Sometimes the archive surprises you. A digitized film reel surfaces online. A few minutes of footage that should have been lost turns out not to be. Or better yet — you’re digging through a collection and there it is. An old 8mm or 16mm film, still in its canister, label faded, sitting in the dark for decades just waiting for someone to find it. Waiting to be shown to the world.
But not every discovery starts in an archive. Some of the best finds come from places you’d never expect. A neighbor down the block mentions a box in the basement. A farmer pulls something off a shelf in the back of a barn that hasn’t been touched since the 1940s. A family clearing out an old house after a passing finds a canister of film tucked behind a water heater and wonders if anyone would want it. The answer is always yes. Always.
Historic film footage is one of the rarest finds in local history research. Photographs freeze a moment. Documents describe it. But film puts you inside it in a way nothing else can. The streets move. People walk. A hand waves at the camera from a porch that doesn’t exist anymore. And for a few minutes, the past isn’t something you read about — it’s something you watch.
When footage surfaces that connects to Horicon, Dodge County, or the stories covered here on Historical Horicon Wisconsin — whether it’s a digitized reel from a national archive, a canister pulled from a barn, or a film a neighbor didn’t know was historically significant — it will be shared right here, with as much context as the research can provide.
Because some things have to be seen to be believed. And some of them have been sitting in a box in someone’s attic for sixty years just waiting to be found.
Horicon Ice Harvest!
I am excited to share a newly restored, black and white, and color film of ice harvesting on the Rock River here in Horicon, the black and white film in circa 1920’s and the color film is captured around 1943–44. Watch as workers wield long pike poles, guide massive blocks along open water channels, and load ice up the great ramp of the Garbisch family’s Big Ice House — a towering 52 x 87-foot structure that once dominated the west end of Chestnut Street, just opposite the Van Brunt/ John Deere Factory. What you’re seeing isn’t just winter work — it’s an entire community’s lifeline in an age before electric refrigeration.
In those days, ice was everything. Horicon’s butcher shops, creameries, hotels, saloons, and breweries all depended on what was pulled from the frozen Rock River each winter. Families placed chalk “ICE” signs in their windows for the delivery wagons, and children eagerly waited for chips of ice on hot summer days.
The Garbisch family, along with the Melliens, the Bossmans, and generations of local workers, turned this river into one of the region’s most productive cold-storage operations — at its peak, even shipping 200 tons of Horicon ice as far as Oshkosh.
Just three years after this film was shot, it was all gone. When the Wisconsin Conservation Department purchased the property in 1947, the Big Ice House was demolished and its timbers given away as firewood.
Today that very site is the Rock River boat launch — your gateway to Horicon Marsh.
So take a moment to watch, share this piece of our history, and like our page to stay connected with more stories of the people and places that shaped Horicon. These memories deserve to live on! 
Credits can be seen at the end of the film
Music credit Nicholas Panek