Barnyard Trail: Ice House

The Ice House kept ice throughout the summer months.

NPS/Sucena

“I had to drive cattle down to the pond east of the house; when it was frozen over had to cut holes along the shore; no other way to water them. I filled the ice house two years off that pond. It does not look like it now. There was no brush then to speak of... 

The old blacksmith shop stood where the ice house now stands and just to the east of that was the goose house. Old Charlotte Hawkins, a colored woman, use to come down and pick those geese alive for the feathers.”

- Charles H. Ross, 1913 

This icehouse, with its fifteen-foot-deep brick tub, was built in the late 19th century to provide the family with cold storage. It replaced an 18th century blacksmith shop which, while essential for a busy farm, was not a useful structure for a summer retreat.  

Locally cut ice was layered with hay from the salt-marsh and insulated by the cool earth surrounding it, the ice would keep for most of the year. Since electricity only came to the site in 1949, the icehouse remained an important resource for the house well into the 20th century.  

Cornelia Floyd Nichols recalled:,  

“Hidden in it here and there might be found a case of ginger ale, or the Sunday roast brought home on Friday to avoid a trip 'up-street' on Saturday, or after [my husband John Treadwell Nichols] entered the family, a dead bird or fish waiting to be examined at the Natural History Museum."