Frederic Tudor (September 4, 1783 - February 6, 1864) was known as Boston's "Ice King", and was the founder of the Tudor Ice Company. During the early 19th Century, he made a fortune shipping ice to the Caribbean, Europe, and even as far away as India from sources of fresh water ice in New England.
The Tudor Ice Company harvested ice in a number of New England ponds for export and distribution throughout the Caribbean, Europe, and India from 1826 to 1892.
Tudor ice was harvested at Walden Pond in Concord, Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Spy Pond in Arlington, Sandy Pond in Ayer, Horn Pond in Woburn, Lake Quannapowitt in Wakefield, Haggett's Pond in Andover, Suntaug Lake in Lynnfield, Spot Pond and Doleful Pond in Stoneham, and Wenham Lake in Wenham (all places in Massachusetts).
The ice business
During these years, there were ten main sources of ice around Boston. Some ice came from the Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers in Maine, but most centered around Fresh Pond, Cambridge; Smith's Pond, Arlington; Spy Pond, Arlington; Sandy Pond, Ayer; Horn Pond, Woburn; Lake Quannapowitt, Spot Pond and Doleful Pond in Stoneham, Wakefield; Haggett's Pond, Andover; Suntaug Lake, Lynnfield, Wenham Lake, Wenham and Jamaica Pond in Jamaica Plain where, in 1880, there were 22 icehouses storing 30,000 tons of ice.
In the winter of 1846-47, Henry David Thoreau watched a crew of Tudor's ice cutters at work on Walden Pond and recorded these remarks in his journal: The sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. . . . The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.
Wenham Lake ice in particular became world-famous for its clarity, and graced the tables of the aristocracy of plush London society. Tudor founded the Wenham Lake Ice Company to promote this demand. It is said without undue exaggeration that no dinner party in London was considered complete without ice from Wenham Lake.
Tudor family and Nahant
The Tudors were a Boston Brahmin family. The Ice King inherited his family's grounds in Nahant, Massachusetts. In 1825, after constructing his summer cottage in the center of town, he began a lifelong campaign to plant trees on treeless Nahant. By 1832 he had 3,358 trees growing in his nursery and within two years he had some 4,000 trees in cultivation, offering them to summer residents for free if they would plant them on their properties. The family grounds are now the Nahant Country Club.Frederic Tudor was a child of William Tudor (1750—1819), a wealthy lawyer and leading citizen of Boston, and Delia Jarvis Tudor. Frederic's father also served as a Representative of Boston in the Massachusetts General Court (1781—94), State Senator (1801—02), and Secretary of the Commonwealth (1808—09), and was a founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society, whose first meeting was held in his house in Boston.
Frederic Tudor's older brother William was a leading citizen of Boston, sometime literary man, and co-founder of the North American Review and the Boston Athenaeum. William Tudor christened Boston "The Athens of America" in an 1819 letter.
Frederic married Euphemia Fenno (April 6, 1814, Mount Upton, New York — March 9, 1884, Newbury, Vermont). Frederic Tudor's oldest son, Frederic (February 11, 1845 — Boston 1902), was an 1867 graduate of Harvard College and a member of one of the first graduating classes at St. Paul's School (Concord, New Hampshire). The Ice King's second son, William, was also a graduate of St. Paul's School.
The younger Frederic was the grandfather of the 20th century watercolorist and book illustrator Tasha Tudor. (Frederic's daughter Rosamond married William Starling Burgess). She was born in Boston in 1915 and named Starling Burgess for her father. She styled herself as Tasha Tudor and published under that name.
The following article is from: http://www.theretirementbubble.com/hooghlyslush.html
The following text courtesy of The Retirement Bubble:
Better than Hooghly slush
The forgotten American ice trade by Jayakrishnan Nair
In the winter of 1846-47, Henry David Thoreau looked
out of his small self-built house in Walden, Massachusetts and saw a
hundred Irishmen with their American bosses cutting ice slabs from the
pond. On a good day, he noted, a thousand tonnes were carted away. These
ice slabs went not just to New Orleans and Charleston, but also to
Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. Thoreau was amused: there he was sitting in
America reading the Bhagavad Gita and the water from his well was being taken to the land of the Ganges.
