there's never really a one to one way to do it.
There's really not. It's really like throwing just the dartboard
at some dollar signs and landing on something. It's it

(02:58):
was a lot of money, though, um. And at that
point he retired from law and became a gentleman of leisure,
that's the dream, I mean, gentleman of leisure while also
being in the state legislature and stuff. But he didn't
work as a full time job anymore. And the Tutors
were also an active part of Boston society, and Delia

(03:20):
was so charming and charismatic that she was something of
a local celebrity. Although the word would not be coined
until eighteen sixty. The Tutor family was part of the
Boston upper class known as the Boston Brahmins. Just co
opting the word from the highest rank of the cast
system in India. Yet to be clear that word existed
in India far longer than eighteen sixty, but it was

(03:42):
in eighteen sixty that people started applying it to uh
influential rich people in Boston. For the most part, Frederick's
siblings started off following the paths that would have been
expected of the children of such a family. His brothers
William Jr. John, and Henry all went to Harvard, and
his sisters Emma and Delia married a wealthy landowner and

(04:06):
a prominent navy officer, respectively, although Delia didn't marry until
the age of twenty six, and that marriage was rocky
and ultimately ended in a messy divorce which could have
been its own podcast, a lot of drama and possibly espionage.
Nice uh. Frederick, though, was having none of his family's expectations.

(04:29):
At thirteen, while his parents were on a European tour
that they could finally afford to take, he left school
and he apprenticed himself at a store. His brother William,
who graduated from Harvard that same year, thought this was
an absolute disgrace. Frederick, on the other hand, thought Harvard
was for layabouts, something he would confirm for himself a

(04:49):
few years later when he visited another brother there and
found his roommate Washington Allston's art stuff all over the room.
Is a side note. Washington Alston was an influential Romantic
landscape painter. He studied at the Royal Academy of Art
and Allston, Massachusetts, which is a neighborhood uh is named
after him. I would not really call him a lay about.

(05:12):
Frederick Tutor's perspective lazy. Yeah. So, Frederick's whole argument in
leaving school was that this apprenticeship was going to afford
him a much better education, but he didn't stick with
it for very long, and with his parents still out
of the country, he went to the family's country estate

(05:32):
of Rockwood, which is northeast of Boston. In spite of
this whole argument about Harvard being for idlers, he spent
the next few years somewhat lazily. He did do some
work on the farm at Rockwood, but not particularly strenuously,
and more of it was about experimenting with agricultural techniques
than about putting a serious effort into making it productive.

(05:55):
He also hunted and read and dabbled in various investments.
In eighteen o one, when he was seventeen, Frederick accompanied
his brother John on a trip to Cuba. John had
been advised to go recover someplace warm following a serious
knee injury, and since Frederick's business deals had included trading
molasses and cigars out of Havana, the tutors already had

(06:19):
some contacts there. But John's condition didn't improve, and soon
they were back in the United States. They crossed paths
with their mother and brother William near Philadelphia, which is
where John died on January eighteen o two, and by
that point Frederick and William had already gone back home.
Back in Boston, Frederick started working in the offices of

(06:41):
Major William B. Sullivan. He wasn't exactly working for the major.
It was more like Sullivan's office was his home base,
where he took no salary and invested in whatever seemed
like it might turn a profit, still not with any
particular dedication, and once he turned twenty one, Frederick's father
set him up with a business of his own, where

(07:03):
at first he kept doing the same basic thing, investing
and trading in various odds and ends. Frederick finally found
something to take seriously. In the summer of eighteen oh five,
g noting after his sister Emma's wedding to Robert Hallowell Gardner,
the family was at a party at Rockwood, enjoying drinks
that were chilled with ice that had been cut from

(07:25):
their pond the previous winter and then stored in the
ice house for the summer. Frederick's brother William casually remarked
that people in the West Indies would probably love such
a luxury. This was not a serious statement at all.
The very idea was absurd. Cutting ice in the winter
and storing it in an ice house for the summer

