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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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New England’s Forgotten Puerto Rican Riots

From 1967 to 1979, Puerto Rican riots broke out in New England cities from Waterbury, Conn., to Worcester, Mass.

Outsiders didn’t understand them at the time, and people have mostly forgotten them since.

Aaron G. Fountain, Jr., a PhD student at Indiana University, in 2016 chronicled the Mexican-American and Puerto Rican riots throughout the United States from the late 1960s through the early 1990s.

From 1964 to 1992, he counted 43 riots that had at least 100 participants, triggered a police response and resulted in damage to buildings and vehicles. While most – 17 – broke out in New Jersey, at least nine Puerto Rican riots erupted in New England cities.

Puerto Rican Festival in Lowell, Mass. Courtesy Library of Congress.

In Connecticut, Puerto Ricans rioted in Waterbury, New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford. In Massachusetts, Puerto Rican riots burst forth in Boston, Springfield, New Bedford and Worcester.

White and Puerto Rican teenagers threw rocks at each other in Woburn, Mass., in August 1973.

“Unlike Black riots of the 1960s, Latino riots occurred mostly in the 1970s, and they continued well into the early 1990s,” wrote Fountain. “Over two-thirds of them were in Puerto Rican communities. They occurred in major cities and in communities as small as Coachella, California, which had about 9,000 residents in 1970.”

Few people wrote about them because they fall outside the category of black-white race relations, Fountain concluded.

The First Puerto Rican Riot

On Aug. 19, 1967, hundreds of Puerto Rican and African-American youths stunned New Haven by rioting. The violence then continued for several days until the governor called up the National Guard to restore order.

Reformers considered New Haven a model city because of its urban renewal and anti-poverty programs. But tensions had grown since World War II.

Puerto Rican flag and American flag at the Puerto Rican Festival in Lowell, Mass.

Many Puerto Ricans, all American citizens, moved to the Northeast during the war . They looked for work in defense plants and harvesting fruits, vegetables and tobacco. Many Puerto Ricans came to Connecticut after arriving in New York City.

The Puerto Rican population continued to grow in the Northeast during the 1950s and 1960s. Today, Connecticut has the densest population of Puerto Ricans in the country. Half of the Puerto Ricans in New England live along the Interstate-91 corridor, from New Haven to Holyoke in Massachusetts. In fact, Holyoke has the highest percentage of Puerto Ricans in the country.

Most had little money when they arrived and had to live in substandard housing. When war work dried up, many found themselves unemployed. They also lived in neighborhoods that decayed when middle-class whites moved to the suburbs.

In New Haven that summer day in 1967, simmering resentment boiled over when Edward Thomas, a white snack bar owner, shot Julio Diaz. Diaz had threatened him with a knife.

Word then spread quickly, and rioters broke windows, looted stores, started fires and fought with police. In the end, police arrested nearly 400 people.

More Puerto Rican Riots

Two years later, on July 30, 1969, a Puerto Rican riot erupted in Waterbury. The news media gave it little coverage.

On Sept. 1, 1969, two nights of Puerto Rican riots started in Hartford’s North End and spread downtown. Buildings were looted and set on fire. Firefighters required police protection as rioters threw rocks and bottles at them. The disturbance was attributed to poor housing, high rents and an article in the Hartford Times quoting an anonymous firefighter calling Puerto Ricans ‘Pigs.’

In July 1970, there were Puerto Rican riots in New Bedford and Hartford. In May 1971 a riot broke out in Bridgeport. Three days of riots erupted in Boston’s South End in July 1972.

The Boston Globe reported a minor scuffle at the Puerto Rican Day celebration grew into a confrontation between bystanders and more than 100 policemen. Mostly young Puerto Ricans set buildings on fire, damaged police cruisers and stoned passing cars. The police were criticized for aggravating the situation.

‘Called me a spic’

Luis Palmarin, a South End resident, told the Globe:

The cop arrested me when I tried to stop him from beating a man who was bleeding badly. He threw me in the car, grabbed a soda bottle from the floor, called me a spic and hit me in the face with the bottle.

Boston City Councilman Albert “Dapper” O’Neil made the situation worse by ordering the police to “club those maggots and leeches out of the park.”

On the third night of violence, riot police were diverted from the South End because a city officials feared a melee near Boston Garden. Police had arrested the Rolling Stones in Rhode Island, which delayed the concert at the Garden..

