Ice from ‘nature's factory’

The Dahll brothers and a new ‘ice culture’, 1850–1870

By the time the Dahll brothers entered the ice business in the spring of 1851, there had been a few ice shipments from the Kragerø area, all of which had utilized seawater to produce ice. Dahll’s freshwater business marginalized the earlier versions of the ice trade. The evidence suggests that the application of the basic methods of preparing, harvesting, storing and shipping freshwater ice happened quickly over the course of the 1851, 1852 and 1853 seasons. Specific references to ice-block sizes of about 25 square inches, horse-drawn ice ploughs making chequerboard patterns in the ice, and chutes for transporting ice to shipside or ice houses indicate that Dahll had grasped the essentials of the New England way of producing ice for sale. ⁹

The Dahll ice business expanded gradually over the course of the 1850s and 1860s. The initial business model, which only applied for a season or two, was to sell the ice at fixed rates to other Kragerø merchants, who then took the overseas risks and rewards. From the second half of the 1850s, Dahll reinvigorated the family company's shipping operations. The fleet consisted of brigs, barks and schooners. While the shipping strategy was fairly conservative, Dahll was involved in bringing steam tugs to Kragerø harbour, which proved crucial in getting ice-carrying ships off to sea.

Historical enquiry confirms that the Dahll ice enterprise figured as something of a paragon in Norwegian press reports of the early 1850s. The young entrepreneur was credited with demonstrating how ‘Nature’ might be ‘assisted by Art’. ¹⁰ His success was largely ascribed to his personal qualities, a blend of commercial acumen and technological curiosity. ¹¹ To the extent that this study adds to that image, it also emphasizes that Dahll was a businessman who approached profitable opportunities in land and mineral resources with the methodical rigour of a naturforsker – a man of the natural sciences. The various lines of the Dahll family business may be regarded as the operationalization of certain ideas about industrial enterprise proposed by their close relative, Professor Anton Martin Schweigaard. A powerful politician of the mid nineteenth century, in the 1840s Schweigaard advocated research-based exploitation of mineral resources with the maxim that ‘the land mass of Norway gives a richer return to the natural scientist for his research, than the farmer gets for all his efforts’. ¹² The ice business fitted into a paradigm of boosting the exports of primary industry products, with the added benefit of increasing demand for tonnage from the nation's shipping sector.

Thorvald Baarsrud and a new competitive environment, 1877–1910

In the early 1870s, Norwegian ice exports exceeded 100,000 register tons per annum. With 1898 as the absolute peak season at more than five times that figure, the entire ‘peak period’ of the trade between the 1870s and the First World War continued to be subject to seasonal fluctuations – some of which were dramatic. It was also marked by paradoxical traits on the macro level: for instance, the concurrence of major levels of ice exports with the expansion of machine-powered and scientifically informed methods of refrigeration in the import markets of the United Kingdom and Europe. ¹³ Hard on the heels of this came new and – viewed in posterity – opaque controversies about the sanitary properties of Norwegian ice. It is fair to state that the rebranded ‘natural ice’ from Norway was a positive step, while demand for its cooling properties generally continued to surge.

Thorvald Baarsrud's career as an independent ice exporter started in 1877 and lasted in excess of 30 seasons. His business model was firmly within the framework of personal capitalism: Baarsrud owned and managed the ice business centred on his own property, attending to matters daily. His correspondence books document an active and extensive network of relations with overseas agents. There were continual additions and changes to the networks, but Baarsrud also underscored the necessity of cultivating steady relations with overseas agents and representatives. His success followed from a mix of knowledge, skills and outlooks, which Baarsrud ascribed to working his way up at sea to become shipmaster. ¹⁴ In the 1870s, this was still a position marked by independent decision-making, confidence and authority, although the shipowners’ capacity for detailed management was on the rise. ¹⁵ His correspondence infers that much of the captain's self-assertiveness was carried over into the on-land leadership of an ice-exporting venture. Baarsrud's ‘Status Book’ discloses that he mortgaged his estate to fund investments but, at the same time, the loans were repaid as quickly as possible. Good ice years, like the 1884 season, provided the financial basis for expansion. Knowing that he had been very successful in the context of the local economy, he admonished his sons and heirs for being ‘indebted to strangers’. ¹⁶

