The Library’s Free to Use and Reuse sets of photographs and prints are copyright-free, yours to use any way you like. They cover any number of intriguing subjects – travel posters, grand movie theaters, genealogy – and they are completely free.
Let’s pick three from the Winter set, since a couple of winter storms are sweeping across the Midwest and Northeast this week.
At first glance, this looks to be a vintage picture of snow shoveling, an ancient rite of winter. But look closer. That’s an ice saw, a thing that exists now almost entirely for those hardy souls who enjoy fishing in the deepest days of winter.
But when this picture was taken, in the first decade of the 20th century, ice saws, ice blocks, ice houses and ice boxes were common things. The delivery guy was known as the ice man. Horse-and-buggy wagons delivering huge slabs of ice were staples of winter life.
What we now call a refrigerator was invented in 1913, but a self-contained unit didn’t come along until a decade later and the use of Freon as a cooling agent was introduced around 1930. Those first units were wildly expensive, making them luxury items.
Non-mechanical cooling units, or informal ways of keep food and beverages chilled, had been around for centuries. Damp, cool pits were popular solutions, often with ice chopped up in winter, stored underground and used throughout the warmer months.
By the late 19th century in the U.S., the typical home had a refrigerator, but it’s what we would now call an icebox – a waist-high wooden cabinet with several compartments, secured with latches and handles, the interior lined with tin.
Getting the ice, though, wasn’t so easy.
The building blocks of the business were ice chunks cut out of frozen lakes and rivers as pictured here. Using an extremely sharp saw, workers carved a chunk out of the ice and used heavy metal tongs to lift it out and onto a wagon, then into a storage facility and delivered, house by house, business by business.
Check out our man in Palm Beach right here! This is sunny Florida in the winter of 1954, and our friend is sporting a tropical shirt and a razor-sharp crease in those slacks. He’s at the high-end La Coquille Club, using a twin lens reflex camera, most likely a Rolleiflex.
The picture is from a Sports Illustrated photo essay, “Sporting Look,” by famed photographer Toni Frissell in midcareer form. She was primarily a high-end fashion and society photographer for the glossy magazines of the day, but revealed a new depth to her career during World War II, when she volunteered for the Red Cross and shot an influential range of photographs of Americans at war.
How trendy was La Coquille?
Its website notes the beachfront club was built in the early 1950s, about the time it “became one of the premiere destinations for celebrities, diplomats, and captains of industry as the Fords and Vanderbilts swam with Esther Williams, danced alongside Ginger Rogers, and downed gimlets with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at the club’s Tortoise Bar.”
The club was demolished in the 1980s for the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa, but La Coquille endures within the larger resort.
Snowshoes have been an integral part of winter weather for thousands of years, with the traditional one we think of today – the webbed footing inside a larger wooden frame – created by Native Americans. These shoes were found across all the snowy climes, from the Northeast to the Arctic.
The documentary-style photograph of a shoemaker at work here is part of the Frank and Frances Carpenter collection. Frank Carpenter was a highly influential globe-traveling journalist and photographer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His dozens of travel books were popular and textbooks he wrote became standard fare in U.S. classrooms for decades.
Along with his daughter, Frances, he traveled and photographed Alaska over the course of 14 years, from 1910 to 1924. Their work, totaling more than 16,000 images and 7,000 negatives, is preserved at the Library, and in this case gives us a window into an age-old craft.
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Comments (3)
Americans need one of these social media Goodreads books social media for Americans to post and publish
The Library of Congress should run a virtual book club where they can use these images as a ice breaker for discussion. I’d love an opportunity to share.
Thank you for sharing. 🙂