*The drawing is from an ad for White Mountain Freezers, which appeared in the Home Furnishings Review, a trade paper that began publishing in Philadelphia in 1892.

The ad was reproduced in The Housewares Story: A History of the American Housewares Industry, by Earl Lifshey (The National Housewares Manufacturers Association, 1973). 

Ice cream freezers soared in popularity after World War I, he says.  When electrically operated

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freezers came onto the market, the hand-turned model continued to sell well right up into the 1970s, according to the Richmond Cedar Works Manufacturing Corporation, which started making hand-operated, wooden-tub ice cream freezers about 1900. 
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Baltimore: Birthplace of
Commercial Ice Cream
Production

Commercial ice cream production began in Baltimore in 1851, but it wasn't until 13 years later that a home ice cream freezer was invented.   In 1864, Nancy Johnson, about whom nothing else is known, devised the first home ice cream freezer.

Her freezer consisted of a cooking pot, in which she beat her recipe mixture, and which she had surrounded with packed snow, ice, and rock salt.

At left:  A little girl feeds her doll ice cream from "The Gem Freezer, The Best in the World," in a color ad from the Bettmann Archives, reproduced in Lifshey's book.

-- Susan M. Rogers

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