Cocolalla plant once kept nation cold with prime 'blue ice'

Anyone fortunate enough to have been born before the days of modern refrigeration remembers the sound of the horse and wagon nearing the house with its load of huge blocks of ice.

The iceman would take his ice pick and magically chip away until a smaller block would appear just the right size for the waiting icebox. If a child was good, and stayed out of the way, then a few ice chips would be given to him/her to be wrapped in a piece of newspaper and sucked on with delight. This was usually done away from one’s house to keep from hearing the motherly words, “Now don’t eat too much of that ice because it will give you a sore throat.”

The ice would then be picked up by tongs and carried to the back porch or kitchen. The transaction would end with, “That will be 10 cents, please,” and everything in the old icebox would be safe until the next visit from the iceman.

On special days, two blocks of ice would be purchased and one would end up, with a liberal amount of course ice cream salt, in the hand turned ice cream freezer. After what seemed an eternity of turning, the cream would be pronounced “ready” and the freezer would be covered with either burlap bags or old newspapers to “set.”

It seemed hours before the freezer top was removed to reveal to numerous young eyes the beauty of the contents. On rare occasions, the celebration would be cut short because some of the salty slush had leaked into the metal canister and ruined the ice cream. This caused the squeals of joy to turn to moans of disappointed from kids of all ages.

In the southern part of the country, rivers and streams rarely froze solid; the ice for the home and stores usually came from a local “ice house” where blocks of ice was frozen and then delivered by horse and wagon. In our area things were different.

In the delightful book, “The Cocolalla Valley 1860-1910,” compiled by the Southside 5th grade class of 1982-83, Edward Kalb related the following story. “I was nine or ten years old when I started helping my dad cut ice blocks out of Cocolalla Lake. We used crosscut saws to make the blocks. The water underneath would push the blocks up and we would hook tongs on them. The blocks were about one foot square and eighteen to twenty inches thick. After we put the tongs on a block, we had to pull it up by hand onto the ice.”

“When the block came up the water spread upon the top of the ice making the ice slippery and if we weren’t careful we’d go for a cold swim! We slid the block along a ramp made of boards onto a sled. We would pull the blocks of ice home on the sled. When we got it there, we unloaded the blocks into a building and covered the blocks with sawdust. This was how we kept our food cold …”

Today, many people zip up and down the highway in Cocolalla and some may glace at the beautiful lake. But nothing is left along the beautiful shore line that would indicate that years ago there existed bunk houses, barns, and ice houses that was the source of prime “blue ice” for the nation. Few people realize that the huge ice plant located on the south end of the lake employed 300 men during the winter harvest and 100 men during the summer months to maintain the plant and care for the ice in storage.

The Sandpoint Daily Bulletin reported in 1922 just how big the operation was of the Cocolalla Ice Company. It read, “One hundred and ten cars are being loaded daily, or 3,500 tons; while 2,500 tons are being daily shipped up the loading chains into the mammoth icehouse. The cars (railroad) are loaded 16 cars at a time...” for shipment to the railroad’s ice stations that were located at Yakima, Ellensburg, Toppenish, Walla Walla, Pasco and Spokane, Wash.

To be continued