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Frederic Tudor in 1806 Brings Cocktails and Ice Cream to the Rest of the World

In 1805, Frederic Tudor decided to make his fortune by selling ice to people in tropical climates.

Most people thought the 23-year-old was crazy, but Frederic Tudor knew something most people didn’t. His wealthy family had the luxury of an ice house, and he had experienced the joys of cold mixed drinks and ice cream in the summer. He figured he could get the rest of the world addicted to the stuff.

And so in 1806, he launched his business by sending to Martinique a brig full of ice cut from his family’s pond. He told his sales agent to give it away to bartenders.

“A man who has drank his drinks cold at the same expense for one week can never be presented with them warm again,” Frederic Tudor wrote.

His first venture failed, and so did his second, third and fourth. In the end, Frederic Tudor made his millions and revolutionized the way the world ate and drank.

Frederic Tudor

He was born in to a Brahmin family on Sept. 4, 1783, the day after the signing of the treaty that ended the American Revolution. His father, William Tudor, had studied law in John Adams’ law office, become George Washington’s first judge advocate general and started a lucrative law practice in Boston.

William Tudor liked to live large and followed the new upper-class fashion of drinking alcoholic beverages with ice. His 23-year-old son Frederic seized on the idea of bringing the luxury of ice from Massachusetts lakes and ponds to the tropical masses in the Caribbean.

In 1806, he sent his first shipment of ice to Martinique amid much derision. “No JOKE,” reported the Boston Gazette. “A vessel has cleared at the Custom House for Martinique with a cargo of ice. We hope this will not prove a slippery speculation.”

Ice turned out to be a harder sell than Frederic Tudor imagined. He was trying to sell it to people who had never once experienced anything cold. They didn’t have ice houses, and they didn’t know how to keep ice from melting. He and his partner – his brother William – lost money on the deal. William dropped out of the business, founded the North American Review and co-founded the Boston Athenaeum.

Failure

Frederic Tudor stubbornly persisted, sending another shipment of ice to Cuba. Again he lost money.

So did his father – in a real estate speculation gone disastrously wrong. Frederic Tudor kept shipping ice, losing money but learning ways to keep ice cold. Sawdust, for example, worked better than straw.

But then Frederic Tudor spent parts of 1812 and 1813 in debtors prison after his business partner swindled him.

He kept going. “Let those laugh who win,” he wrote.

He borrowed money, bought ice in Massachusetts and an icehouse in Cuba and set sail for the Caribbean. “Pursued by sheriffs to the very wharf,” he wrote. Finally, he made some money on his crystal blocks of Yankee coldness.

Smash

Frederic Tudor expanded his business to Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans, developing new sales techniques along the way.

He gave bartenders free ice for a year after teaching them how to keep it frozen in a ‘refrigerating jar’ and how to make cocktails like the Smash. He sold ice to Havana coffee shop owners and the keeper of the Tivoli Gardens after teaching them how to make ice cream.

During one mild winter, he faced an ice shortage. So he sent his ship’s captain to take a detour to Labrador and hack off part of an iceberg. Tudor also ventured to the Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers in Maine to find enough ice to ship.

In 1825 came another big turning point: Frederic Tudor met Nathaniel Wyeth, a hotel owner. Wyeth invented a horse-drawn ice plow that cut ice from ponds far more cheaply and efficiently than the laborious hand labor then used. Tudor hired Wyeth as his foreman and expanded his ice-cutting operation.

Harvesting ice

India

In 1833, Frederic Tudor gambled that a shipment of ice would survive the voyage to India. He was right. The arrival of the ice caused a sensation, especially among the colonial British administrators.

Henry David Thoreau heard about it. He watched as Tudor’s men divided Walden Pond into a chessboard pattern and cut ice into square, two-foot blocks. “The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges,” wrote Thoreau.

The same year he sent ice to India, Frederic Tudor, 50, met 19-year-old Euphemia Fenno. They married the next year and had six children.

Ice King

Frederic Tudor finally achieved the success he craved, earning the nickname ‘Ice King.’ At one point he owned ice houses in Havana, Jamaica, New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, Ala., Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Sri Lanka and Singapore.

But he had created a market for ice too big for one company to serve. By 1855, 12 companies shipped ice from the Boston area.

In the run-up to the Civil War, American ships carried more tonnage of ice than any other commodity except for cotton.

