Refrigeration was around for a long time before electricity

In the picture above some of our Radford family members are standing in front of their ice house. Ice houses were not a new idea in America. They had been used in Europe for a long time. What was new in America was the log cabin adaptation of the ice house. Old world ice houses were often made of bricks but bricks cost money and trees could be cut down for free. And when trees are cut up there is sawdust as a byproduct. So our pioneer ancestors made the ice house out of logs and filled it with sawdust to insulate the ice. We have records of our families having ice from their ice houses all summer.

This old world ice house, found in Europe, illustrates the technique common there of digging into a hillside and then building an entryway, and, to finish the ice house, the interior was lined with bricks.