Legendary Old West gambler and lawman turned New York sportswriter Bat Masterson observed in his final column: “There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours. I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter things are breaking even for both. Maybe so, but I’ll swear I can’t see it that way.” 

Then this legend of the west, a participant in so much Old West history, had a heart attack and died at his typewriter, 

Masterson used ice as a metaphor, but the literal truth was that people up north had ice about any time they wanted it but the sultry south had precious little of it in the good ol’ summertime. We don’t think of ice as an agricultural crop but in the mid-1800s ice was almost as important to the economy of northern states as grain.

Ships, laden with ice sawed from northern ponds and lakes, visited the Texas coast in the early days of statehood but most Texans never saw a single cube of the stuff. By the early 1870s, ice was coming to Texas packed in sawdust-insulated boxcars but it didn’t last long once it got here. The fortunate few Texans with private icehouses filled them with their own private supplies. Bat Masterson was more literally correct than we’re giving him credit for. 

When the Civil War stopped shipments from the North, Texans complained about the lack of ice as much as the lack of anything else. An ice-making machine developed in France made it through a Union blockade to San Antonio and brought a measure of relief to that town. 

A casual glance at histories of Texas communities shows that most towns of any consequence boasted an icehouse right along with the churches, stores, post offices, saloons and cotton gins. At some point, enterprising icehouse operators began putting beer and soda pop on ice. And then milk and butter. And why not have the baker drop off some bread? These were the first convenience stores. 7-Eleven began as the Consumers Ice Company and later the Southland Ice Company.

At home, before the arrival of the modern refrigerator, people used iceboxes. Iceboxes had hollow walls lined with tin or zinc and insulated with cork, sawdust, straw or seaweed. People bought a large block of ice and stored it in an area near the top of the box, allowing cool air to circulate to otherwise perishable items—milk, butter and the like—in the lower compartments. 

The icebox had to be drained or emptied every day until the ice was all gone and it was time for another trip to the icehouse. Or an iceman delivered it. John Daniel Wolf, in Harder Than Hardscrabble, remembered the iceman making his appointed rounds in deeply rural Bell County, same as the mailman. The iceman came with the ice in the back of a truck and covered by big tarps.

 “You could swap two dozen eggs for a block of ice,” he recalled. “And many a time we had a tremendous treat, because we made homemade ice cream with that block of ice.” 

The ice trade helped preserve food and drink for a growing coastal population. Inland families were left to rely on the time-tested preservation methods of drying, smoking, salt-curing and pickling the foods they raised.

Icehouses started going out of business in the 1920s but Texas still had more iceboxes than refrigerators in the 1940s. By the 1950s nearly 90 percent of Texas families had a refrigerator of one kind or another. The air conditioner wasn’t far behind. Now ice is a billion-dollar industry for all seasons, but especially summer. Bat Masterson would approve.