Frost Fair
Winter has returned to much of the United States, and outside the Main Library here on the University of Iowa campus, cold temperatures have caused ice to form on the Iowa River. Historically, severe freezing conditions in London caused the Thames to completely freeze over several times in the centuries before the medieval London Bridge was finally taken down and the flow of the river increased again. This led to a practice known as a frost fair, when booths, rides, printing presses, and other amusements were set up on the iced over river. A famous freeze occured during the winter of 1683/1684, which was chronicled by John Evelyn. The last frost fair ever held on the surface of the Thames was in 1814. In 1844, freezing temperatures in London caused the The Illustrated London News to run a brief article commemorating the 1814 fair, accompanied by a wood engraving of the scene. Click on the tumbnail below to view the entire page with the engraving, or click on the thumbnail to the right to view a high-resolution (300 dpi, 11 MB) scan of the scene.
Special Collections has an excellent run of The Illustrated London News, as well as several other serial publications from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Port Cities site, in conjunction with the National Maritime Museum, features a colored and animated version of the above print at their website, along with a photograph of ice on the Thames taken in 1895 that suggests the environment in which a frost fair might have taken place.
An interesting new item in Special Collections, purchased in 2005, is a photograph album compiled by three men who took a vacation down the Iowa River to the Mississippi river at Burlington in a boat they built before undertaking their journey.
