Keeping Food Cool

April 20, 1937  We made the cement tank.  Mama and Mary sewed.

In the days before farms had electricity, the family needed some way to keep perishable food cold.  An icebox was one solution – they would go to town to buy a block of ice and put it in the icebox to cool food, but this was expensive and did not last more than a few days before it had to be replenished.  Farther north where rivers froze solid, people would cut blocks of ice from the river and store them in sawdust (as insulation) in an icehouse.  Then in summer, they would have ice for the icebox.  But this was not a practical solution in southwest Kansas.

Instead, Cornelius and son John (Jake and Corney were already married) dug a hole at the windwill about four feet long, three feet wide, and three feet deep.  They built a frame for the walls of the hole mixed and poured concrete to make a tank.  Since well water from deep underground was cold, they laid a pipe from the windmill to the tank so that cold water would always flow into the tank.  And they laid an overflow pipe so that the warmer water would overflow and go to water the garden.  

There was a shelf in the tank to store milk, butter, cheese, and other perishable food.  Here they would store their five-gallon cream can while they filled it every day with fresh cream before shipping it from the railroad station when it was full.  Although the tank was not as cold as a refrigerator, perishable food would keep for several days.  Cornelius was quite ingenious when it came to making conveniences around the farm, something that his wife Margaret surely appreciated.