This Forgotten Minnesota Job Once Kept America’s Food From Spoiling

While it's not even officially winter yet, after a few years away, the cold and snow are back in Minnesota. But there was a time in our state's history when winter was big business here in our neck of the woods.

Old Man Winter appears to have made a comeback so far this season, with much of the state having already seen snowfalls of between 4 and 8 inches (or more in some parts) on the last two days of November. And even though the past two winters were unusually mild, Minnesotans know that *this* cold and snowy weather is much more like a typical Minnesota winter-- one that used to provide a lot of jobs exporting a unique part of the cold-weather season here in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

Minnesota Once Led the Nation in Harvesting and Exporting Ice

Sure, many resorts, cabins, ski and ice fishing areas up north still use Minnesota's winter as their 'business.' But exporting winter-- specifically ice from the Gopher State's 10,000 frozen lakes and rivers-- used to be a major industry, and one that created a lot of jobs.

According to this History Lesson column from the Sun-Sailor (a weekly site serving the western Twin Cities suburbs), ice from frozen Minnesota rivers and lakes was used before our modern-day refrigerators and freezers were invented to help keep food cold.

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How Minnesota’s Ice Industry Kept America’s Food Cold

And, the story says the ice harvest industry was big in Minnesota from the early 1800s to as recently as the 1950s. Crews would spend several weeks in January, working nearly 24 hours a day, cutting massive blocks of ice that would then be stored in massive, insulated warehouses before being delivered to homes and businesses.

Those individual homes and businesses would then put that ice in their icebox-- an insulated cabinet located in the kitchen, before refrigerators and freezers were invented-- to help keep food cold. Those blocks of ice were also used on trucks and trains delivering food across America. The harvest was so great that the supply of ice would last throughout the entire year-- even during our hot summer months. And, it was once the second-largest export in the entire country.

Why Minnesota’s Ice Harvest Completely Disappeared—And Who Still Does It

However, change was coming. After electricity made it to even the most rural parts of the U.S. in the early 1950s, Minnesota's ice harvesting business pretty much went away. That's because of refrigeration, which made the refrigerators and freezers we know today much more common in households across the country, eliminating the need to keep a block of ice on hand-- unless it was for your drink, that is.

Minnesota's ice harvest isn't totally gone, however. An ice harvest is still done each year (when Mother Nature cooperates, that is) by the Three Rivers Park District in Plymouth, as well as in other parts of the state, as this social media post from 2022 shows:

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