Built in the 1930s, the three-story Ice House building is located on the grounds of Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Mass.
It was used to store ice cut from the adjacent pond during the winter months. Using hay as insulation, the ice could last well into the fall.
Being humans who have melted throughout the hot and humid summers here, we find this incredibly hard to believe, but also pretty amazing. The ingenuity is super cool.
The Ice House is now used for storage and is closed to the public.
This super cute display is across from the Ice House and in front of the pond, named Josephine’s Pond after one of Henry Ford’s granddaughters. (Industrialist Henry Ford owned the Wayside Inn from 1924-1944, adding acreage and historical buildings to the site in order to preserve important bits of history.)
