In the 1700s, only the rich elites had ice for their guests or to cool their drinks or preserve other perishables. It was harvested locally in winter and stored through summers in covered ice houses to minimize melting. Ice production was initially very labor intensive as it was performed entirely with hand axes and saws, and may cost hundreds of dollars a ton to have ice available all summer. In the early 1800s they developed techniques and specialized tools to harvest ice cheaply and one of the major exports from Massachusetts, New York and other settled northern states was ice — the “Frozen Water Trade”.This trade eventually averaged several million short tons of ice per year that sold for millions of dollars in the U.S.. This ice was harvested by scoring the ice with horse drawn gouges or ice plows that allowed the ice to be separated into square or rectangular blocks. This ice was cut out of frozen lakes, rivers and ponds, floated in a cleared channel to a loading dock before being transferred to an insulated ice house. There it was kept till it could be sold or transferred.
One of the more unusual applications of the frozen ice trade was the miners in Comstock Lode in Virginia City, Nevada. As they mined ever deeper for the silver and gold there the temperatures in the mines continued to rise. Soon the temperatures were well over 110 °F (43.3 °C) and they started having to give the miners ice to help them survive. A miner could use over 75 pounds (34 kg) of ice per shift. The ice was harvested in winter from frozen lakes in the Sierra Nevada (U.S.) with some like the Central Pacific Railroad building, after 1869, special ponds to help them harvest and ship ice to Virginia City, San Francisco, California and other Nevada and California cities.
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