If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius… he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies.         - Henry David Thoreau, Walden

This is a story of insanity, and it begins in ancient Ireland, where legend says there once lived the powerful Tuatha de Danann. They were Kings, Queens, Druids, and those possessed with magic arts long since forgotten or explained away by modern science. Among them was Cailleach (translation, “Old Hag”), the Witch Queen of Winter. Twice a year she battled with her sister Áine, the Queen of Summer, locked in an eternal cyclical struggle between cold and warmth. Cailleach was fearsome. She carried a magic staff with which she could direct the weather, and everything near her froze. Once, when confronted by a giant, Callieach struck the earth with her staff, breaking it into rocky pieces. Scooping up the rocks, leaving a crater behind, she hurled them at the giant until she cut him down. The crater filled with water and became a lake, which immediately froze over.

Time passed, and old ways melted into memory. An Irish race of mortals reigned until English powers sought to control them. By the late 1700s, the American Revolutionary War, triggered by the Battles of Lexington and Concord, resulted in England losing possession of America. England was determined to retain its remaining empire, including Ireland, and by the 1840s, Ireland was under heavy-handed English rule. Life was harsh and famine was growing. Thousands of Irish immigrated to American cities like Boston, Massachusetts, where they found work in the surrounding areas.

Frederic Tudor (Sept. 4, 1783 - Feb. 6, 1864) 

It was thus that in the winter of 1846/47, an Irishman working as an ice cutter for the Boston-based Frederic Tudor Ice Company, found himself on, and then suddenly below, the frozen surface of Walden Pond in Concord. At the time, Henry David Thoreau was living in his cabin on the shore of this kettle hole that science says was carved by a glacier and is, at its deepest, 108 feet. As described by Thoreau in his journal and book Walden, for sixteen days, “a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice…unroof[ing]the house of fishes”. Using horse-drawn sharpened sleds, the men scored the pond into squares. Then, placing a horse-drawn ice-cutting plow into the scored grooves, the fourteen- to eighteen-inch-deep ice was cut into blocks. Holding long pike poles, the Irishmen then struck the blocks, breaking them free. To condense from Thoreau’s writing, the blocks were next “sledded to the shore… rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air. It looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla.”

On this day, the ice below one of the Irishmen suddenly gave way, plunging him into the freezing water. Cailleach was in a merciful mood, for the man made it back to the shore and stumbled to Thoreau’s cabin for help. Thoreau placed him by the fire and gave him a dry shirt. Here, in this section of Concord woods owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the simple walls of Thoreau’s cabin were in stark contrast to the Beacon Hill mansion owned by the Irishman’s employer, Frederic Tudor.

 Born in Boston in 1783, Frederic Tudor was the son of wealthy lawyer William Tudor. Unlike his academically inclined father, who studied law with John Adams and was George Washington’s legal counsel on April 19, 1775, Frederic dropped out of Harvard and eventually plunged into a business venture that involved cutting free ice from New England Ponds and selling it to hotter climates where ice did not exist.

 It was a brilliant, yet insane, idea. Everyone knew ice melted, and no mortal could defeat hot weather. In 1806, unable to get any ship carrier to join him in this ludicrous venture, Tudor bought his own ship, The Favorite, loaded it with ice, and sailed it from Charlestown, MA, to Martinique. A headline in the Boston Gazette read: “No joke. A vessel has cleared at the Custom House for Martinique with a cargo of ice. We hope this will not prove a slippery speculation.” A month later, the ship arrived. In his diary, Frederic Tudor copied a passage from the Martinique Gazette: “The Brig Favorite… happily arrived at St. Pierre, on the 5th of March, and is now disposing of her cargo to great advantage. It will be a remarkable epoch in the history of luxury and enterprise that on the 6th of March ice creams have been eaten at Martinique probably for the first time since the settlements of the country and this too in a volcanic land lying fourteen degrees north of the equator.” The success was short-lived as, shortly after arrival, the remaining ice melted in the hot climate. A subsequent ice shipment in 1807 to Havana, Cuba, also ended in evaporative, costly results.

Ice Harvesting, Massachusetts, early 1850s 

 For the next three decades, shipwrecks, swindlers, imprisonments for unpaid debts, and repeated evaporation failures plagued Tudor. Yet he persisted in this eternal battle between cold and warmth, until at last, with the help of business partners, he gained control of the impossible; conquering hot weather with the design of insulated warehouses, railroad cars, and ships. This changed the entire perishable goods industry, well beyond ice.

Tudor’s ice markets expanded, covering the southern United States, the Caribbean, Cuba, Europe, India, and eventually China. He became known as the “Ice King.”

 In Massachusetts, the Ice King’s crews spread out across the state, cutting ice from multiple freshwater ponds. In Concord, the ice blocks were loaded onto train cars on the track adjacent to Walden Pond, railroaded to Charlestown, and loaded on ships. Imagining the waters of Walden Pond mingling with drinks prepared in India, Thoreau wrote in Walden, “The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

 In British-occupied and controlled India, native and British residents enjoyed Tudor’s ice in cold drinks, chilled foods, and ice cream and incorporated it into medical treatments. Heat emergencies were common for British soldiers in India.  Lt. Edward Charles Zouch, an English naval officer, was one such individual with a history of multiple sunstrokes. In the 1840s, he began incessantly to pace the deck of his ship, raving aloud. One morning, Zouch became convinced he would be hanged at 8:00 a.m. He reported promptly for the event and was upset at the lack of discipline when his crew did not hang him. As documented in a medical report, Zouch then “imagined he had been transformed into a vegetable, an artichoke, and was in the habit of taking advantage of every shower that fell in order that he might be properly watered.”

 “The Artichoke” (formerly known as Lt. Zouch) was escorted from the ship to an English-run lunatic asylum where patients would be subject to the psychiatric treatments of the time. These included prolonged immersion in icy cold baths or being wrapped like a mummy in blankets that had been soaked in ice (now available in India thanks to the Frederic Tudor Ice Company).

So, in the end, it was Tudor’s ice, and not he, that ended up in an insane asylum. Frederic Tudor won the war between cold and warmth, introduced the world to ice, opened new shipping routes, and changed an entire industry of perishable goods. With time and the invention of refrigerators and home ice makers, the Frederic Tudor Ice Company and Concord’s role in the ice trade melted into a memory.

As Thoreau wrote, “[it was like] a fable of the lark and the reapers… and now they are all gone…. I shall look… on the pure sea-green Walden water… and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there.”

All photos public domain

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