(07:46):
was common for New England. Families of means and societies
with access to ice have been storing it for later
use since antiquity. But loading ice onto a ship and
sending it thousands of miles away and to the tropics
was a ludicrous idea. Not only did it seem like
the ice would just melt on the way, but pirates, privateers,

(08:06):
and the navies of multiple nations that were variously at
war with each other all had chips in the waters
in the Caribbean. The islands themselves were also seeing their
share of unrest. Slave uprisings were an ongoing occurrence, and
recent years had seen the Second Maroon War in Jamaica
as well as the Haitian Revolution, but Frederick Tutor latched

(08:29):
onto his brother's offhand, not serious comment as his next
big venture, along with claiming that it was his own idea.
Later on, his insistence that he and not William, had
thought up the whole thing would lead to a severe
falling out with Robert Gardner, who basically told the truth

(08:50):
when somebody asked him about it. Frederick never forgave him,
even though Robert and William Jr. Both insisted that it
just didn't matter who had thought of it first, since
Frederick was the person who actually made it happen. And
we're going to get into the details of how Frederick
started to build an ice business, but first we're gonna

(09:10):
pause for a moment and have a little sponsor break.
On August one, eighteen oh five, Frederick Tudor began documenting
his ideas for exporting ice in a newly purchased journal
that he would later dubbed the Ice House Diary, even

(09:31):
though he refused to acknowledge that the idea had first
been his brother Williams. He pulled William into the scheme
along with their cousin James Savage. Frederick and James or
each twenty one at the time, and William was twenty six.
Frederick sent William and James to the Caribbean to set
up business relationships, oversee the building of ice houses, and

(09:54):
generally just handled the Caribbean end of the business. This
included talking to the government on each island and trying
to get an exclusive license to distribute. It was deeply
important to Frederick that he not only have the right
to sell the ice, but that he also have a
monopoly on it. They began in the French territory of Martinique.
Once William and James arrived there, they did secure an

(10:17):
exclusive license to sell ice as planned. They also noted
a couple of good locations for ice houses and compiled
a list of prominent people who should get a free
sample once the ice actually got there. But not long
at all after they arrived, James got yellow fever. He
spent weeks recovering, during which time William went on ahead

(10:39):
to other islands to try to make similar arrangements there.
Frederick followed behind them departing for Martinique on February eighteen
o six. He couldn't find anyone willing to ship the ice,
so he'd bought a brig called the Favorite for four thousand,
seven hundred fifty dollars, and he modified it with a
wooden ceiling to separate the ice in the hold from

(11:01):
the hot upper deck. When Frederick arrived on March five,
his cargo of ice, which had been insulated with wood shavings,
was surprisingly intact, but he was not pleased at all
with the arrangements that William and James had made. Since
they had marked some sites for an ice house, but
they had not actually built one, there was nowhere to

(11:23):
unload the product, so Frederick had to get permission to
sell it directly off of the ship, and even though
he did sell some ice, the people who bought it,
some of whom had never seen anything frozen, didn't really
know what to do with it. In a letter to
Robert Gardner, Frederick wrote, quote, their methods of keeping it
are laughable. To be sure, one carries it through the

(11:45):
street to his house in the sun noonday, puts it
in a plate before his door, and then complains that
il font another puts it in a tub of water.
A third, by way of climax, puts his insult. He
did eventually print up some handbills to give people instructions
about what to do, but his instructions on the handbills

(12:06):
wouldn't have been all that helpful. They were basically like
rapid in a blanket. Well, and I like how he's
there's like a conceit to the whole thing, right, idiot,
don't you know what to do with ice? No, we've
never seen it before. Frederick lost between three thousand and
four thousand dollars on this first attempt, and he placed

(12:28):
all of the blame on William and James. Did not
matter to him that James had been critically ill for weeks,
he hadn't been able to even leave his lodgings for
a long time, or that William had secured an exclusive
import license in multiple other Caribbean nations. Even as Frederick
was sailing home, William was on the way to Europe

(12:51):
to try to get a general license from the nations
of Britain and France to sell in their Caribbean colonies
so he would not have to negotiate with every single
island individually. None of that compared to the fact that
they didn't build an ice house, so Frederick had nowhere
to put the ice. He he put all the blame
on his brother and cousin. Frederick tried again in eighteen

