Great Burlington Ice Cream Heist of 1914

Boys stealing tastes of ice cream on the heat-soaked riverfront

The Great Ice Cream Heist of Burlington didn’t look like a crime wave at first. It slid in slow and sticky, the way trouble sneaks into river towns when the heat gets mean and people get stupid. By July 1914, Burlington was staggering through one of those summers when the Mississippi smelled like dead fish and everyone walked around half-dizzy. Tempers thinned. Judgment wilted. That’s when strange things start moving in the dark.

The Burlington Ice Cream Company started losing tubs off their wagons. Not a pint here or there—five-gallon buckets. At first, it looked like sloppy bookkeeping or a hungry stray. Then the numbers piled up. Fifteen gallons went on Tuesday. Thirty on Thursday. By August, someone had hauled off hundreds of gallons. The Burlington Hawk-Eye called the culprits “ice cream fiends,” adding that “whole tubs vanish nightly.” Another line warned that the city was “plagued by a youthful gang whose appetite exceeds their morals.”

People imagined some dairy underworld cruising alleys in refrigerated rigs. The truth was stranger. The thieves were local boys—half-wild from boredom and heat—drifting through town after dark because their houses felt like ovens. They weren’t masterminds, just kids who’d been told no too many times. Even the Hawk-Eye admitted the culprits seemed to be “youngsters of good standing who have taken to cold-storage crime.”

 

Boys raiding the ice cream wagon and running
off with five-gallon tubs

Their method was pure teenage logic. Wait for the deliveryman to step inside, look away, and light a cigarette. Then lift the flap, grab a tub, and run like hell. It worked far too often. Drivers didn’t notice until the thieves were long gone. The Hawk-Eye scolded merchants, saying, “No one is safe unless he sleeps atop his icebox.”

 

Stories drifted in about nighttime gatherings along the levee. Boys dragged stolen tubs like trophies, and carved them open with spoons and pocketknives. A grocer who lost three tubs told the paper, “The youngsters feast like river pirates. They leave nothing but the tins.”

 

The river rolled by, smelling like mud and dead carp. Bats skimmed the surface. The boys didn’t care. They ate until their stomachs cramped, tossed the empty tins into the weeds, and hunted for the next score.

 

Merchants got jumpy. Clerks slept beside their stockrooms with shotguns across their chests. One butcher chained his freezer and posted a dog outside. He bragged the mutt would tear the first thief apart. The next morning, the dog had a belly full of strawberries and wouldn’t wake up. The Hawk-Eye laughed at the effort, writing, “Even the guard dogs have proven unreliable—more given to sampling the evidence than defending it.”

 

The thefts kept climbing. Fifty gallons gone in twenty-four hours. Eighty the next. Rumors floated around about a boy on the north side who’d built an ice cream locker in an abandoned chicken coop. The Hawk-Eye joked that “a makeshift creamery has sprung up in the suburbs, managed by boys too nimble to catch.”

 

A midnight feast along the shores of the Mississippi

The police finally got a break when an officer spotted a knot of boys dragging something heavy toward the river. He followed them down an alley until his lantern beam froze them in place. They bolted. He chased what he could. The tubs slowed them down. They ended up cornered at the levee, sweaty and filthy, still gripping their ladles. The officer told the paper, “Never have I seen boys run so fast with so much ice cream.”

 

At the station, everything spilled. They’d been stealing for weeks. Eating most of it. Sharing the rest. Selling pints at school. They’d created a ridiculous underground economy based entirely on stolen ice cream. The Hawk-Eye summed it up as “a tale of nightly raids, riverside banquets, and shameless barter in the schoolyards.”

 

The paper doubled down. One columnist said Burlington had sunk into “frozen vice.” Another compared the thieves to bootleggers, “armed with scoopers instead of pistols.” Parents tried to save face. Some marched their sons door-to-door to apologize. Others blamed outside influences. One mother told the paper, “The devil must work in ice and sugar,” and the editor printed it straight.

 

The juvenile court handled the cleanup. The judge didn’t want to ruin boys who’d simply baked their brains in the heat. He fined them, ordered restitution, and told them to behave. He said, “Let them sweat out their sins and start fresh.” As the weather cooled, the heists faded. School started. Nobody had the energy to sprint through alleys chasing melted dessert.

 

By winter, the whole thing felt like a fever dream. The numbers still hung in the air. Six hundred gallons gone—scarfed down by boys who didn’t know what they wanted until they had it, and then wanted all of it. They ripped through Burlington like sugar-drunk locusts and got away with most of it. The Hawk-Eye’s last jab claimed, “The great cream shortage of 1914 may be remembered longer than it deserves.”

 

It’s easy to laugh now, but the town never quite shook it. Walk the levee on a sultry night and you can almost see those boys crouched in the weeds, passing around a dripping tin pail and eating straight from the bucket, convinced for one wild season that no rule mattered if you ran fast enough.