Jim Bradshaw: When Centerville was the coolest place in Louisiana

When William S. Cary built an ice house next to Bayou Teche in Centerville in 1850, the (Franklin) Planters’ Banner proclaimed that “the project … has contributed more to the health, comfort and luxury of the population” than anything yet seen.
It may have been the first ice storage facility in South Louisiana. Small amounts of ice had been shipped in casks to Teche communities for some years before that, but in the newspaper’s view the capacity of the new ice house could lead to climate change.
“It has been remarked a thousand times, that were it not for the excessive heat of Louisiana in the summer months … that she would be by far the most delightful State in the Union to reside in. This is certainly true; and … no one ever thinks that the disadvantages of climate could ever be remedied. But such is not the case; by a plentiful use of ice the climate of Louisiana may be moved many miles north,” the newspaper claimed.
That was William Cary’s idea, too. He did not make the ice. The first primitive system to manufacture ice wasn’t patented until 1853. Cary’s ice was cut from frozen lakes up north and shipped by flatboat — packed in sawdust — to ice houses in New Orleans, from which it was sold or shipped elsewhere. It was sent by steamboat to Centerville, still insulated with sawdust or straw, but melting away during the trip.
The sawdust was key to slowing the melting enough that ice could be hauled from one place to another with enough of it left to be worthwhile. There is a story in my family about one of my ancestors who invested his life savings in several flatboats, went up north and cut ice all winter, and returned as far as Baton Rouge when all of his ice melted, sinking his flatboats and his fortune. Nobody told him about the sawdust.
Mr. Cary had better luck, or better sense.
Cary’s ice, the newspaper promised “is of the finest quality — solid as the adamantine rock, and in cakes that never seem to have known the ‘melting mood’ since Old Winter, the great ice planter, long, long ages ago first struck them off. … There are blocks weighing from four to five hundred pounds, and so unsusceptible to melting that … it may be carried without any danger of it melting, unlike that sent up in steamboats from the city, in casks.”
The Banner reported on April 11, 1850, that Cary had just received a hundred tons of ice, “and has it nicely packed away … for the benefit of the people of this parish during the approaching hot weather.” The newspaper said Cary planned to sell it “at a low price, to induce people to buy liberally, that he may secure a business in this line that will pay in future.” The Banner noted that “when the waste by melting between New Orleans and Attakapas is considered, Mr. Cary’s ice will cost but little more than half what New Orleans ice will.”
The business plan must have worked. Early in 1851 Cary built a larger ice house “of about 350 tons capacity, and on a plan which can hardly fail to preserve the ice in good condition through the summer.” Its walls were five layers thick, “two of which are filled with sawdust, and the other three are air spaces.”
He reportedly had on hand 200 tons of “the best kind of Boston ice, which of course is frozen tolerably hard” so that “Franklin people will be well supplied with ice the coming season, and will be able to keep cool if they patronize Mr. Cary liberally.”
The cooling ice helped keep you healthy as “an invaluable agent in the hands of the physician,” the newspaper suggested, “and if [people] in this parish would take an ice bath every morning, when suffering under languor … they would feel in a short time as if they had taken a trip to Canada and resided in Quebec for six months! We do not speak theoretically … we have tried it and tested it.”
The editor also tried, and gave testimony for, another use of the ice.
“As a cheap, elegant and luxurious dessert, ice cream, flavored in the many delicious ways that accomplished housekeepers of St. Mary can do it, is unparalleled. … Ice cream is the most elegant, most economical and sanitary of all desserts.”
I won’t vouch for the ice baths, although they seem like a tempting idea when the heat index goes crazy. I will fully join in the Banner’s praise of ice cream as elegant, luxurious, and delicious — especially when it is heaped liberally on a slice of fresh-baked pie.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.