The Ice Industry in the Pikes Peak region

By Steve Plutt

May 21, 2021

Today, we tend to take crystal clear ice for granted. Most of our refrigerators even dispense it right from its door.  But our ancestors didn’t have it quite that easy.  There was a time when ice was a very big deal and the beginning of the ice harvest season was an exciting event that employed a lot of workers. In fact, at its peak the ice trade in the United States employed an estimated 90,000 people. 

So if you will for a few moments, use your imagination and think about a hot mid-summers day in Colorado Springs in the year 1880. You’re 10 years old and you and your family live in a nice Queen Anne style home north of downtown on a quiet Cascade Avenue. Suddenly, you hear the clip-clop, clip-clop sound of a horse drawn wagon coming your way. 

Oh boy you say to yourself, “the ice man.” You jump down off your porch and run out into the street and greet him as he pulls his 2 stout horses to a stop.

The brawny ice man gets down from his wagon and, as always, rewards you with a few pieces of ice.  What a great day this is for you and the rest of the neighborhood kids standing around the wagon! “Ice”, you think to yourself, “in the middle of July!”

Well that scene was played out all across the United States in those days. Ice was a vital commodity and was one of the leading industries in our area. It was even considered a weapon of defense when it came to protecting the public’s health against spoiled foods.

In the Pikes Peak Region, most family farms outside of town had ponds and would cut and store their own ice. However, folks living inside of Colorado Springs had ice delivered to them. It was sold by weight and the ice man brought it right into your kitchen and fit it into your ice box. Once in place, your perishable’s such as milk, butter, eggs and meat products were kept fresh.  When your household needed ice, which was usually on a daily or at the most every other day basis, a card was put in your window and the ice man knew to make a stop at your house.

Ice, along with ice boxes, also lead to a healthier change in everyone’s dinner and eating habits. And to the grumbling of some, “leftovers” were now a much more common item.  Besides keeping your food fresh, if the ice was pure enough it made a cold beverage possible in the heat of the summer.  It was quite a treat to sit out on your porch on a August evening watching the horse drawn carriages go by while sipping your favorite ice cold drink. By the 1890s, all but the poorest residents had ice boxes and nearly every home and business used ice to some degree.

Hotels and restaurants were big consumers of ice and many of them kept a good supply on site in their own small ice houses.  Railroads were also big clients, using it for moving perishables from farm to market. They also had their own ice houses fully stocked from ice wholesalers.  The typical ice house was essentially a barn built within a barn, packed with sawdust in between the two for insulation. A well-insulated ice house would experience about a 20% loss by the end of summer while a poorly insulated one would lose about 50% of the product.

One of the first wholesalers of ice in Colorado Springs was the Fountain Ice Company.

Since the temperatures on the Front Range were not low enough early on in the winter, the harvesting season around Colorado Springs was pretty short.  The cutters needed at least 12 inches of thickness for the safety of the many men and teams of horses on the ice and also to get the size of blocks desired. Because of the short season, ice wholesalers would often work long hours cutting nonstop, 7 days a week until the harvest was completed or warm weather shut it down for the season.  Additionally, the quality of the Front Range ice was not always what customers demanded, especially hotels and restaurants. Contamination was the issue with things like moss, pine needles and other pollutants trapped in the cut ice blocks. Not to mention that it wasn’t uncommon for folks back then to dump garbage, trash and raw sewage into the streams and creeks.

Here is an ad from local retailer T.E. Johnson promoting the quality of his ice that was cut over at Cheyenne Canyon

Another source of contamination was the ice cutters themselves, their horses that is. Since horses will be horses, precautions were taken to keep the ice clean and hygienic and someone had to clean up after them. The person who did that was called the “shine boy.” His job was to scoop up the manure and put it into a sled that he pulled behind him.  Then he would pour formaldehyde on the area to supposedly kill any germs or contamination that was left on the ice.