People had come to view ice as a necessity to preserve food and medicine. When the Civil War broke out, two-thirds of Boston and New York households received ice deliveries every day.

And in 1862, a bartender named Jerry Thomas published The Bartenders Guide, with recipes for America’s cocktails – most of which used ice.

Wenham Lake Ice

Between 1844 and the early 1850s, the remarkably pure ice from Wenham Lake in Massachusetts became a fashionable luxury among the British aristocracy. The best London hotels put up signs advertising Wenham ice. It was said you could read a newspaper through a block of Wenham Lake ice two feet thick.

Wenham Lake today

Wenham ice inspired the popularity of cocktails like sherry cobblers and mint juleps in London. No fancy dinner party was complete without it, and Queen Victoria insisted on it.

A competitor to Frederic Tudor, the Wenham Lake Ice Co., had promoted the stuff.

By 1850, Norway and Sweden began to export ice. One ice company bought Lake Oppegaard in Norway and rechristened it “Lake Wenham.”

Aftermath

Frederic Tudor died in 1864, his fortune said to amount to $200 million in today’s dollars. His estate in Nahant, Mass., became a country club. His great-granddaughter Tasha Tudor illustrated nearly 100 children’s books and received many honors for them.

The ice business thrived, with Massachusetts supplying ice around the world from ponds in Boston, Cambridge, Arlington, Ayer, Stoneham, Wakefield, Woburn, Andover and Lynnfield.

By 1880, 22 icehouses stored 30,000 tons of ice next to Jamaica Pond in Jamaica Plain. In Vermont, 5,000 men cut ice on Lake Champlain.

But artificial refrigeration eventually overtook the need for natural ice. The commercial ice maker, invented in 1854, allowed people around the world to make their own ice for cocktails and ice cream.

How To Make a Smash

Dissolve sugar in water in a cocktail shaker; add mint and spirits. Shake well with ice and strain through a fine strainer into a rocks or old fashioned glass filled with fresh ice. Garnish.

Images: Wenham Lake By Daderot. – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1029494. Ice harvesting: Cutting the cross sections with a saw–ice harvesting, Conneaut Lake, Pa. Pennsylvania Conneaut Lake, 1907. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018652316/. This story about Frederic Tudor was updated in 2023.

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The Secret History of New England’s Sundown Towns

“Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark” reads the faded road sign, an artifact on display at the Tubman African American Museum in Georgia. The sign was found outside one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

Sundown towns were municipalities that prevented African-Americans or other minorities from lingering after dark.

A sundown town sign found in Connecticut

James Loewen, a sociologist who taught at the University of Vermont, discovered thousands of sundown towns throughout the United States, including New England.

Beginning in the 1890s, New England’s small towns and rural communities drove African-Americans into urban ghettoes, Loewen contends.

Small towns kept out not just black people, but Jews, Catholics, Greeks, Italians, Indians, even trade unionists and gays. They used violence and intimidation and restrictive covenants and mortgage practices

Great Migration

Some New England counties drove out their entire African-American populations. From 1890 to 1940, many African Americans who lived in rural areas of New England had to move to cities.

From 1890 to 1930, the U.S. black population increased 60 percent. Between 1915 and 1930, more than a million African-Americans moved from the South and the Caribbean to the North. And yet entire counties in New England became whiter.

In Maine, for example, only two of the state’s 16 counties had fewer than 10 blacks in 1890. By 1930, Maine had five.

Writes Loewen, in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, 14 Maine counties had at least 18 African Americans. By 1930, only nine did. Five black people lived in Lincoln County in 1930, where 26 had lived in 1890. Hancock County had 30,000 people in 1930, but only three were black. Forty years earlier, there had been 56.

Vermont had no all-white counties until 1930. New Hampshire had no all-white counties in 1890, but two in 1930.

Rise of the Klan

Keeping out African-Americans happened well before the 19th and 20^th century. In 1717, Town Meeting in New London, Conn., voted against free blacks living in the town or owning land anywhere in the colony.

But in the 1890s, racism deepened in the North as memories of the Civil War faded. Waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Canada and southern Europe moved into Yankee mill towns. The influx of immigrants sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan — and created sundown towns.

In the early 1920s, the Klan began to hold regular meetings and cross-burnings in small towns in eastern and central Massachusetts. A Klan rally near Montpelier, Vt., in 1925 drew 10,000.

