Old house

[hmca]

Jun 8, 2023 19:54:59 GMT BuckSkin said:

Notice how everyone has paused in their activities and are looking at the camera; there was no such thing as an action shot back in those days; film and developing was much too expensive to be wasting it trying to get an action shot.

Nice observation.

[pontiac1940]

WayneS and BuckSkin I remember ice houses back in the mid 50s out in the boondocks. (Oh, BTW, my uncles and aunts never got power until about 1957.) Anyway, these ice houses were tall wooden bldgs in which wood shavings were placed. In winter, large blocks of ice were sawn from frozen lakes and placed in the ice houses. The ice was insulated so well they would stay solid well into summer and ice  blocks used in ice chests (fridges) to keep food chilled in summer.   

[BuckSkin]

We had an "ice house" in our community well into the late 1970s; one of the wealthiest men in the community was the man that owned it; they sold ice in 50-lbs blocks.

The "Ice Man" ran his door-to-door route the same as the Milk Man, Postman, and so forth.

I remember a somewhat rowdy song my father used to sing about an "Ice Man"

"I am the Ice Man,

sly as a fox....."

If people were fortunate enough to have a cooperating spring on their property, they would dig out and build a "spring house" where the water coming out of the ground would run through a long trough before exiting through a pipe and going on down the creek.

Milk, eggs, butter, and so forth were kept in the trough of flowing water; and, if you were sent to fetch a bucket of water, you filled it from the pipe.

I can only speak for Kentucky; the coolest I know of caves and deep-water wells being able to achieve is 56°; they used to claim that Mammoth Cave remained a steady 56° year round, no matter how hot or cold it may be above ground.

[WayneS]

We had a very small icehouse, but the issue was lack of water! We had a couple of wells, but the water was not drinkable, so they were used to keep some perishables cool, and we had machine dug ponds that would fill with rain and melted snow, and was our source of drinking water. Then later, cisterns (large concrete tanks) were dug beside the houses, and stored our drinking water! In early years, the water came from the ponds, and later was trucked in from local towns who had running water!
i.ibb.co/h1bYkKK/1938-Cutting-Ice-on-Pond.jpg

[BuckSkin]

Jun 9, 2023 13:27:55 GMT WayneS said:

We had a very small icehouse
i.ibb.co/h1bYkKK/1938-Cutting-Ice-on-Pond.jpg

Many thanks for sharing the ice cutting photo; that is something we Kentuckians seldom get to see.

We did cut and save ice; but, camera film was too expensive to be wasting on such.

I have been fortunate to always have either a very dependable well, a spring, or both; where we live now, we have both, a strong well that I can pull the handle on and walk away for days on end and it never slow down, and a big fresh-water spring boiling out of the ground that would fill a milk truck in minutes; people a lot older than me tell me that spring has never slowed down.

I share a back fence with a Limestone quarry stockpile (not a quarry, but a huge storage yard).

Several years ago, when we were building the new US127, they needed a huge amount of water to mix with the dense-grade rock that went on under the blacktop.

Yates Drilling brought in a big rig and hit an Artesian Well, just over the fence from me, that was blowing water into the clouds while they were trying to get it captured; that well easily more than provided the vast needs of the rock pile and had no pump; the water came out of the ground of it's own accord under pressure.

There are however, many in the county and surrounding counties who can drill plumb into hell and never hit anything but smoke; and, the creeks and streams around them disappear into their slate-rock beds and they stay bone dry for months at a time; those people have cisterns and often have to have water hauled in to fill the cistern; this in Kentucky that brags of having more running water shoreline than any other state.