Spring house
small building constructed over a spring
A spring house, or springhouse, is a small building, usually of a single room, constructed over a spring. While the original purpose of a springhouse was to keep the spring water clean by excluding fallen leaves, animals, etc., the enclosing structure was also used for refrigeration before the advent of ice delivery and, later, electric refrigeration. The water of the spring maintains a constant cool temperature inside the spring house throughout the year. Food that would otherwise spoil, such as meat, fruit, or dairy products, could be kept there, safe from animal depredations as well. Springhouses thus often also served as pumphouses, milkhouses and root cellars.
The Tomahawk Spring spring house at Tomahawk, West Virginia, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994.
Gallery
See also
Ice house (building)
Smokehouse
Windcatcher
References
External links
"The Spring Cellar". Retrieved 2007-05-13.
The public source identifies “Spring house” as small building constructed over a spring. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Spring, house and small.
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Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7580769. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1994 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spring house” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.