A business opportunity
In 1831, a Boston businessman named Frederic Tudor,
who wanted to make money without physical effort, came up with an idea.
He would speculate on coffee prices; coffee consumption in United States
was increasing and prices were going up at the rate of 20 to 30
percent. What could go wrong?
Within three years, this speculation would put him
deep in debt of more than $210,000. He did not know that in 1833 when he
met Samuel Austin, a Boston merchant. Austin’s ships regularly went
from Boston to Calcutta, but on the trip to Calcutta it did not carry
cargo, but ballast. Austin wanted to know if Tudor wanted to ship
American ice at a low freight rate.
If there was one person in United States who had the
expertise to export ice to the other side of the globe, it was Tudor.
Sedulous and quietly determined, he had single-handedly invented the ice
trade in 1806 by exporting ice, cut from frozen lakes in Massachusetts,
to the French colony of Martinique. Everyone—his father, relatives,
other Boston merchants—thought he was in cuckoo-land, but he ignored
them. No merchant was willing to carry his cargo, but he overcame that
by buying a brig for $4000. Inventing various techniques required for
the preservation and safe transportation of ice, he delivered ice to
Havana, New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah as well.
An enterprising man who had dabbled in coal and
graphite mining as well as salt and paper making, he was driven by the
belief that once a person in the tropics had tasted cool water, he would
never drink tepid water. And he was right. But he did not make a profit
till 1810. He was even jailed a few times for being in debt. Even two
decades later, though he was exporting ice to Southern states, Cuba and
West Indies, he was not rich; he made enough to live comfortably. It was
then that he decided to diversify and indulge in coffee speculation.
But shipping ice to India was an offer he could not refuse. Especially with the low freight cost.
To Calcutta
Within a week of meeting Austin, Tudor and another
business partner William Rogers were thinking of logistics. Tudor
himself was involved fixing the Calcutta ship—a vessel with two
square-rigged masts named Tuscany—which had the ability to
transport 180 tonnes of ice. Ice was cut and transported from the lakes
near the Boston harbor. The question was how much of that ice would
survive the trip past the two tropics and the equator.
There was no foolproof way of preventing ice from
melting; it could just be slowed. Over two decades Tudor had perfected
techniques for insulating ice in ships and building safe ice houses.
Previously ice used to be cut in a haphazard manner, but now it was cut
in uniform rectangular blocks which helped in efficient storage and
shipping.
On May 12, 1833, under the captaincy of Littlefield, the Tuscany
set sail for Calcutta. Tudor did not go on the ship, but instead had
William Rogers as his agent. During this long journey, the crew bathed
in sea water, ate dinner of pea soup, goose and cranberry sauce and plum
pudding. For meat they carried pigs, goat, geese and chickens which was
supplemented with shark caught from the sea. When a ship passed by,
they sent messages to family members.
Finally the Tuscany reached the Gangetic delta
in September 1833 to great reception. There was a reason for this
enthusiasm—the British in India were looking for any means to survive
the heat. They were finally getting rid of the Hooghly slush which was
the ice equivalent. To make Hooghly slush, boiled water was poured in
earthenware and placed in shallow pits filled with straw. The cool air
froze the surface creating a thin film of ice. These pots were then
collected and stored in pits for sale during summer. This Hooghly slush
was expensive and it was slush. The slush was available for six weeks at
a rate of 4 pence per pound and now pure Boston ice—so pure that it
astonished scientists like Michael Faraday—was available all year around
for three pence a pound. Tudor also had a subscription model which
helped him sell ice faster: if you bought one ton every day, the price
was halved.
The newspaper India Gazette, argued that ice
should be declared duty free. It also argued that the permission should
be given to unload the cargo at night. The article had effect; the Board
of Customs, Salt, and Opium made ice duty free and allowed it to be
unloaded during the cool night. The land for the ice house was donated
by the Governor General and people took out a subscription to build an
ice house.William Bentinck, the governorgeneral of India presented
William Rogers with a silver cup acknowledging the enterprise; Kipling
wove American ice into one of his stories in the Second Jungle Book.
