Knoxville, Tennessee, early 1930s…I suppose everyone that sees this post has a refrigerator in their home. Quite a few may have multiple refrigerators, but there was a time that no one owned one. Well what did they do to keep things like milk, butter, cheese, etc.?First of all, a lot of our grandparents and great grandparents didn’t keep the same foods we do today. Cupboards and pantries had pretty much basic items like sugar, flour, corn meal, salt, and things of that nature. Cellars held canned goods such as vegetables, fruits, jams, jellies, and even meats. Potatoes were also stored in a cellar along with other “root” vegetables. Another storage area was a smokehouse where smoked or salted meats were cured and stored.What about things that needed to stay cooler? Many folks who lived close to a spring would build a spring house around that spring to keep various items like milk. I’ve found that some communities would even share a spring house at a larger spring. After railroads were built, access was given to the northern lakes and streams that froze solid every winter. Ice could now be cut in large blocks, packed into insulated rail cars, and shipped south. Southern towns often had ice houses which were simply insulated buildings for keeping ice as long as possible.Most cities had an ice house which distributed, by way of home delivery, blocks of ice to their customers. The ice box was the refrigerator of its time, and I’ve read that ice companies had a pretty good business up into the 1940s, maybe longer.This picture shows a Knoxville woman at her family’s ice box with a local delivery man.
