The Coldest Job in Town

The Coldest Job in Town. . Temperatures were in the single digits. Their muscles stung with cold, but the men continued to push their raspy saws through the foot of ice that covered Salt Creek. With steel poles they chipped away the last few inches before using cast-iron grappling hooks to stack the 100-pound blocks of ice onto waiting rafts. If the men were lucky, they stayed on top of the ice and out of the water, but even wet, the work went on. , , At the end of a narrow channel of open water, the frozen cargo would reach its destination for the day: the Mammoth Spring Ice Company Ice House. Packed inside between double walls insulated with sawdust, the season's laborious harvest , all several thousand tons of it , would supply ice boxes in LaGrange, Western Springs, Hinsdale and South Elmhurst well into summer, a feat difficult to imagine in today's mechanically refrigerated world. , , Crews like this carried out operations at the Mammoth Spring Ice Company Ice House on the coldest days of the year between 1880 and 1910. Today, on land now owned by the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County, only a few timbers along the bank remain of the company's historic operations.