Selle shares tales of early-day ice harvests

Sandpoint Furniture/Carpet One, home of The Ponderay Design Center and Selkirk Glass & Cabinets (208-263-5138), sponsors this column.

(It was on Sept. 30, 2000, that Erik Daarstad and I met with Bob Selle in his home to interview him for the “Sandpoint Centennial” movie.

As he walked again the paths of yesteryear, Bob relived the excitement of his life experiences and his words reflected his enthusiasm.

In his way of speaking, them became “em,” because often became “cause,” and anything to be emphasized was done with a “yeah” or, if very important, “yeah-yeah.”

Today, Bob shares, in his own words, about the days before the refrigerator ended the delivery of ice and fuel by a horse drawn wagon.

Bob Selle died at his Sunnyside home on Sept. 1, 2004, at the age of 88.)

Question: “Bob, you mentioned that your Uncle John had an ice harvest business. Where was that and what is ice harvesting?”

Bob: “Well, he iced up the iceboxes in people’s homes and they kept the ice down on the beach. The big icehouse was on Lake Street down in Dearborn Slough, between Second and Third Avenue.

“That was all sloughs in those days — the water came back out of the lake, out of the river, backed up there, a big hole, wetlands, in other words. Yeah.

“This icehouse was on the face of Lake Street and his office and his barn for his teams were on Lake Street, between Third and Fourth Avenue.

“This big house, to me as I remember being young it was a huge building, and they’d go down when the ice was

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the right thickness and cut the ice out of the lake cause in those days, see, we got winter every winter. You could bank on it.

“We’d get two or three storms and I think they’d wait until the ice was about sixteen inches thick fore they’d cut cause they wanted to make about three hundred pound kegs.

“I remember this real well now because my dad used to work on that and I’d go down there when I was 10 or 11 years old. They’d take a fresno (phonetic spelling) and clean the snow off of the ice.

“A fresno is what they pulled with a team and it was just a big bucket with a handle on it, you know. The team pulled it and they would hold the handle and scoop up the snow.

“When it was full, they would dump it and then they’d go back around and get another load. They’d clean all the snow off and then they had a gadget that had spikes in it like a harrow that marked the ice and they drug that along and they would mark the ice, you see, with the team.

“One way they’d make a cake of ice about, oh, I’d say about three feet long, probably about that wide and whatever the thickness of the ice was.

“They marked both ways. Then they’d chop a hole to get a start and they had what they called ice saws and they would cut the ice that way. They cut quite fast. The ice saws had rakers and cutting teeth just like a wood crosscut saw for cutting timber.

“When they’d get pretty near through with a cake, why they’d just pull that up and bust it, you know, and then they’d float ‘em. They’d get one out to get a start; they’d pull it out with a team.

“They’d put a couple of planks down on the bottom of the ice block and then slide ‘em up and out of there.

“They’d cut a great big patch, float it over, and pull ‘em up on the sleigh. The sleigh and the horse would take ‘em up to the icehouse.

“Then they’d put ‘em down — they’d put a layer of sawdust, a layer of ice, a layer of sawdust, until they’d fill in the whole thing. They’d fill the icehouse clear full, all covered in sawdust.

Question: “Where was the icehouse located?”

Bob: “It was right off of Lake Street, between Third and Fourth avenues, down in the Dearborn slough.

“They also had a wood yard there, see. Coal, they sold coal and wood. And they had a barn that could take, I think it had probably about four teams, that would be eight horses, that’s a pretty good size barn, you know.”