Klan members march on Washington in 1926

The Klan spread rapidly in Maine, with 15,000 showing up at the state convention in 1923. The KKK held its first daylight parade in the United States in Milo, Maine, in 1923, and others soon followed.

In 1925, The Washington Post estimated New England had more than a half-million Klansmen, with 150,141 in Maine and more than 370,000 across the other New England states.

Though Klan membership fell almost as quickly as it grew in New England, the KKK left a legacy of sundown towns. Their history is rarely told.

Tales of Sundown Towns

Loewen collected anecdotes about places where minorities were afraid to spend the night.

Italian stonecutters who quarried in Portland, Conn., were told to be on the other side of the Connecticut River by sundown. The bridge would then stay open at night so no one could pass over it.
One resident of the Wollaston neighborhood of Quincy, Mass., remembers an incident from the mid-1950s: “My father, a jazz musician, had some of his musician friends over one night for some jamming. Most of the musicians involved were black. The next day, a delegation of neighbors…came by to register their disapproval that my father had blacks in their neighborhood after dark.”
A similar story was told about Burlington, Conn. An African-American family friend from Waterbury came over to play cards. “He always made a habit of leaving before sunset and if he could not, he would spend the night on the couch. … [In] earlier years, whenever he would drive in or out of town, the police would stop and harass him, detain him for questioning, or pull him over and run his license and plates. Comments were made to the effect that being a black man in Burlington after dark, he couldn’t be up to any good…”

Starting in the 1930s, the Negro Motorist Green Book guided African-American travelers away from sundown towns. Black travelers typically carried blankets, food and cans of gasoline in their cars to avoid embarrassment, or worse.

Restrictive Covenants

In 1905, restrictive covenants began appearing in property deeds. They typically stated, “No portion of these premises shall ever be sold to or occupied by anyone other than members of the white or Caucasian race.” Then they often added, “Nothing in the foregoing shall preclude live-in servants.”

The exception rather than the rule: Jackie Robinson at home in Stamford with his wife Rachel, sons David, Jackie Jr.. and Sharon.

A 1940 deed for a development called High Ledge Homes in West Hartford, Conn., said, “No person of any race except the white race shall use or occupy any building on any lot.” The deed allowed one exception for people of a different race: the owner’s employees.

Similarly, Manchester-By-The-Sea in Massachusetts only allowed blacks and Jews to live within its borders if they were servants.

Government-Supported Sundown Towns

The federal government encouraged sundown towns through discriminatory mortgage practices. Between 1934 and 1968, 98 percent of loans approved by the federal government in Connecticut went to white, non-Hispanic borrowers.

In 1954, baseball great Jackie Robinson bought a house in Stamford, Conn., but only with help from prominent white people. He proved the exception in suburban New England.

In Nahant, Mass., a property deed written in the 1920s contained language forbidding the owner to sell the house to Greeks or Jews. (Nahant, ironically, now has the densest population of Greek descendants in New England.)

Anti-Semitism

A film that exposed Darien as one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

In 1922, the Sharon, Conn., chamber of commerce distributed a leaflet asking homeowners not to sell to Jews. Another realtor in Greenwich, Conn., sent a similar memo. It said, “From this date on, when anyone telephones us in answer to an ad in any newspaper and their name is, or appears to be Jewish, do not meet them anywhere.”

Darien, Conn., did not let Jews spend the night within its borders. The 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement , co-starring Paul Revere’s descendant Anne Revere. exposed the practice. Gregory Peck played a reporter pretending to be Jewish to write a story on anti-Semitism.

The Civil Rights movement then started to change all that with laws against racist policies. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, family status or national origin.

But attitudes didn’t necessarily change.

In 1973, all-white Ashby, Mass., voted at Town Meeting 148 to 79 against inviting people of color into town.

Photos: Darien, Conn., via Wikimedia. This story about sundown towns was updated in 2023. With thanks to Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James Loewen.

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Eleonora Sears, Brahmin Bad Girl on the Tennis Courts (and Polo Field and Squash Court…)

Eleonora Sears pioneered women’s sports in the way only a Boston blueblood could. When she took up long-distance walking from Boston to Newport, R.I., her chauffeur followed at a discreet distance with a thermos and sandwiches.

Eleonora Sears on the tennis court.