(13:15):
o seven, this time having ice houses ready before the
ice arrived and tinkering with his methods of insulating and
securing the cargo. He was more successful this time than
in eighteen o six, but he couldn't try again in
eighteen o eight because of the Napoleonic Wars. The Embargo
Act of eighteen o seven, drafted in response to the wars,

(13:36):
closed all US ports to export shipping. Yeah, the United
States is basically trying to stay out of the wars
themselves while also retaliating against the fact that their ships
are being harassed in transit. So with exports completely closed off,
Frederick had to spend a couple of years biding his
time at Rockwood, trying to make ends meet, and experimenting

(13:59):
with different ice house designs and different methods of insulating
them in the cargo, taking really meticulous measurements of how
these different designs and insulators affected how quickly the ice melted.
Times were hard for most of the tutors around this time.
Because Frederick's father also lost most of his money on
a failed land speculation, he wasn't able to repair his

(14:22):
finances before his death in eighteen nineteen. The Embargo Act
of eighteen o seven was repealed in eighteen o nine,
and by eighteen ten Frederick was ready to try again,
though he had to borrow money to finance the trip.
The eighteen ten voyage was his most profitable to that point,
and he secured a six year agreement giving him exclusive

(14:44):
control of the Cuban ice market. But when he tried
to build on this success in eighteen eleven, things once
again became shaky. Frederick's first shipment of ice to Jamaica,
sank Off Port Royal, and an agent managing his operation, Havannah,
swindled him, turning over only a thousand dollars of what
was supposed to be a nine thousand dollar profit. With

(15:07):
these things combined, he lost almost all of his eighteen
eleven profits and consequently was arrested and sent to Debtors
prison on March nine of eighteen twelve. Once he got
out of prison, the United States and Britain went to
war in the War of eighteen twelve, once again disrupting
exports from the United States and putting yet another stop

(15:29):
to Frederick's ice business. At this point, the threat of
going back to prison loomed. Frederick's first shipment of ice
after the war left Boston on November one, eighteen fifteen,
and Frederick himself was on the boat, having been quote
pursued by sheriffs to the very wharf. Slowly but surely,

(15:49):
his ice business started to grow over the next few years,
and Boston had a number of advantages as the location
of his headquarters. These advantages became more important as business
got bigger. Numerous ponds in the area provided the product
for pretty cheap, including Fresh Pond, Spy Pond, Jamaica Pond,

(16:10):
and even wild In Pond, where he would go on
to bother Henry David Thorreau by harvesting ice there in.
The nature of the shipping trade through Boston also meant
that once he had proved it could be done, he
could move his product at a lower cost. Ships sailing
to the Tropics from Boston to retrieve goods such as

(16:31):
sugar were often empty, with holds full of rocks. His ballast.
Frederick filled these otherwise empty ships with ice replacing rocks
with sellable cargo, and the ship's owners glad it was
no longer a wasted trip gave him a discount. The
fact that he was mostly using things like wood shavings
and sawdust, which were waste by products of the lumber industry,

(16:53):
also meant like even the things that he was using
to keep keep things frozen in transit that was free
or cheap. Also in eighteen six team he built an
ice house in Charleston, South Carolina. When he started selling
his ice from there, an ice house in Savannah, Georgia,
soon followed, and as the business grew. In addition to

(17:15):
securing licenses and building ice houses, Frederick was selling people
the idea that they needed ice. One of his eighteen
nineteen diary entries describes how he would start with the bars.
Here's a quote. It became necessary to establish with one
of the most conspicuous bar keepers a jar and give
him his ice for a year. The object is to

(17:38):
make the whole population use cold drinks instead of warm
or tepid, and it will be affected in the course
of three years. A single conspicuous bar keeper having one
of the jars and selling steadily his liquors, all cold
without an increase in price, render it absolutely necessary that
the others come to it or lose their customers. They

(18:00):
are compelled to do what they could in no other
way be induced to undertake. Ice really had been considered
a luxury until this point, but Frederick's whole model relied
on it being thought of as a basic necessity, and
on tepid or warm beverages being considered undrinkable. He remarked
that he knew his business in Charleston was successful once