The case of Baarsrud provides a rare insight into how a Norwegian ice exporter acted according to both the long- and short-term prospects of the business. His instructions on conducting ice exporting, clearly intended for his male heirs, relate an understanding of a method of risk diversification in this volatile trade, which he once labelled ‘dangerous’. ¹⁷ The ice business might make a man wealthy, but it could also reduce a farmer to the state of day labourer, as exemplified by Baarsrud's brother-in-law after a failed ice shipment to London in 1864. ¹⁸

How might winter weather variations impact the total production and profitability of a fairly stable lake and pond area? In the 1890s, Baarsrud reckoned on the production of between 15,000 and 20,000 tons of ice on his properties. ¹⁹ It was not until January that a relatively exact figure for the season's harvest was likely. Some portion of the ice would have to be marketed well in advance. Contracts for the following year's April and May shipments were closed in September and October. Broadly, the marketing of the ice fell into three stages – two in addition to those autumn contracts. There was an amount to be contracted perhaps in January or February, also for spring delivery. Finally, how much ice was to be withheld in ice houses for the late – opportunistic – ‘summer shipment’ in July or August?

The overriding question, from the viewpoint of the ice exporter who traded in goods from his own properties, was to predict how the following season would comply with, or deviate from, ‘the norm’. An unambiguous norm was never set. Baarsrud offered slightly different advice on the distribution of the annual harvests – advice that was influenced by the immediate past. In the final version, recorded after the ‘speculation fever’ year of 1898, Baarsrud advised his heirs not to sell more than a third of the season's produce ‘before Christmas’, then hold the second third for February and March contracts, and have the final third in the ice houses for the July and August shipments.

Baarsrud's writings were cautionary tales in preparation for the transfer to his heirs of the three farms that underpinned the family ice business. He had the title of ‘Isexportør’ carved on his headstone when he died in 1910, and certainly ice exporting was the basis of his considerable position in local society. His identification with ice was carried over to his heirs, who kept a reduced version of the ice business going until the spring of 1961. For most of that time, it was part of a combined forestry and property management company called AS Søndre Nærsnes. In his later years, Thorvald Baarsrud was truly concerned that the properties of ‘his forefathers’, which he regarded as having managed to grab back from the hands of ‘strangers’, must not fall out of the family's possession.

The Wiborgs of Kragerø: organizing risk and rewards in the ice trade

Thomas Møller Wiborg (1835–1918) was a merchant who learned from the methods of the Dahll ice venture. Starting in the business in his early twenties, Wiborg transformed his share of the family inheritance into a combined shipping and ice enterprise. ²⁰ Some 13 ice plants in the Kragerø and Sannindal archipelago were in the Wiborg orbit until 1917, while two were owned by his brother, Simon Wiborg, who remained the junior partner of the family business. In the busiest years, over 400 men were employed directly in Wiborg's ice business. One of the production hubs, at Snekkevik and Frøvik farm in Sannidal outside Kragerø, had a capacity to store 16,000 register tons of ice per year, and was described as Norway's largest ice plant in the early 1890s. ²¹

Wiborg was a local innovator when it came to deploying purpose-built steamships in the ice trade, starting with the 1885 acquisition of the 360-ton Krystal for 140,000 kroner. Raising that kind of capital meant establishing joint-stock companies. The transfer to steam was piecemeal and did not entail the establishment of regular lines. Wiborg essentially continued tramp shipping, partly propelled by steam, with his own ice as the main cargo. Even so, some ice routes were marked by hundreds of return visits. ²²

