How people kept food cold before the refrigerator

Refrigeration to preserve food gained popularity in Edmonton in the late 1800s. Before that, people relied on salting, smoking or drying food. Leftovers from meals were often fed to the pigs because they could not be safely stored for the next day.

For many years before the invention of electric refrigerators, people in Edmonton used iceboxes, heavily insulated containers made out of wood or metal with space enough for food and a large block of ice. These were like elaborate indoor camp coolers like most of us have used with a block of ice to keep our food and drinks cold during a picnic or when we are camping. So if there was no electrical refrigeration to make ice, where did it come from?

As Edmonton grew, several ice companies built warehouses on the Rossdale Flats and filled them with ice cut from the North Saskatchewan in the winter. They covered the ice with layers in hides to make it last as long as possible.

Employees from Arctic Ice Company, Twin City Ice Company and Edmonton Ice Company delivered ice door-to-door and to businesses. The price of ice would rise as the warehouses emptied and then sales would taper off when winter arrived and people could make their own ice. 

Arctic Ice Company advertising described their product this way, "The Saskatchewan river ice is as pure as nature can make it. Coming as it does from the snow-fed streams of the surrounding country, filtered through the immense gravel beds along the river, and fed from thousands of pure springs, the water is as limpid and translucent as a diamond, its rapid flow causing a natural subsidence of all vegetable and other matter to the gravel bed below leaving the surface absolutely free from impurities."

The advent of electric refrigerators in the 1930s slowly made iceboxes obsolete while, at the same time, ensuring a supply of ice year-round.

Original story posted by Gary Dick to an internal Edmonton website.