Ice once dominated City Dock.
The Annapolis Ice Manufacturing Co. opened in 1899 as an industrial powerhouse, pumping water from private wells and freezing it in massive tanks chilled by a coal-powered refrigeration system.
Winter, summer, spring and fall, the company produced as much as 30 tons of ice a day on the Annapolis waterfront.
Homeowners had it delivered. But the real customer was the seafood industry clustered around the plant. Annapolis Ice chilled cans of oysters, crates of crab and trays of fish prepared at 16 packing houses and shipped out by rail.
“By 1902, the company was doing a brisk business, with a total tax and interest liability of $101,000,” researchers at Applied Archaeology and History Associates wrote.
That’s a $4 million business today.
By 1921, Annapolis Ice was gone, vanished along with the neighborhood iceman.
Today, you’re probably thinking about ice on the roads. Or maybe ICE, the violent federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
But a long time ago in this little city on the Chesapeake Bay, ice was what everyone wanted.
Applied Archaeology dug up the remains of that past at City Dock. The archaeological consulting firm did the work as part of the city’s $100 million flood-protection plan. The goal is to remake the waterfront into an elevated green space dotted with pavilions, water access and a Maritime Welcome Center.
It has generated a long, sometimes angry public discussion about the history of City Dock and the impact of change.
That’s because Annapolis is old, founded by Puritans in 1649. If you dig a hole in parts of the city, you’ll find reminders of that past. And wherever you dig, arguments are almost sure to follow.
Archaeologists found thousands of bits and bobs in their City Dock excavations. Pottery shards and nubbins of clay pipes were uncovered, along with a long lost boathouse wall, hammered nails and even a complete sidewalk.
There were no chests of treasure or forgotten tunnels, just abandoned conduits and pits dug for 20th century electrical and plumbing renovations.
Then there were the remains of the ice plant, located beneath the blacktop parking lot that has capped the area for more than 80 years.
“Construction of the plant required demolishing two of the frame oyster packing houses and moving the lumber yard further down the dock toward the waterfront,” researchers wrote.
Applied Archaeology declined to comment, but it filed reports with the Maryland Historical Trust and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA is reviewing a $33 million grant needed to complete the project as currently designed.
The ruins are from the age of the ice barons, when the American Ice Co. crushed competitors from New York to the Chesapeake Bay.
Their business was mechanical refrigeration. It worked the same way it does now: A coolant such as ammonia was pumped around a tank filled with water, whisking away heat until ice formed.
On the Chesapeake, the arrival of this technology changed seafood production. Packing seafood became a year-round business, and in the process overtaxed the bay’s aquatic life.
When Philadelphia brothers Samuel and Robert Berryman arrived in Annapolis, they set up Annapolis Ice on what was then called Matthew’s Wharf. They used Robert’s patented “cans” design to slash the 10 days needed to freeze water in “plates” to less than three.
“The new system, he says, will mean a great saving to ice factories and also turn out artificial ice in far less time,” the Evening Capital wrote in 1901. “His new invention ... takes only 56 hours to freeze blocks 10 feet long, 40 inches deep and 11 inches in thickness.”
Using newspaper accounts, photos and fire insurance maps, Applied Archaeology knew roughly where to look. The freezing cans, an exterior coal yard and a 30-ton steam boiler occupied a two-story brick power plant and three one-story wooden-frame wings.
Applied Archaeology crews uncovered pieces of a brick floor atop a concrete foundation slab, where the boiler once powered giant compressors, as well as brick piers that supported the exterior walls.
The company dominated the business, particularly once the Berrymans sold their interests to Philadelphia investors.
“This absorption allowed the company’s grasp on the local ice market to far outweigh its competition,” Applied Archaeology wrote.
It didn’t last. It was made of ice, after all.
Oyster harvests around Annapolis started to decline by the end of the 19th century, and packing houses gradually faded. The need for all that ice went with them.
David and Claudius Parlett got into the ice business 10 years after the Berrymans, building a plant at their family’s lumber and coal yard on the Compromise Street side of City Dock. Parlett & Parlett bought out Annapolis Ice in 1913.
“As many citizens of Annapolis well know, the situation in the local ice business has been for the last three years a war of one company to exterminate the other from the field,” the Evening Capital reported when the deal was finalized.
By 1921, Annapolis Ice was gone, torn down by the Parletts. They relied on a big ice storage house and brought in shipments by rail from Baltimore.
By the early 1920s, home refrigerators were spreading in popularity. Ice deliveries were soon the stuff of nostalgia.
Parlett & Parlett vanished, too. By the late 1960s, their work yards were replaced by a yacht club, a hotel, shops and a little outdoor theater in what was once a paint store.
The remains of Annapolis Ice were reburied, along with oyster shells, brick and other rubble used to fill in the area and create the current shape of City Dock between 1846 and 1913.
Some of what was kept might make its way into exhibits. Researchers will be able to read about the dig findings in the Maryland Historical Trust’s Archaeological Synthesis Project.
The age of ice in Annapolis melted away, never mentioned during 10 years of fighting over what to do with City Dock.
The past was there all the time, hidden just below the surface.
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