The Divide Lake mentioned in the ad is north of Colorado Springs in the Monument-Palmer Lake area. In the early days, that area was one of the very first sources of ice for the new Fountain Colony (Colorado Springs was first known as Fountain Colony) and was cut and hauled by Mr. S. C. Foote and sold here in town.  

The T.E. Johnson in this ad was an early and major, long time ice dealer here in the Springs. Timothy Johnson was also one of the first settlers here. He built some ponds and an ice house on his land that Cheyenne Creek ran through over by Cheyenne Canyon. Later, he also built a large ice house on Huerfano Street with a capacity of 900 tons for summer time sales. He also sold spring water and was a large milk dealer here too. The Union Ice & Coal Company was founded by Johnson on West Vermijo.

Prior to the end of the 1870’s, competition among local ice dealers was evident by some of the local ads.

Here is a June 9, 1877 ad by Mr. Johnson where he pans his competitor Mr. J.B. Riggs.

And FYI, the word humbug in those days meant to trick or to deceive someone.

And then, local ice dealer and competitor Charles Stockbridge also put out this ad about the quality of his ice and gets in a dig at one of his competitors whose teams were apparently owned by his mother-in-law.

There were many ice dealers and ice houses in and around Colorado Springs through the years; Prospect Lake for example had a large 600 ton ice house that was built in 1909 to store ice cut from that lake. Ice houses also spawned another business enterprise, which was the buying and hauling of sawdust from area sawmills.  The sawdust was used not only as insulation in the buildings, but also to cover the blocks of ice and preserve them.

Contamination was still a problem every year and it wasn’t until after the Colorado Midland Railroad came into existence that a cleaner and much purer ice became available to Colorado Springs. On a daily basis from the Springs, the Midland was steaming in and out of 11 Mile Canyon. That was when local rancher George Frost thought of the possibilities of a successful ice cutting business. So, in 1891 he dammed up the South Platte river at the mouth of 11 Mile Canyon and built what was later to be named Lake George.   

Lake George, as you probably know, is a very tiny unincorporated town about 40 miles west of Colorado Springs on Highway 24.  Its elevation is 8000 feet and sits in what the Forest Service meteorologist calls a “cold sink” and has some of the coldest extreme temperatures on the eastern slope of Colorado. From mid-December through mid-February, during what I would call a normal winter, it is below zero almost every morning. 

George Frost by the way, was born on July 3, 1843 in Massachusetts and was a Civil War veteran coming to Colorado in the early spring of 1886.

So, after the completion of the lake, a very large ice house was constructed beside the east edge of the water. The Lake George Ice Company produced ice that was of a most superior quality and purity, which in turn made it the preferred ice in the Pikes Peak Region and beyond.

A big customer of the mountain ice was the Citizens Ice Company of Colorado Springs. They signed a contract that would provide them with 25,000 tons of ice per year.  Citizens also built a 10,000 ton ice warehouse at the corner of Sierra Madre and Moreno Streets. 

In this Gazette ad from 1910, it boasts about the ice at Lake George.

At the bottom of the ad, it reads “Lake George Ice is a natural Ice taken from the famous Lake George, 40 miles west of this city at an elevation of 9,000 feet. It has a state wide reputation for its pure, sparkling water, clear as crystal, which when frozen makes an absolutely pure, clear ice free from all impurities and absolutely without any contamination, together with higher refrigeration and careful handling that makes Lake George Ice the finest in the state.”

The restaurants and hotels of both Colorado Springs and Manitou absolutely preferred and loved Lake George ice. 

The famous crystal clear blocks of Lake George ice began with a large workforce of men and horses out on the frozen lake.  The ice business in Lake George employed anywhere from 75 to over 200 men to cut and store the ice. George Frost annually sold tens of thousands of tons of ice to the Colorado Midland Railroad and other railroads such as the Rock Island, Rio Grande and the Santa Fe.  Besides Colorado Springs, Lake George ice also went to the cities of Pueblo and Denver and many more places along the Front Range and eastern plains. One year they even shipped 24,000 tons to Chicago. Lake George ice allowed the Broadmoor’s wealthy visitors to sip cool drinks in the hot Colorado Springs summers. Lake George ice was even shipped to Rocky Ford for packing their famous melons.  Every year, over 100,000 tons of ice was cut from Lake George and the supply seemed inexhaustible.