Carlos Mora, director of the Concilio drug program, said, “The Puerto Rican population has been mistreated for a long time. Our people just want respect, and then they’ll give respect.” Forty percent of Boston’s Puerto Ricans lived in poverty.

Puerto Ricans in the United States

Changing Demographics

Two more Puerto Rican riots broke out in Massachusetts. One happened in Springfield in late August 1975 and one in Worcester in June 1979.

But then immigration patterns changed. Other Latino groups moved to the Northeast. In Massachusetts, for example, Puerto Ricans comprised 75 percent of the commonwealth’s Latino population. That then fell to only 49 percent by 2000.

In 1984, a riot broke out in the Tower Hill neighborhood of Lawrence, Mass. Fountain characterized the disturbance as “Hispanic.” Dominicans had moved into the largely Puerto Rican section of the city.

Buildings were burned, people were injured and police used tear gas and clubs over several days of Dominican and Puerto Rican riots.

“They don’t want to know anything about us – the way we live,” 24-year-old Ramon Rodriguez, told the Boston Globe. “One day you just get tired of it all and say enough. It has always been this way as long as I’ve been here. It’s just now that we’re getting tired of it.”

This story about Puerto Rican riots updated in 2022. Images: Denatale, D., Rankin, T. & Montaño, M. (1987) Puerto Rican Festival, Lowell, Massachusetts. United States Lowell Massachusetts, 1987. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1987042_mm_c001/.

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Christopher Seider: The First Casualty in the American Revolutionary Cause

Christopher Seider was just 11 in 1770, a working boy in Boston at a time when the city was awash in the debate over the Massachusetts colony’s relationship with Great Britain.

In 1770, the American colonies strongly resisted the British Townshend Acts. The Acts taxed goods such as lead, paper tea, paint and glass. However, the desire for British goods was also strong.

American-made clothing and other products were often rougher in appearance and less appealing. Some goods could only be had by importing them.

Non-Importation Agreements

Boston merchants had agreed to boycott British goods to protest the tax. But throughout the colony, people wondered whether they’d continue to honor non-importation agreements. Boston had played a leading role in implementing the non-importation strategy and convincing other colonies to join in. But the cost took its toll.

Frustrated by several years of struggling to make a profit, the stage was set for merchants to announce they would no longer honor non-importation agreements and would resume selling British goods.

Theophilus Lillie, a dry goods merchant, was one of the earliest to break the non-importation agreements. Though some merchants disregarded the ban altogether, most did it quietly. Lillie, though not political, did so with a flourish, announcing his intentions in a letter to the Boston Chronicle.

His decision led to dueling letters and articles in the newspapers and, on the night of February 22, a protest in front of his house.

Importer

“A number of boys had been diverting themselves with the exhibition of a piece of pageantry near the house of Theophilus Lillie,” the Boston-Gazette and Country Journal reported. They placed a sign, ‘IMPORTER,’ in front of his home.

Soon their protest turned explosive. Ebenezer Richardson, a British customs officer, stepped in and tried to stop the demonstration. He urged several passing men to tear down the sign and effigies in front of Lillis’ house.

The passersby declined to help, and the protesters drove back Richardson and pelted him with dirt and stones as he fled. But the crowd pursued him to his house.

Richardson went to a window and first fired his musket without shot to disperse the crowd. He returned to the window to shoot again — this time his gun loaded with “swan shot,” pea-sized lead balls.

Paul Revere’s famous engraving of the Boston massacre. In the background on the right a gun can be seen firing from a window, an oblique reference to Seider’s death.

Christopher Seider

The shot injured teenager Samuel Gore, but it killed 11-year-old Christopher Seider, the blast striking him in the chest.

The news raced through the city, with newspapers halting their presses to include accounts of the shooting. Later they would report more than 1,000 people attended his funeral procession days later, which started at Boston’s Liberty Tree. Poet Phillis Wheatley would also memorialize him in a poem.

“It is hoped the unexpected and melancholy death of young (Seider) will be a means for the future of preventing any, but more especially the soldiery, from being too free in the use of their instruments of death,” the Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal opined. However, 11 days later the Boston Massacre would take place and the march to Revolution continued.

As for Richardson, he was tried and convicted of killing Seider and imprisoned for a time, but was later pardoned by the king and offered a post in Philadelphia in 1773. In that city, publishers attacked Richardson with a broadside and spread the story that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. They said he allowed a Woburn pastor to take the blame for it.

Richardson, widely reviled, would later flee to England.

This story was updated in 2022.

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