Debt
By 1834, Tudor had a debt of $210,000 due to the
coffee speculation and the ice trade to India had to work. He reached an
agreement with creditors which would allow him to be a free man and
return to ice trade. He was fortunate to meet a person named Nathaniel
Wyeth who developed tools to cut and transport ice efficiently. With
Wyeth’s tools, they could cut up to a thousand tons a day, a massive
increase from 300 tons a day. Ice could also be cut in uniform
rectangular blocks which minimized the surface exposed to air.
After falling out with his partners—Austin and
Rogers—Tudor sent another ship with 150 tons of ice, 359 barrels of
apples, a new agent and a letter to William Bentinck asking for a
monopoly in the Calcutta trade. The ship reached Calcutta after 163 days
with just two tons of ice and 359 barrels of rotten apples. It seemed
as if the end was near, but what saved him was the letter to Bentinck
and the enthusiasm of the British community in Calcutta.
The interest shown by the British community can be
seen in the communication between the president of the American Ice
Committee of Calcutta and Frederic Tudor. The rotten fruit was mentioned
and the Committee suggested that he avoid shipping them. Tudor did not
agree; he replied that small quantities could be shipped if the fruit
was maintained between 32 and 40 degrees. He wanted to ship Spanish
grapes and pears as well.
The Committee then expressed interest in expanding
the ice house so that there would be year long supply. A town hall
meeting was convened for discussing techniques for building an effective
ice house. Some suggested that the cistern be made of iron, instead of
wood. Another wanted a bigger wooden cistern with a wooden wall around
in which air would be trapped while someone else suggested a brick wall
instead of a wooden wall. The committee finally ended by adopting the
resolution that the ice house had to be expanded and the public would
pay for the expense.
Ice was not just used for cooling water, but also as a
palliative for those with fevers and stomach disorders. Occasionally
there were ice famines—when the ships were delayed or ships went to
California due to the Gold rush. During those times the quantity each
person could buy was reduced and if he needed more, he had to get a
doctor’s certificate. In 1850 when Bombay had no ice, the Telegraph and Courier
suggested that there should be an agitation. By 1860, ice was no longer
considered a luxury and chilled alcoholic beverages was common.
Meanwhile there were a few changes in America. When
Tudor started his business, ice was a free commodity. It was available
in plenty and was considered useless. When Tudor monetised it, property
rights were enforced; the amount of ice you could take from a lake
depended on how much land the trader owned along the shores. Tudor had
to look for new sources and that is how he reached Walden.
Ice melts
The favorable transport conditions and British
support rewarded Tudor’s entrepreneurship. Over a period of 20 years,
Tudor made a profit of $220,000 just from Calcutta and paid off his
debt. When he finally got out of debt in 1849, he acknowledged the help
of the British community of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay and their help
in building a “fine fireproof building unconditionally”, though he was
helped by trade to the Southern states as well.
He sold ice to both Bombay and Madras, but he had a
monopoly in Calcutta. The peak years for the ‘crystal blocks of Yankee
coldness’ were between 1840 and 1870. During the American civil war, the
Tudor Ice Company could not ship to the southern ports, but there was a
growth in trade to India. The India trade too suffered a decline during
the Indian rebellion years but then picked up once again.
Tudor died a millionaire in 1864 due to the real
estate he owned in the major shipping ports. For example, he owned land
in Howrah across the Hooghly river. Business continued even after
Tudor’s death; between 1864 and 1866, the company made a profit of
$377,000.
In 1878, The Bengal Ice Company, the first artificial
ice maker in India, was formed and thus began the decline of the
American ice business. Pure ice could now be made locally using
distilled water. There were other factors too like less severe winters,
commercial decline of Boston harbor and rising expense in building
ships. The artificial ice sold for a price much less than the American
ice and by 1882 the business came to an end. By 1904, there were ice
plants all over India: from Peshawar in the North to Madras in the South
and from Karachi in West to Bhamo in East.
The ice houses at Calcutta and Bombay no longer exist
but the one in Madras, built in 1841, still does as a testimony to a
forgotten trade.
[Jayakrishnan Nair is a resident commentator for The Indian National Interest and blogs at Varnam. This article is republished from Pragati - The Indian National Interest Review. Visit their website at pragati.nationalinterest.in. A free Internet subscription is offered at pragati.nationalinterest.in/subscribe/.]