Once ice harvest season began around late December or early January, one of the first chores was to clear the harvest area of frozen snow. 

Usually, a conventional farmer’s disc was pulled behind horses to break up the snow.  Then horses would pull a scraper, which was called a Fresno, that cleared the snow down to the glare ice.  After snow and any other debris were cleared, a set of checker board grid lines were then laid out.  This allowed a special horse drawn plow to make deep grooves in the ice with a scorer.  This photo shows the men and teams scoring the ice at Lake George.

Here’s a better look at the scorer.

The bottom of each plate was saw-like and took deep penetrating bites.

After a few passes with the scorer, the workers would then start cutting the ice along the grid lines with hand saws. 

The results were called ice cakes.  At Lake George when the blocks were cut, the “cakes” were never hand lifted out of the water, but floated from the harvest area to a steam-powered conveyor belt at the shoreline.  To do this, channels were cut into the ice and the cakes were pushed along by many men spaced out alongside these channels, using pike poles.

Once at the shore, the pike poles would be used to push the cake blocks from the water onto the partially submerged conveyor belt system for transport up to the ice house.

These ice cakes were crystal clear on the sides of each block but the tops still had some frozen snow on them, even after the Fresno’s cleared the lake. So, to free all debris on the top part and square up the bottom,  the ice cakes went through a “planer” positioned on the conveyor belt that trimmed off the frozen slush and snow and made the blocks symmetrical and crystal clear. 

Another conveyor belt system was positioned below the “planer” and carried away the frozen shavings and ice chips that the planer produced.  In the above photo at the Lake George ice house, on the right, you can see the cakes going up the main conveyor, through the planer and up to the ice house. You can also see the conveyor that carries away the planer chips going to the left. The tower seen on the left of the photo supports the top of the conveyor belt and has a pulley system and cable that runs to the steam engine which turns the belt. Black smoke from the steam engine is seen in the top center of the photo.

Once the cakes made it to the desired opening of the building, they were shuffled to the chosen storage area of the ice house.

After the blocks of ice were placed in the ice house, sawdust was spread around and over the blocks for added protection.

In this photo, boxcars are seen on the siding in front of the Lake George Ice House taking on ice.  45 to 50 cars a day were shipped from Lake George, with each car capable of holding 23 tons. That’s a lot of ice!

In 1918, the Colorado Midland Railroad ended 31 years of service.

A small number of freights ran for a few more years to Lake George for ice but in the fall of 1921, the scrap train was ripping up the entire system except from Divide to Colorado Springs.  With rail service terminated, that marked the end of the ice cutting business in Lake George.

But the industry of supplying natural ice from area ponds and lakes was doomed anyway, even long before the Midland went out of business.

It was back on May 6, 1851, that Dr. John Gorrie was granted the first U.S. Patent for mechanical refrigeration. Although it was far from practical, it did lay the ground work for modern refrigeration.

In the summer of 1891 T.E. Johnson built an artificial ice plant at his Union Ice & Coal Company. That plant was later sold and in 1901 a new $50,000 building was built at the northwest corner of Vermijo and Sahwatch. Inside that building was installed a $30,000 ammonia plant which produced 30 tons of ice per day making it at the time, the largest ice plant in Colorado Springs.

In 1897, the El Paso Ice & Coal Company of Colorado Springs was also selling artificial ice and by the 1930’s, the industry of cutting natural ice had pretty much run its course.

Today, we are far removed from the labor intensive industry of providing natural ice to area residents.  I’m sure that ice is probably taken for granted by most of us, as it is merely a convenience available at the push of a button.