The pleasures of ice
COOLING THE SOUTH:
The Block Ice Era 1875-1975
By Elli Morris
111 pp Wackophoto $35
Reviewed by Julie McGuire
As I write this, I’m listening to my son plop ice cubes into a glass. He can’t imagine drinking his root beer without it. The automatic icemaker in the freezer is churning out new cubes. Before reading Elli Morris’s Cooling the South, I wouldn’t have given these moments another thought. I imagine that is exactly why Elli Morris wrote this tribute to her family’s block ice business and to an industry with vital consequences for life in the early twentieth century. Ice is among the many necessities that we simply take for granted.
Morris has a nomadic spirit. As a freelance photojournalist, she has wandered the globe, sometimes stowing away in a ship, often sleeping in a different location every night. She served as the photographer for a scientific expedition in the Belizean rainforests, and investigated hurricane recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast. In 2000, “seeking refuge and a place to stay” Morris returned to her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. The hundred-year-old family home was being renovated. “Auspiciously” Morris’s Uncle Hebron, the last president of the family business, put her in the ice plant. She stayed for one year. Morris writes:
I used to live in an ice plant. I suppose I shouldn’t tell you that, it sounds like I’m a vagrant or a hermit but if you’re one of the lucky ones who have ever been in an old block ice plant, with the looming machinery, various sections of multi-leveled floors, stairs and elevators, then you might understand my craziness.
Morris’s time living in the ice plant inspired an enthusiasm to learn about the business her great-grandfather Joseph Morris founded in 1880. Though Joseph, a teenage Civil War Army Captain, would not have known the wonder of ice as a child, his imagination “turned the muddy brown waters of the Pearl River not only into 300-pound blocks of ice, he turned that water into gold.”
Wealthy Southerners already enjoyed the pleasures of ice, but Joseph saw possibility in bringing this cheap, icy hot commodity to regular Mississippians. While it was easy to convince most folks that ice would improve their standard of living, Joseph had an uphill battle convincing some. Morris tells of a time a country preacher traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, in the summer of 1906. He “was told about humans creating ice, something heretofore exclusively within the realm of God alone. He visited the Morris Ice Company (MICO), where he saw with his own eyes ice being made in Mississippi—in July.” Unfortunately for the preacher, his congregation didn’t believe the news. They soon asked him to step down as their pastor.
Morris convincingly chronicles how the ice industry impacted life in the South. And MICO was at the heart of that industry. Even the poor could now pick vegetables and keep them fresh rather than having to pickle them or preserve them. Milk could be purchased from a dairyman without having to store it in a well. Ms. Morris remarks, “It didn’t take long for those living in air as thick and spicy as a bowl of gumbo to figure out a cold bit of ice was a piece of Heaven.”
After a year living at the ice plant, Morris’s wanderlust resurfaced. But she couldn’t escape her desire to learn more about the industry her family helped launch. She soon embarked on a month-long, 3,000-mile trip through Mississippi searching out old ice block factories; the trip Uncle Hebron nicknamed the “trail of abandoned ice plants.”
Cooling the South is more than just a book about a family business. Morris’s engaging, reverential and fluid writing, coupled with the photographs of old ice block plants, former ice house owners, and exquisite photographs of ice of various shapes and sizes, creates a very cool book about a little understood industry that is often taken for granted. She brings to life the ingenuity, hard work and dedication of ice makers. She reminds us of the myriad ways in which these unsung heroes made life easier. From the seafood industry’s ability to put their product on ice and bring it to people living hundreds of miles from the ocean, to the elimination of scurvy through preservation of the vitamin content in fresh foods during transportation and storage, the block ice era was “a wild and woolly ride for His Majesty, the iceman.”
After 113 years of business in the same family MICO closed on November 1, 1988. However, Morris’s Cooling the South will keep its memory alive. Shaped like a block of ice and with 209 color and black and white photographs that showcase Morris’s talent as a photographer, this self-published book is just right for display on the coffee table. I hear the clink of ice cubes as my son refills his glass. It is a sound that will be harder for me to take for granted after reading Morris’s factual, entertaining, and even moving homage to frozen water and the entrepreneurial spirit of the individuals who recognized its life-changing promise.
Julie McGuire is a litigation paralegal. Her personal essays and poems have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and several small periodicals. She and her family live in Virginia.
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