Fort Union Trading Post Historic Structures Report (Part II) Historical Data Section

George Catlin (1832) spoke of the "spacious ice-house" from whose cool depths he enjoyed meat and wine. Competing Trader Campbell, in 1833, wrote that Fort Union's ice house "serves for Lumber having a door in the floor and a descent by rope ladder to the Ice." Apparently, he meant that the upper room was used for storing lumber. In 1835, Larpenteur recorded that a workman was hauling earth to repair the ice house roof and that three others were "covering and daubing it." Twenty-nine years later, Bourgeois Larpenteur told how he had the upper part of the ice house raised so that four new sills could be put in. The structure was then lowered, the floor was "layed back," and the front of the building was whitewashed. A week or two later (1864), the Army troops "commence[d] to prepair [sic] a room in the end of the ice house for an hospital."

Denig (1843) described the ice house as being 24 by 21 feet and located near the dwelling range on the west side of the fort. It may be that the corner of the building appearing in the Kurz sketches (1851-52) is the ice house (see HS 10)