Looking back on Glacier Ice's history
Aug. 14—After the Marysville Glacier Ice building caught fire on July 21, Marnee Crowhurst of Sutter looks back on her family's history with the long-standing ice distributor.
Also known as the "Ice House," the Glacier Ice building served as a distribution center for Glacier Ice, Co.'s Elk Grove manufacturing plant.
According to Appeal archives, ice was trucked to communities throughout the greater Sacramento area including Yuba City, Marysville, Oroville, Gridley, Colusa and Willows. The Marysville plant provided ice to supermarkets, convenience stores and events.
Ted Langdell, founder of Yuba-Sutter Live, said in a social media post that the Glacier Ice building also helped preserve fresh fruit and produce being shipped via the railroad before mechanically refrigerated rail cars came along.
The plant provided cold storage for local farm products, and ice to local residents and businesses — until 1996 when Arctic Glacier bought the facility from MidValley Ice and Cold Storage. Afterward, the building was used for ice distribution, according to Appeal archives.
However, in more recent years, the building along B Street had been used as more of a storage facility for ice distribution, officials said.
Crowhurst estimates that her grandfather Edward Heilmann moved to Marysville from Brooklyn, New York, in his mid-30s during the early 1900s. He briefly served as a manager for the Glacier Ice Building before becoming a deliveryman for gallons of water.
"Even then people were buying ice to keep their vegetables cool and their water. They called them ice boxes instead of refrigerators. ... Anything you need to keep cold, you used one of those big blocks of ice," Crowhurst said.
She estimates that during the 1930s, the Glacier Ice building changed its name from the National Ice and Cold Storage Company to the Marysville Ice and Cold Storage Company before later becoming Glacier Ice Co. She believes that this was partly due to the fact that as refrigeration became more popular, blocks of ice were no longer a household necessity.
"They didn't adapt to the fact that people weren't going to be buying big old blocks of ice to keep their food cold," Crowhurst said. "My grandma tried to tell my grandfather Heilmann when they were married, 'You ought to go into the refrigerator business,' and he said 'Oh, it's a passing fad.'"
Crowhurst remembers visiting her grandfather at the Glacier Ice building as a young girl and finding the area off-putting.
"The inside of it, as I recall, was a big, old, dark, spooky inside of a building, which I didn't like. My feeling was the sooner I got out of there and into the sunshine, the happier I was," she said. "Dark and cold and wet: It was full of ice. Big old squares of ice piled up."
Despite her wariness of the building as a girl, Crowhurst came to appreciate the history behind it. Officials with the Marysville Fire Department believe that the amount of plastic ice bags and the structure itself contributed to the severity of the fire.
"And as a plastic component, once it burns and melts down it creates a real flammable material. And then when you have the structural members on top of that, it gets real difficult for us to get under those structural members and extinguish those ice bags," Fire Chief Kyle Heggstrom said previously.
With a longstanding piece of Marysville history reduced to ash, Crowhurst is happy that her family was involved in a small part of the building's legacy.
"It's history and it's gone," Crowhurst said.
