It is easy to take food for granted. Meat and dairy last for days in a refrigerator and an amazing array of produce is available in the grocery store year-round. In Jefferson’s time freshly butchered meat and dairy would last perhaps a day in hot weather without being cooked, preserved, or kept cold. Fruits and vegetables were available locally and when in season, few being hardy enough to ship long distances. The common American diet, excluding that of Native Americans and the enslaved, contained produce only when grown at home or purchased at a farmer’s market providing there was one nearby and it was affordable. Milk and meat were eaten at points well past today’s “best by” dates. A privileged few were afforded greater access to fresh food by employing ice.
Before the advent of modern refrigeration, ice collected from ponds, lakes, and rivers in the winter, was used to extend the life of perishables. Stored properly, the ice could last well into autumn. At the turn of the 19th century some taverns and hotels had icehouses for their own use and would sell any excess to the public. There were a small number of commercial icehouses in northern cities that sold ice locally. A few wealthy individuals had their own. Thomas Jefferson, known for the dinners he held as president and as a gracious host at home, had icehouses built at the President’s House in Washington, D.C., and at Monticello. A new exhibit on the Weather and Climate Records digital resource uses Jefferson’s notes and other papers to document ice collection and storage from 1801-1825.
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, collecting ice from ponds and rivers was back breaking and wet work. Laborers, most likely a mix of recent immigrants, free Blacks, and the enslaved, used hatchets, picks, saws, and axes to cut the ice and then fished the chunks from the water with pike poles. While northern ponds were covered in ice strong enough for men or even a team of horses to walk on, Virginia ice was much thinner. Manasseh Cutler recorded in his diary that in 1804 the slabs cut for the president’s icehouse were “about two inches thick.” Once in the icehouse the slabs were crushed and rammed together to form a large mass more resistant to melting than individual pieces. At the President’s House, Jefferson’s financial records and retained orders indicate that except for the winter of 1807-1808 for which there are no accounts, the icehouse was filled every winter Jefferson was in residence. A chart tracking the “state of the ice” in the Monticello icehouse for several years between 1811 and 1820 indicates that the ice lasted as long as mid-October in 1815 and 1816. Not so coincidentally, these were years that experienced significant cooling owing to the 1814 eruption of Mount Mayon in the Philippines and the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Ash in the upper atmosphere cooled large parts of the planet causing 1816 to be remembered as “the year without summer.”
By the 1820s ice imported from New England was available for purchase in most cities. Frederic Tudor, a Bostonian, is credited with starting the large-scale exportation of ice. He sent his first ship to Martinique in1806 but met with minimal success owing to a lack of adequate storage and the need to convince people that they wanted ice. To market his product Tudor gave ice to taverns as an encouragement to serve cold drinks. After constructing an icehouse in Havana in 1810, business slowly began to build. Improvements in icehouse construction and the development of an ice plow that scored the ice in regularly sized blocks, enabled the commercial ice business to increase efficiency and to thrive. Artificially produced ice began to replace natural ice in the early 20th century. By the 1930s the local iceman’s cart went up and down city streets, much like the ice cream truck today, selling ice to fill the iceboxes beginning to appear in home kitchens.
The icehouse records reflect a time when ponds and rivers in Virginia and Washington froze reliably. Dependent on natural ice, there were years when Jefferson worried about collecting enough, but the weather seemed to come through. Climate change has made filling an icehouse from a pond nearly impossible in the region. Even in northern states, where the ponds and lakes still freeze over, the date of first freeze is getting later every year, shortening the window for ice harvest and affecting the quality of the ice. Camps that rely on lake ice to supply to their summer residents worry about poor ice preventing their trucks and equipment from going out. Changes in the freeze/thaw cycle also shorten the winter recreation season, reducing income from tourism in many places. More importantly it has an ecological impact on life in the water by inhibiting the oxygenation of the deepest levels and aiding the incursion of invasive species into the warmer waters. The lack of ice cover on the largest lakes can even affect local weather.
The interaction of climate and everyday life is the subject of a new section on the Jefferson Weather and Climate Records digital resource. Jefferson’s icehouse records document the work involved in collecting and storing ice as well as attention to weather. His produce chart, made from data collected during his two terms as president, lists a variety of fruit and vegetables purchased at the Washington markets and indicates when during the year they might be available for purchase. In Jefferson’s time the weather and climate affected virtually every aspect of everyday life beyond the choice of weather-appropriate clothing or activities. His motivation for recording icehouse observations may have been practical, a need to know when to be ready to work, or motivated by his interest in the relationship of people to their environments. Today they help bring home how climate has changed in the past 200 years.
Further reading:
The Jefferson Weather Record, 14 January 1815, 15 December 1825, Jefferson’s Icehouses.
Thomas Jefferson to James Dinsmore, 19 Mch. 1802, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 37:86-7. Manuscript in the Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress.
William Parker Cutler and Julia Perkins Cutler, eds., Life, Journals and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, LL.D., 2 vols. (Cincinnati, 1888), 2:72, 153.
Climate Change Indicators, United States Environmental Protection Agency, archived site from 19 January 2021.
Sarah Gladu, “Ice-In and Ice-Out,” Coastal Rivers Conservation Trust, Maine, 15 December 2022.
Roderick Floud and others, The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700, Cambridge, Eng., 2011.
Lester Graham, “Consequences of Less Ice on Lakes Due to Climate Change,” Michigan Public Radio, 14 October 2024.
Tim Graf, Ice Harvesting, Three Rivers Park District, Minnesota, 23 Sep. 2025.
Mara Hoplamazian, On Thin Ice: How Warming Winters are Changing the Squam Lake Ice Harvest, New Hampshire Public Radio, 8 Mch. 2024.
Vertie Knapp, “The Natural Ice Industry in Philadelphia in the Nineteenth Century,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 41 (1974), 412-21.
National Centers for Environmental Information, Past Weather, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, June Global Release, 9 June 2026.
Katherine Ott, “How Did it Feel to be an American Colonist in 1776? Probably Itchy, Achy, and Slightly Nauseated,” The Conversation, 2 July 2026.
J. Ruess and others, The Virginia Climate Assessment, Fairfax, VA, 2025.
“Pocono Manor Ice Harvest in 1919,” film, posted 26 October 2010 by Farm Collector Magazine, YouTube.
Lewis P. Simpson, “Boston Ice and Letters in the Age of Jefferson,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal, 9 (1968), 58–76.
“Thomas Jefferson’s Underground Rooms,” The White House Historical Association.
