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THE HONEST ENTRY
What the record holds, and what it does not: The question is natural — a northern river town must have cut river ice — and the answer is what the record shows rather than what must have been. What it shows for Fort Wayne is this much: the Centlivre brewery chose its St. Marys site in 1862 in part for river ice and drew on it; down the Maumee in Ohio, farm and town crews were still cutting river ice into the early 1930s, as the Farmland News reminiscences collected at Fostoria attest for Napoleon, McClure, and their neighbors. For Fort Wayne itself, no commercial river-ice harvest — no ice houses on the banks, no tonnage figures, no ice company cutting the Maumee or the St. Joseph — appears in the sources. What appears instead, by 1903, is the competition: the city's Polk directory for that year carries the Artificial Ice Company advertising distilled-water "Pure Ice... the only pure ice that is fit for table and house use or sick rooms," a pitch aimed precisely at customers who no longer trusted river ice. The trade's local monument is the Centlivre name change of 1919, when a river-ice brewery became, on paper, an ice and cold-storage company. If Fort Wayne cut its rivers commercially, it did so below the level of the surviving printed record, and this record says so rather than inventing the harvest.
Sources:
- Fort Wayne Beer, Centlivre brewery history — the 1862 siting for river water and ice, and the 1919 Centlivre Ice and Cold Storage Company.
- Farmland News ice-harvest reminiscences (Archbold), collected by the Fostoria Area Historical Society — Maumee River ice cutting in northwestern Ohio into the early 1930s.
- R. L. Polk & Co., Fort Wayne City and Allen County Directory (1903) — the Artificial Ice Company's distilled-water ice advertising.