(18:23):
he saw enslaved people with cold drinks. We should note
here that although slavery was effectively abolished in Massachusetts the
year that Frederick was born, his business, which he created
from scratch, was built on selling ice to slave states
and to Caribbean and eventually South American colonies and nations

(18:44):
whose economies relied heavily on enslaved labor. For example, the
Emancipation Proclamation was issued the year before he died, and
Britain and France both abolished slavery in their colonies during
his lifetime, but this was long after hearted trading with
some of those colonies. Slavery wasn't abolished in Cuba or

(19:05):
Brazil until long after his death, and Tracy did the
research on this one, and she didn't find evidence that
he had directly enslaved anyone, although there is a troubling
account of an agent from India bringing him a quote
servant as a gift. But it's incredibly likely that at
least some of the people unloading ice at Southern and

(19:27):
Caribbean ports and working for the year round agents and
ice housekeepers living there were enslaved, and a lot of
Frederick's customers would have been buying his ice with profits
that came from slave labor. It's a good example of
how industries in the United States were complicit in slavery,
even when founded and run from states where slavery had

(19:48):
long been abolished. Some of the things he was investing
in before he started this ice business similarly were being
produced using enslaved labor. Like his his molasses trades, molasses
was made from sugar that was farmed on plantations that
used enslave labor. I found it frustrating that zero of

(20:14):
the accounts that I looked at about both Frederick Tudor
and the ice trade in general really got into the
fact that he created an industry selling stuff to enslavers
like that is where the money was coming from. So
to get back to his basic story, although he was

(20:37):
selling lots of ice in the eighteen teens, he was
not breaking even because he still had so many debts
to pay, And we will talk about how he finally
started to break even briefly after another quick sponsor break
even though Frederick's brother, William was really a lot more

(21:00):
interested in being a writer, he published several books in
his lifetime. He was one of the co founders of
the Boston Athenaeum, which is a membership library that still
exists to Boston. William borrowed money to join Frederick's ice
house business in eighteen twenty. He was the person who
managed the introduction of Frederick's ice into New Orleans, which
would become his biggest market in the Deep South. In

(21:24):
eighteen twenty one, Frederick finally managed to get ahead of
his debts and it seemed as though the ice business
would just grow from there. But that year Frederick had
a nervous collapse. He had been working himself to exhaustion
trying to make the ice business lucrative enough to pay
off his debts. Everything was compounded by his generally weak
health and the fact that he'd had both yellow fever

(21:46):
and malaria, along with other ailments while he was in
the tropics. He did recover, though, and by ninety six
the ice business had gotten so big that he brought
on Nathaniel J. Wyath to supervise direct the harvesting side
of it. Wyath introduced several improvements, including a horse drawn
ice cutter that he had invented the prior year. Previously,

(22:11):
ice had been cut by hand, which meant that the
blocks were uneven, they were harder to insulate, and they
were prone to shifting and transit. But Whyatt's cutter scored
the ice in a perfect checkerboard, which allowed crews to
cut the blocks into very regular, tightly stackable blocks that
left very little space for air or for shifting, and

(22:31):
also let them fill the holds a lot more full.
In January of eighty nine, Wyath also suggested a method
of making the blocks thicker, basically cutting a sheet of ice,
sliding it under solid ice to make a double layer,
and then cutting around the stack to allow it to
float while refreezing. This let them make blocks of ice

(22:52):
up to twenty inches thick, when previously they had considered
themselves lucky for a naturally frozen layer of nine to
twelve inches. So he was starting to do financially really well.
And then two events massively changed Frederick's life. In eighteen
thirty three, when he was forty nine, he started making
massive investments into coffee futures, and he also met Euphemia Fenno,

(23:16):
who was aged nineteen. Tutor was immediately smitten with her
and they were quickly engaged, but he kept it in
the wedding secret from his family, who he was increasingly
estranged from. There was a lot of drama and pettiness
in the Tutor family. Uh. If if you read accounts