Eleonora Sears was a model of social decorum in the mansions of the rich. On the athletic field, however, she shattered the rules during the first half of the 20^th century. She rode horses in pants, crashed men-only squash courts and shocked tennis spectators by playing in rolled-up sleeves. During her lifetime, she accumulated 240 trophies.

She succeeded in sports when it wasn’t thought important for women to succeed. “Sports were never seen as a proving ground for women, but Eleo made it a proving ground,” said her biographer, Peggy Miller Franck.

Multi-Champion

When Eleonora Sears died in 1968 at the age of 86, Boston Globe sportswriter Victor Jones wrote, she ‘was probably the most versatile performer that sports has ever produced — not just the most versatile female performer, but the most versatile, period.’

She was a four-time national tennis champion, the first women’s squash champion and an accomplished horsewoman who in 1909 became the first woman to ride a horse in a major polo match.

She played 19 sports, including tennis, ice skating, horseback riding, yacht racing, rifle shooting, boxing and football.

Off the field she walked, often commuting the 20 miles from her Beacon Hill home to her summer home in Prides Crossing, Mass. In her 50s walked the 42 miles from Fontainebleu to the Ritz Bar in Paris.

She also was one of the first women to race a car, to fight a speeding ticket and to fly an airplane.

Eleonora Sears, Brahmin

Eleonora Sears was a wealthy Boston Brahmin, born on Sept. 28, 1881, the second child and only daughter of Boston real estate and shipping tycoon Frederick Richard Sears and Eleonora Randolph Coolidge Sears. Her ancestors included Thomas Jefferson (her great-great-grandfather), John Winthrop and Massachusetts Gov. James Sullivan. She was Henry Cabot Lodge’s cousin.

“I began exercising the first time I fell out of my crib,” she said, according to her obituary in the New York Times.

She divided her time between tony Pride’s Crossing in Beverly, Mass., and Palm Beach. Along the way, she used her wealth and social standing to break down barriers for women who lacked that silver spoon at birth.

Her father introduced her to tennis. He was one of the first to play the game in America, with Dr. James Dwight in Nahant, Mass., in 1874. Her uncle Richard Sears was the first U.S. national tennis champion, winning seven straight championships from 1881 to 1887.

Eleonora Sears by John Singer Sargent.

Eleonora played tennis with the Astors and befriended the Roosevelts. She sat for a sketch by John Singer Sargent, at his request. “She looked fine in evening clothes, and didn’t look out of place behind a silver tea service,” wrote Jones.

Known as Eleo, she made the best-dressed women’s lists during the early 20th century. “It isn’t my ambition to be the best dressed women in Boston,” she said. “I think that interest in clothes should be perfectly casual.”

Pants and Cigarettes

She attended society balls, weddings and debuts, but she occasionally broke the rules of her social class even off the field. In 1910, she smoked in the lobby of Boston’s Copley Square Hotel because men were allowed to and women weren’t. Police arrested her.

Eleo Sears at a society wedding on Long Island in 1915.

In 1911, newspapers reported her engagement to Harold S. Vanderbilt, and in 1924 she made news by dancing with the Prince of Wales. But she never married and her contemporaries assumed she was gay.

“Her sexual orientation certainly formed her character, and gave her the drive,” Franck told the Windy City Times. “She was tremendously courageous in the way that she was willing to challenge, in a very public way, the very narrow role that woman had.

Her aggressive style of play made her a fan favorite on the tennis courts. She won the U.S. national doubles title four times between 1911 and 1917, and the national mixed doubles championship in 1916.

In 1909, Eleonora shocked people by riding onto the Burlingame Country Club’s polo field wearing pants. Ministers delivered sermons against her wardrobe choice. The California Mother’s Club condemned her as immodest and unbecoming. “Such unconventional trousers and clothes of the masculine sex are contrary to the hard and fast customs of our ancestors,“ the club said in a statement.

Mother of Squash

Eleonora Sears broke through the Harvard Club’s ban on women, and by 1918 she was playing men on its squash courts. She excelled at the game and brought many women into it as president of the U.S. Women’s Squash Racquets Association. She was known as the ‘Mother of Squash.’

Eleonora Sears astride her polo pony. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

As a girl she loved horses, and she bred and rode them until she died. She displayed saddle horses, rode in jumping events, drove harness horses, rode to hounds — and even helped pay for the Boston Police Department’s mounted police unit.

