A Few Words About the Ice House of the Konsum Store in the Nineteenth-Century Priest’s Mill Factory and Residential Complex in Łódź

Abstract

The issue of ice houses, both those found among manor and farm buildings and those connected with industrial plants, is a research issue frequently raised in many countries of Western Europe and in the United States. In the Polish literature, however, it does not attract much interest, which is why knowledge of it – or at least the knowledge shared – is usually limited to the awareness of the existence of ice houses and their purpose, and only occasionally do they become subjects of more extensive research. This also concerns the very material substance of such buildings.
 In 2015, on the Priest’s Mill estate in Łodź, erected along with the extension of Karol Scheibler’s cotton plant at the beginning of the 1870s, rescue excavations were conducted under the supervision of archaeologists Maciej Milczarek and Zbigniew Rybacki. They concerned the remains of an ice house built for the estate general store (including a grocery) called Konsum. Its preserved form is a result of a few construction stages completed in quick succession. During the third one (between 1883/1884 and 1889) the ice house we are interested in was built. It was not big as its capacity was approximately 100 cubic metres, and its structure was rather typical of larger industrial ice houses, with the upper (aboveground) chamber used as an ice warehouse, and the lower (underground) chamber serving as the store’s cold storage. Most probably, it was not used for long, however, there is no data that would allow to determine the time of its liquidation.