(23:39):
that that get into his family dynamics, um, it's really
his his brother in law, Robert halliwell Gardner, that comes
off the best of all of them. Um. So by
this point he was not really getting along and he
did not tell them that he was getting married. But
they got married on January eighteen thirty four, and they

(24:00):
would go on to have six children. The coffee speculation,
on the other hand, would not be nearly so productive.
Coffee prices collapsed and he lost about two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars of his investors money. He convinced his
creditors to allow him to continue his ice business unhindered,
committing to pay at least the interest back every year

(24:22):
and estimating that it would take about six years to
pay off. The sale of ice to India is what
ultimately allowed him to pay off this debt. He had
already planned to expand into India with a couple of
business partners even before he realized how bad his financial
situation was because of this whole coffee situation. In spite

(24:45):
of the fact that it was a four month, fourteen
thousand mile that's two kilometer journey to India that involved
crossing the equator twice, it turned out to be his
most lucrative destination by far. I feel like if he
had just invested in coffee after I had been born,
he would have been fine. Yes, sure, I mean I

(25:08):
have a many many cups a day habits, so I
could have kept him afloat. Thanks to the British East
India Company, India was home to a lot of British
people and Anglo Indians, and among this population, it was
incredibly fashionable to complain about how hot it was, and
to describe the Indian subcontinent as the most punishingly miserable

(25:29):
hot place on Earth. And although the British had adopted
a number of local methods for dealing with the heat,
including using saltpeter infused water to chill bottles of wine,
many of these ways of coping were very time and
labor intensive. A lot of more affluent households actually had
a person whose job it was to use this saltpeter

(25:52):
infused water to cool things, and like that person's job
was as important as the cook uh it took a
lot of um. But in addition to dedicating people to
chilling stuff, India also did have its own sources of ice.
One was ice brought in from around the Himalayas to

(26:12):
further south in the subcontinent, and the other was a
novel way of manufacturing it. People would cut pits into
the ground and then fill the pits with straw, and
then place shallow earthenware dishes onto them, filled with a
couple of inches of water. As the water seeped through
the earthenware vessels, that acted as an evaporative cooler, which

(26:35):
let the water freeze, even if the air temperature wasn't
quite to the freezing point yet. That's some cool science
at work, right. But this method didn't yield much ice,
and some of it was more like slush. So the
British population was incredibly eager for a steady supply of
tons of ice at a time. The British population of

(26:56):
Kolkata raised money for ice houses under the under standing
that some of the ice stored there would be reserved
for medical use in years when the ice harvest was
poor or ships were lost in transit. The ice in
India was strictly rationed and you had to have a
doctor's note to get more. This isn't actually the first
doctor's note that there's an important role in the story.

(27:19):
When William was trying to negotiate a license with the
British government to sell in the British colonies, they thought
that this idea was so far fetched that it must
just be a front for smuggling. So he had to
get a note from a doctor explaining how ice could
be beneficial uh in in Caribbean colonies. So tutors first

(27:42):
ice delivery to India arrived in Kolkata on September six
thirty three, and intense British demand for it made it
an immediate success. It was not just the demand for
ice that made the Anglo British market so lucrative the
British East India count but He's terms were very favorable
for Frederick Tudor. He got a lot of exemptions and

(28:05):
and incentives that made India more profitable than any other market,
and so soon he was expanding into other Indian cities
as well. In eighteen thirty four, Frederick also began shipping
ice Tarrio, and this was coincidentally where his brother William
had died. William had left the business after being appointed

(28:26):
to US consul in Peru in eighteen twenty four, and
he was appointed charge a fair for Brazil in eighteen seven.
He died there of an infection on March nine, eighteen
thirty Although Frederick dabbled in plenty of other side investments
and side businesses over the course of his life, nothing
was ever nearly as successful as the ice trade, and

(28:49):
he was doing so much business through exports that he
was nearly unaffected by the Panic of eighteen thirty seven
or by the start of the Civil War, completely opping
his shipping to southern ports, and that, as a side note,
led to some of the development of artificial refrigeration technologies
as the South had come to rely on these ice

