Why the U.S. Navy Once Had a Concrete Ice Cream Barge

Author: Paula Mejia / Source: Atlas Obscura

The United States’ Prohibition years, which lasted from 1920 to 1933, didn’t just give the bootleg liquor and pharmaceutical industries a boost. They also transformed ice cream from a sweet treat into a bonafide craze, since people began to socialize at soda fountains instead of bars.

Yet Prohibition may have turned the U. S. Navy into ice cream’s biggest fans—to the point where they once bought an enormous, million-dollar floating ice cream parlor made solely to accommodate demand.

During Prohibition, breweries including Pennsylvania’s Yuengling and Michigan’s Stroh’s turned to making ice cream instead of beer to stay in business. It worked: From 1916 to 1925, ice cream consumption skyrocketed by 55 percent in the United States, according to Mental Floss. The fervor for frozen treats is said to have spawned a well-known ice cream flavor when the stock market crashed at the end of the decade, too. The story goes that William Dreyer and Joseph Edy, the storied ice cream and candy maker, respectively, created the mashup of marshmallows and chocolate ice cream known as Rocky Road, with the name as a metaphor for the tough times.

But Navy sailors had felt the sting of forced teetotaling years before Prohibition became official: Alcohol was banned on ships as of July 1, 1914. Ice cream, which was becoming more widespread thanks to advancements in freezing refrigeration technology, became a way to take the edge off. To get a sense of how deep the craze went, consider that in 1942, right before the crew of the USS Lexington abandoned ship, they tucked into the ship’s locked freezer, and drained every single ice cream container dry—as the vessel was sinking from torpedoes.

It’s not a coincidence that the government…

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