by

Rob Kinney

    Hugh Smith was born in Colfax, Iowa, on February 28, 1871. He spent most of his life on a farm south of Cedar Falls. In 1910, Smith began to manage a wooden ice house that was owned by the Frisby Lumber Company. [1] In February 1917, he purchased the ice house and founded the Cedar Falls Ice and Fuel Company. On October 22, 1921, Smith received word that the wooden ice house had caught on fire. Sadly, it burned to the ground in less than an hour. [2] With the help of the Cedar Falls community and an out of town engineer, Smith turned his great loss into an opportunity to build a better ice house. He built a circular building with hollow clay walls that was capable of holding between 6,000 and 8,000 tons of natural ice cut from the Cedar River. [3] Smith's new building functioned as the ice house until 1934, when he was forced out of business, due to debt and the popularity of mechanically frozen ice. Today, the Ice House is a museum open to the public, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Hugh Smith was working at a filling station in Cedar Falls on September 12, 1944, when it was robbed. He was hit over the head during the robbery, and his death on February 5, 1945, was a result of complications from this injury. [4]

Footnotes

1. "Hugh Smith, Attack Victim, Dies at D. Moines," Waterloo Courier, 6 February 1945, sec. A:3. 

2. Herb Hake, 101 Stories of Cedar Falls (Cedar Falls: The Record, 1970), 101. 

3. Hake, 101. 

4. "Hugh Smith," Waterloo Courier, 6 February 1945, sec. A:3. 

Bibliography