(29:10):
exports that they could no longer get because they were
at war with the North and they needed their ice.
Tea we love it in the South. Uh Tutor paid
off the last of his coffee debts in eighteen forty nine.
He was sixty five at the time. It had actually
taken him fourteen years to do it, during which time
he paid about fourteen thousand dollars worth of interest. He

(29:32):
continued to be heavily involved in the ice trade until
very late in his life, and eventually a lot of
the New England ice harvesting moved north into Maine. The
harvesting season was longer, and the ice could be harvested
directly from the Qunebec River and then loaded directly onto
a ship, rather than having to transport it from all
these ponds over land to the harbor in Boston. Also,

(29:55):
the ice in Massachusetts towards the end of his life
was becoming a lot dirtier, as the land around the
ponds was more developed and as the horses used to
draw the ice plows left their waist behind. By eighteen
fifty six, ice companies in New England were sending one
hundred fifty thousand tons of ice to forty three nations,

(30:18):
and similar businesses had sprung up in other cold weather
parts of the country as well. Although Frederick had continually
sought monopolies and did occasionally managed to secure them, they
didn't generally last for long. Competition with other ice exporters
increased over the course of his life, especially when Italian traders,
who were much closer to India than Boston was, began

(30:41):
transporting alpine ice, and as New York began to overtake
Boston in terms of overall shipping, much of the ice
trade had moved there. Frederick Tudor died on February six,
eighteen sixty four, at the age of eighty, and he
was by then vastly wealthy, both from the actual fits
of the ice trade, but also really importantly from the

(31:04):
land value of all this property that he had bought
decades before to build ice houses on. His widow ran
the business after his death, changing her name to Fenmo
Tutor in eighteen sixty seven. Possibly don't actually know her
motivations for sure, but the speculation is so that correspondence
in the ice trade would assume that she was a man.

(31:26):
She also, in the continuing pile of things that make
make of wonder whether Frederick was that much fun to
be around. She went through and annotated all of his
journals from the early years of their marriage, often saying
things happen in a very different way than we're written
down in the journals, and alleging that he had been

(31:49):
sharing quote the marriage privileges with the woman he had
lived on and off with since eighteen twenty four. I
don't know who that woman was or slash may have been.
Since this is an allegation, right, we have nothing but
Venmo Tutor's word at that point um and during the

(32:10):
window of time when Tutor was the ice King, though
the ice trade was changing the world, The first home
refrigerators were powered by huge blocks of ice, hence the
name icebox. They didn't just help people save money by
keeping their food longer without spoiling, though, they also improved
public health. Without the ability to keep food cold, pathogens

(32:31):
multiplied in warmer weather, leading to acute diarrhea known as
summer complaint, which could be fatal. Aside from that, just
as examples, hospitals use ice to cool patients who had
high fevers. Fishing vessels were able to stay at sea
longer because they could keep their catches on ice, and
perishable foods could be shipped much farther away, so this

(32:54):
changed the types of food that people were able to eat.
Tropical fruits could also be shipped much farther packed an
ice that had first been shipped to the tropics to
pick it up. The British Royal Navy even used ice
to cool their gun turrets. And of course, the advent
of artificial refrigeration and ice making once again changed everything.

(33:16):
Mechanical refrigerators were in development by the eighteen seventies, and
home refrigerators were becoming ubiquitous by the nineteen twenties. Once
manufactured ice became a possibility, most folks stopped wanting to
use frozen pond water that could potentially have horse poop
in it. Of Course, the ice trade, much as was
the case with butter versus margarine, the ice trade, tried

(33:38):
to make a a lot of arguments about how artificial
ice was bad and chemical. You should want this naturally
fresh pond water that horses have been pooping in and
on secades. I mean, we still right, there are variations
of that that are not so much legal arguments as
marketing schemes, right, Like you want this water fresh from

(34:00):
a stream, not one that's been processed. Uh. I don't
think anybody's making the case for horse poop water. So
one of his descendants donated all of his papers and
all the family papers to Baker Library at Harvard Business School,
and I kind of want to go down there and

(34:21):
pour through them and try to figure out, like, did
he think about what he was doing regarding establishing a
business that for so long was almost exclusively trading to
people that were making all their money off of slavery,
Like he has to have known about slavery being wrong,

(34:44):
especially since he was literally harvesting ice from where Henry
David Throw was hanging out the row was a staunch abolitionist, um.
But I couldn't find anybody that had looked into that
at all. Most of this are says are really candid
about the fact that he was selling to you know,
you know, British colonial India, which has its own set

(35:08):
of issues and human rights concerns and all of that,
but I didn't find any anyone really looking into the
part where he created a trade that was so reliant
on slavery for so long. I would be willing to wager.