She rode in steeplechases and once, on a bet in 1912, drove a carriage pulled by four horses down Fifth Avenue in New York. That same year she won a quarter horse race in San Diego.

Land and Sea

She also raced yachts and speedboats, and swam the 4-1/2 miles from Bailey’s Beach to First Beach in Newport, R.I. — the first to do so.

Her habit of long-distance walking came from her father. In 1925, she walked the 47 miles from Boston to Providence in 9 hours and 53 minutes. At the age of 46, she competed against Olympic marathoner Bill Agee in a walk from Laurel, Md., to Baltimore. She also once walked the 73 miles from Newport to Boston in 17 hours.

Eleonora Sears died on March 16, 1968 at age 86, four years before the enactment of Title IX, which prohibited discrimination against women in school sports. She was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame, the Show Jumping Hall of Fame, the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame and the United States Squash Hall of Fame.

This story about Eleonora Sears was updated in 2022.

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American Lawn Tennis Rockets From a Back Yard to the U.S. Open

Exactly how lawn tennis came to the United States is open to dispute, though there is agreement that a wealthy American brought it from the British commonwealth to an East Coast summer resort.

An early lawn tennis match at the Newport Casino

According to one version, that wealthy American was Mary Outerbridge. She brought a tennis set from Bermuda to Staten Island, N.Y. , in 1874.

Jim Dwight, the Founding Father of American Tennis

According to another, 22-year-old Jim Dwight saw the game while traveling in England after graduating from Harvard. He brought a set of equipment back to his aunt the same year Mary Outerbridge brought hers to Staten Island.

The First Lawn Tennis Tournament

Whatever. It is clear the American craze for tennis took hold quickly, as the first U.S. Open was held in 1881, only a few short years after the first American lawn tennis tournament was played on a doctor’s lawn in Nahant, Mass.

Mrs. William Appleton, the doctor’s wife, wasn’t interested in playing tennis. Dwight and his cousin, Fred Sears, decided to try the game. They laid out a court without reading the directions – or establishing guidelines. For a while they batted the ball back and forth. Dwight later wrote,

“As we hit the ball in no particular direction very naturally we could not return it. So we voted the whole thing a fraud and put it away.”

That wasn’t the end of it, though. On a rainy day a month later, the two bored young men took out the set, put on rubber boots and raincoats and tried again. This time, they had fun.

For the rest of the summer, wealthy young Brahmins in Nahant played tennis on Mrs. Appleton’s lawn. By 1876, enough people had taken up the game to have a round-robin contest – that first tournament. Jim Dwight beat everyone. The only one who came close to challenging him was Fred Sears.

Richard Sears

Fred Sears had a younger brother, 15-year-old Richard Dudley Sears. Dwight saw how well he played and took him under his wing.

Though Dwight had a medical degree, he suffered from frequent illnesses. The story goes that he caught rheumatic fever, which put an end to his medical career. Whatever the case, he became a tennis bum in 1880.

Richard Sears in his tennis togs

That year, Jim Dwight took Richard Sears to play in a tournament on Staten Island. The balls were two-thirds the size of the ones they were used to. They quit the singles tournament and did poorly in the doubles.

Dwight realized the need to standardize the equipment and rules for tennis. He and two others formed the U.S. National Lawn Tennis Association in 1881. Dwight served as president for 21 years.

Newport Casino

That fall, Richard Sears won the first tournament – the first U.S. Open – at the brand-new Newport Casino. The U.S. Open would be played at the Casino until 1914.

Richard Sears would win the next 18 matches he played in. In fact he never lost.. He cut an unusual figure on the court, wearing pince-nez, a hat and tie.

He retired from the game in 1887. According to the Tennis Hall of Fame, housed at the Newport Casino,

Bespectacled, mustachioed, wearing a necktie and cap on the court, Sears controlled competitive tennis in America from its very beginning. At 19, he won the inaugural U.S. Championships, and by the time he retired undefeated in 1887, he had won an astonishing seven consecutive U.S. National Championships. Attacking whenever presented with the opportunity, he moved into the forecourt to end points with crisp volleys before other players fully perceived that strategy. At the end of his reign as the first American tennis champion, he became President of the USNLTA.

Newport Casino, 1900

The Newport Casino is on the National Register of Historic Places and a National Historic Landmark. The U.S. Open ranks as one of the most important tennis championships in the world.

This story was updated in 2022.

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