Spring house

This article is about the structure. For the Pennsylvania town, see Spring House, Pennsylvania.

A small spring house near Collegeville, Pennsylvania.

A spring house, or springhouse, is a small building used for refrigeration once commonly found in rural areas before the advent of electric refrigeration. It is usually a one-room building constructed over the source of a spring. The water of the spring maintains a constant cool temperature inside the spring house throughout the year. In settings where no natural spring is available, another source of natural running water, such as a small creek or diverted portion of a larger creek, may be used. Some people put jars of milk in a bucket suspended by a rope in an "open-mouth" well during hot weather. The main use of a spring house is for the long-term storage of food that would otherwise spoil, such as meat, fruit or dairy products. In some cases, a spring was used for this purpose without a springhouse.

The Tomahawk Spring spring house at Tomahawk, West Virginia was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994.

See also

• Icehouse (building)
• Windcatcher
• Smokehouse
• Butter

References

• "In the Wake: Cool Food Storage (from Tools for Gridcrash)". http://www.inthewake.org/b1cool.html. Retrieved 2007-05-13. 

• "Hopewell Furnace NHS -- Virtual Tour". http://www.nps.gov/archive/hofu/TOUR/17.html. Retrieved 2007-05-13. 

• "The Spring house". http://waltonfeed.com/old/springhs.html. Retrieved 2007-05-13.