(35:29):
And this is a bet that can probably never be
proven out unless we somehow managed to reanimate long decease people.
I would bet he didn't even really think about it.
That is my sad suspicion. I suspect he was like,
I just want to sell my ice. I don't care

(35:50):
to I'm not going back to prison, ma'am. I do
know that there is a letter that's in some way
related to slavery and to the Movement for Abolition Abolition
that's listed in the finding guide of the Tutor family
papers at Harvard, But I like, I don't know what

(36:12):
that letter is is about. I feel like it's We
have gotten comments before on social media about how like
the money related to slavery was all the Southern money,
and that's so false, And to me, this is a
really good example of how a Northern industry could really

(36:35):
be heavily connected to slavery, even if it wasn't using
enslaved labor or directly enslaving anyone. Um A lot of
the as I was like, I really, I don't know.
I should not have been astonished, but I was. And
as I was looking around trying to figure out if
there was anything that anybody had really put together about this,

(36:56):
and I kept finding articles where the only reference to
slavery at all was the caption of a photo of
some ice being unloaded by enslaved people in a Caribbean port.
And I was like, well, this is my unsatisfactory experience
of the week. Uh. In in an episode I chose
because I thought it was going to be more fun

(37:17):
than talking about eugenics. Nothing's ever fun in history, That's
what we learned from. So anyway, I have some listener mail. Fantastic,
it serves Susan. I just want to say, Susan, your
your intro to your email is charming and true. Uh.

(37:39):
And then Susan goes on to say, back in February,
I was learning more about the Underground Railroad. I discovered
this really great map online from the National Park Services,
part of their Network to Freedom program that marked notable
locations of the railroad's history. You may have already been
aware of it. About your researching prowess. She links to it,
and then says, as anyone who loves a good map,

(38:01):
I was intrigued to discover not just one, but three
pins on the map in my city of Lincoln, Nebraska, Nebraska,
being on the fringes of many escaped slave roots. I
grew up knowing the likes of John Brown's Cave in
Nebraska City, but never heard of a connection in the
state capital. Specifically, there are three documented graves of people
who escaped slavery via the underground railroad, buried in a

(38:23):
cemetery less than a mile from where I lived, so
on a freakishly warm Saturday in February, my husband and
I paid them a visit and some pictures. The connection
to Frederick Douglas comes in the form of Ruth Cox Adams, who,
through a seemingly circuitous route, eventually settled and died in Lincoln,
born in Maryland as well. Apparently they recognized one another

(38:45):
vaguely when she met up with him after escaping to
freedom in New York in eighteen forty two. He referred
to her as his adopted long lost sister, though it's
unclear to me if they truly believed they were related,
or if the phrase was used to connect them because
of a perceived recognition from their pasts. For years, Ruth
lived with Douglas and took care of his wife and

(39:06):
children while he was out of the country. After leave,
living in Massachusetts with the with the Douglas family, Adams
married and moved to Rhode Island, then later Nebraska with
her daughter and son in law, living in various eastern
Nebraska towns and eventually settling in Lincoln, where she died
on April two nine. And then she goes on. She
goes on to say that it's one thing to read

(39:27):
about famous figures, and then it's another to see how
far reaching their personal connections can be. Um So I
found that really interesting. That was not a name I
had stumbled upon when doing that research. So if you
would like to write to us about this or any
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(39:49):
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(40:11):
dot com. You can find show notes on all the
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So you can do all that and a whole lot
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(40:32):
other topics, is it how stuff works dot com