Holzwarth Historic Site - Ice House & Wood Shed

Holzwarth Ice House and Wood Shed

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Historical/Interpretive Information/Exhibits

What the Rocky Mountains may lack in agricultural value, they make up for in natural resources such as timber, wild game, and ice. There are two buildings, the Wood Shed and the Ice House, which were both used as storage areas for some of these materials, used to sustain the family.

The Ice House

Located next to the Taxidermy Shop, the Ice house structure was used to keep wild game and other perishable foods cool, using blocks of ice that averaged 100-125 pounds. The ice was primarily obtained from Grand Lake, located eight miles south of the homestead and hauled up and down the valley by horse drawn sleds. However, some blocks were cut closer to the homestead from the surrounding beaver ponds.

Johnnie Holzwarth referred to it as the hardest work he had ever done in his life. He was paid $3.50 a day to prepare horses and drive them to Grand Lake to haul the blocks. He and other workers were paid an additional 4 cents for every ice block they cut, with an additional penny added if they took the ice block out of the lake.

Why do you think this building has a sod roof?

The Wood Shed

Look across the path from taxidermy shop to view the woodshed. It was used to store chopped logs, used for heating and building the homestead, and sourced from nearby lodgepole pines.

The lodgepole pine is a quality building material for the construction of primitive cabins such as these, due to their narrow straight trunks. The family harvested and processed all logs used in the constructing the homestead with their own personal sawmills. There were two sawmills: a smaller one on the north end of the homestead, which produced an average of 300,000 boards annually and was used for their personal buildings; and a larger, commercial operation that was located down valley, which processed an estimated 5 million feet of lumber in its lifetime.

Do you think that this woodshed is big enough to store all the wood you'd need to keep warm through a Colorado mountain winter?

The business practices and personalities of the Holzwarth family made them influential and interesting to guests and neighbors, but none of them were quite like Johnnie Holzwarth, the temporary resident of the next building.