Between 1880 and 1910, crews at the Mammoth Spring Ice Company Ice House worked on the coldest days of the year to harvest ice from Salt Creek. In single-digit temperatures, men pushed saws through a foot of ice, chipped away the last inches with steel poles, and used cast-iron grappling hooks to stack 100-pound blocks onto rafts. Even when they ended up in the water, the work continued as the frozen cargo moved through a narrow channel to the ice house, where several thousand tons of ice were packed between double walls insulated with sawdust. That laborious seasonal harvest supplied ice boxes in LaGrange, Western Springs, Hinsdale, and South Elmhurst well into summer. Today only a few timbers along the bank remain of the company's historic operations on land now owned by the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County.