A Brief History of Ice in Minnesota
7000 BCE
The previous of the mile-substantial glacial ice sheet that had protected Minnesota for two million years melts, leaving behind much more than eleven,000 lakes, most of which are geologically recognized as kettle or “ice block” lakes.
1600–1850
Indigenous Dakota, Ojibwe, Ho-Chunk, and other tribes endure the frustrated temperatures of the “Little Ice Age” with heated stone floors, residences wrapped in birch bark, and animal-pores and skin door coverings.
1886
St. Paul lures architect A. C. Hutchison away from Montreal to make a grand ice palace for the Winter season Carnival. The resulting castle is just one of the 1st structures to be electrically illuminated in St. Paul, and 150,000 men and women pay a quarter each individual to stroll by it.
1888
Soon after a January snowfall, Sven Stevenson’s outhouse slides down a hill and skitters throughout the major of Lake Minnewaska prior to producing a gap in the ice and coming to rest atop it. Stevenson fetches his rod and reel—the ice-fishing shack is born!
1888
German immigrant and locksmith John Strauss starts off creating ice skates on the facet. Strauss’s hand-slash, adaptable skates are such a strike that, 132 years later on, his Maplewood shop life on as probable the oldest sporting products store in America.
1920
The Saturday Evening Post publishes “The Ice Palace,” a quick tale by upstart wordsmith F. Scott Fitzgerald. In it, Sally Carrol Happer, a southern belle, visits her fiancé’s indigenous Minnesota, only to be frozen out of his social circle.
1936
St. Paul skating buddies Eddie Shipstad and Oscar Johnson concoct a touring wide variety present showcasing soloists, chorus ladies, and elaborate props. The Ice Follies debuts in Tulsa and proficiently introduces figure skating to the place.
1938
Frederick McKinley Jones invents a transportable refrigeration device, and his corporation, Thermo King, revolutionizes the perishable-freight marketplace. Jones is dubbed “the Black Thomas Edison” and “King of Great.”
1952
Marvin Schwan hundreds up a refrigerated truck with 14 gallons of his father’s ice cream and sells it door to door. The rest is frozen-evening meal history.
1968
Two cryptozoologists certify the carcass of a 1.eight-meter-tall hirsute male hominid as Homo pongoides, a new species of Neanderthal. Alas, in its place of staying proof of a true-life Bigfoot, the “Minnesota Iceman” turns out to be a phony.
1980
Herb Brooks coaches a ragtag team of college or university young ones to a 4–3 acquire around the Soviet Union in an Olympic hockey upset so improbable it is dubbed the “Miracle on Ice.”
1981
Major Gun’s at the time and future Iceman, Val Kilmer, cometh to Minneapolis to perform as Orlando in the Guthrie’s As You Like It.
1986
Will Steger leads a dogsledding crew to the North Pole. His teammate Ann Bancroft gets to be the 1st lady to attain the pole by sled and foot. A few years later on, Steger flips his pole goals and leads the 1st dogsled crew to cross Antarctica.
2006
Agents from ICE descend upon Swift meatpacking crops throughout the place, which include just one plant in Worthington. Virtually 1,three hundred workforce are finally arrested nationwide in what is just one of the greatest solitary-working day law enforcement actions in U.S. history.
2008
The U.S. Patent Workplace will allow Worldwide Falls to trademark the nickname “Icebox of the Nation,” thus throwing chilly water on the decades-extensive tug of war around the title with decidedly balmier Fraser, Colorado.
2012
A dilapidated Minneapolis warehouse that was previously Cedar Gas and Ice—an ice purveyor that harvested 75,000 tons of ice for every yr in its heyday—is redeveloped into Icehouse, a extremely chill new new music venue.
2019
University of Minnesota researcher Lesley Knoll authors a paper studying how cultural ecosystem services—think pond hockey and ice-fishing tournaments—are staying affected as local weather modify minimizes lake and river ice go over.
