The Icebox

Growing up on the farm, this is what we called the refrigerator.  I’m not sure why.  Perhaps this comes from older times when people really did use iceboxes for keeping things cold before the invention of the refrigerator. 

 Root cellar

 

Before even the icebox, people stored food in underground cellars.  Iceboxes were invented just before the nineteenth century.  People would purchase huge blocks of ice and put them in wooden boxes equipped with drip pans for the melting ice.  Anything that needed to be kept cool was placed in the box and the ice replaced periodically.

There was an old, red brick icehouse in the small town near the farm when we were all growing up.  Daddy used to get ice from there occasionally.  They sold it in huge square blocks (similar to ice cubes but a hundred times bigger.)  Large silver colored picks were used to hoist the ice from the icehouse to the waiting transport.

German engineer Carl von Linde developed the first refrigerator in 1876.  By 1920, over 200 companies were producing refrigerators, but due to the cost, most people continued to use the icebox.  Freon was invented to cool and freeze foods.  This was effective but caused the release of chlorofluorocarbons into the environment.  In the 1980s, Freon was discontinued.

Did you have a refrigerator or an icebox growing up? 

When we moved into the sharecropper’s shacks when I was about six, we had a small rounded fridge, similar to a Philco, and it could have been that brand.  Kids don’t really pay attention to things like brand names.  We had too much playing to do.  The whole time I was growing up we all called the refrigerator the icebox.  I think people in the south still use this term today.