Icehouses—Vintage Spaces with a Cool History - Albany, TX
Posted by: 
WalksfarTX
N 32° 43.414 W 099° 17.716
14S E 472331 N 3620680
During the early 1900s, virtually every Texas town had an icehouse, as ice manufacturing plants were known. In large part, they supplied block ice to the frosty icon of the era, the icebox.
Waymark Code: WMVGT3
Location: Texas, United States
Date Posted: 04/17/2017
Views: 2
Texas Highways
Before the mid-1800s, the only ice in Texas (except during winter) came from the northern United States. Cut from frozen lakes and rivers, then transported on sailing ships to ports like Galveston, this natural ice helped preserve food for a growing coastal population. Inland, most families survived on food preserved by age-old methods—drying, smoking, salt-curing, and pickling.
During the Civil War, Union blockades of Confederate ports cut off Northern ice supplies. So, in 1862, a group of desperate Texas businessmen had a Carré absorption machine (later known as an ice machine) shipped to Mexico and then hauled overland to San Antonio. The machine, designed by Frenchman Ferdinand Carré, used ammonia to absorb heat and freeze water.
Texans’ passion for man-made ice snowballed. The state recorded a number of frigid firsts: the nation’s first commercial ammonia-compression plant (in 1873 in Jefferson); the first refrigerated slaughterhouse (in 1871 in Fulton); and the first refrigerated beef shipments (in 1868 from Palacios and Indianola to New Orleans by boat, and in 1873 from Denison to New York by rail).
Beginning in the 1920s, electrical refrigerators for home and commercial use slowly melted away traditional icehouse business.
The icehouse in Albany, built in 1927 by West Texas Utilities on a rail siding, now does business as a restaurant that serves Tex-Mex dishes and mesquite-grilled steaks.
Sonona Teinert, who co-owns the Icehouse Restaurant with her daughter Melissa Williams and Melissa’s husband, Bobby, changed the building as little as possible. The area that housed the icemaking machinery is now a bar. The former “salt pit,” where the ice was made, is now the dining room, and the old vault, where the ice was stored, is now an office and a storage room.
Icehouse Restaurant, 200 S. Second St. in Albany (76430).
Hours: Mon-Thu 11-2 and 5-9, Fri-Sat 11-2 and 5-10.
Call 915/762-3287.