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When I was but a wee child in Comanche, there was an ice house down near the railroad tracks. I'm not sure who owned it, but I think it might have belonged to the Durhams. The Durham family had a business that made Durham drug products back then. Their stuff was probably born out of the days of snake oil sales but it was still commercially viable. Durham Drugs was housed in one end of a long building that ran along the tracks, a block or so west of where the Peanut company is now. In the other end of that building was the Ice house. The ice house manufactured huge 4 foot by 4 foot by 1 foot blocks of clear solid frozen ice that people would buy to use in their "ice boxes". "Ice boxes" was what we called them before we retooled them and started calling them refrigerators. I don't ever actually remember any of my relatives using an ice box but enough people of the time still had them to cause the Ice house to exist. Those big chunks of ice could be cut up and placed in an ice box to keep food cold enough, long enough to be edible for some time. The entire building was insulated to keep the ice from melting. In the summer one of the big rooms in that building would be full of huge rectangular blocks of ice.
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