Wiborg's hybrid ice and shipping enterprise evidently remained vulnerable to seasonal shifts in the ice trade, and he could only weather so many low-profit seasons. In early 1893, the company defaulted, but the bankruptcy did not ruin Wiborg or the family enterprise. The majority of the shipping and production assets were recovered within two years by his son, Nicolay Wiborg, who had acquired much financial experience from his work in insurance brokerage and debt collecting. Nicolay Wiborg beat Alcock & Co., a firm from the United Kingdom, in an auction for the Svarttjern facility, with a winning bid that was just 100 kroner more than the 45,000 offered by the Britons. ²³ In sum, the somewhat impersonal, institutionalized generational transfer that saw Nicolay Wiborg taking over his father's business brought into sharp relief the divergent cultures and mentalities of ‘farming’ and ‘merchant’ personal capitalism in the Norwegian ice trade. To the latter, not only was the product a matter of impersonal vending, but so were the places that yielded the product.

Nicolay Wiborg upgraded the ice business over the course of the next 20 years. More steamers were put into service, and turnaround times for ice ships were reduced from days to a matter of hours. A premium was placed on keeping ships employed in a kind of triangular route network between Kragerø and destinations on both sides of the English Channel. The coordination of ice production, shipping and selling ice required new decision-making practices. Much of the on-the-spot decision-making was transferred from shipmasters to the central office on the Kragerø waterfront. Evidently, this managerial consolidation was not just amended by, but also presupposed the flow of, instant information facilitated by the electric telegraph, which had a major impact on the ice trade. The first steps towards ‘regular’ ice trade, ice-house storage and withholding parts of the harvest for later sales depended to a certain extent on telegraph communication. Wiborg's archives include a collection of telegraph code books from the 1880–1903 period, which reveal how the telegraph was used to collect intelligence on foreign ice markets, and also how it allowed for continuous sales operations on vessels underway and at sea. ²⁴ They demonstrate that the ice trade was increasingly run in an orderly fashion, to the extent that certain messages about arrivals and departures were sent and received in a standardized, routine manner.

Risks and predicaments were categorized, establishing a sense of order and control over events, including those outside the powers of the organizers. The indefinite natural variation in ice properties was reduced to a listing of 50 codes of different ‘qualities’. Standardization never eliminated ambiguities and discretion, as evidenced by the seemingly very similar qualities labelled as ‘good hard ice’ and ‘excellent ice’. Wiborg's listing was a company invention that indicated increasing differentiation and refinement with regard to the natural-ice product, necessitated by the sources of the marketed ice. In short, the telegraph codes are a convoluted set of instructions, but ones that essentially reflect one ice company's growing need for mastery of the complex environment in which the ice trade was situated.

For all the discussion of risks, there were plenty of personal rewards. The business model honed by Nicolay Wiborg made him exceedingly wealthy. In August 1917, his taxable estate was estimated at 2,143,000 kroner, the largest in Kragerø that year. ²⁵ He had ranked in the top echelon well before the First World War. In contrast to many Norwegian ice exporters, the war did not spell ruin for Wiborg. The key to this was the shipowning leg of the operation. Four vessels owned by the Wiborg family were sold on lucrative terms during the shipping speculation of 1915–1916, while two more – the steamer Nico and the sailing vessel Cort Adler – were sunk by the Germans in 1917. ²⁶ A few vessels continued to depart with ice. There seems to have been an attempt to divert sales to neighbouring Scandinavian ports, suggested by an encounter between the steamer Forsete and a German patrol outside the Danish port of Esbjerg in 1916. ²⁷ However, the writing was on the wall, and the last ice shipment organized by Nicolay Wiborg left Kragerø in September 1917. ²⁸ Divesting himself of public and private duties in Kragerø, Wiborg moved to Kristiania (Oslo) in a financially successful exit from the trade, which laid waste to most of the infrastructure of the Kragerø ice industry.