The Antique Ice Tool Museum in West Chester celebrates the time before the freezer was invented and cutting ice from frozen rivers and shipping it across the country was big business, writes Roger Morris for Main Line Today.

Ice industry historian Peter Stack made a career out of freezing water and transporting the resulting ice as the owner of Brandywine Ice Company. Now retired, he has devoted his knowledge and a huge collection of memorabilia to the Antique Ice Tool Museum.

During the 19th century, a flotilla of men with saws, augurs, scrapers, and plows would descend on the frozen rivers to cut the ice and prepare it for shipping. The museum has everything from those treks on display. These range from saws and ice boxes to the trucks painted yellow – the official color of the ice industry – used to deliver ice.

Stack and his wife oversaw every aspect of the museum’s construction. They converted an 1834 barn into a modern space that officially opened to the public in 2012.

Nowadays, Stack is the museum’s tour guide, a job he loves.

Read more about the Antique Ice Tool Museum in Main Line Today here.

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