ABSTRACT
The ice house was an essential component in the consumption and trade of natural ice in nineteenth-century Anglo-America. Early structures built for this purpose took the form of underground pits and small outbuildings built on country estates and farms. But the scaling up of the ice industry in the mid-nineteenth century brought about the construction of commercial warehouse buildings on the shores of rivers, freshwater lakes and oceans. These mammoth structures were purposefully designed to optimize cold storage, subdivided into compartments with trenches for drainage, double insulated walls and pitched roofs painted white. The buildings were part of a complex infrastructure that traced the process of extraction as a continuous path of movement involving the removal, transportation, and storage of slippery and heavy blocks of frozen water. The monumental ice houses constructed in the tropical port cities of the Caribbean and South Asia represented the farthest reaches of the trade network, serving as a highly visible marker of the triumphs of American capitalism and British colonialism.
