McComb was once home to the largest railroad icing complex in the world, as rail cars took on ice here to keep bananas and other produce cool as they were shipped north from ports in New Orleans and fields in south Mississippi and Louisiana.
This and other data on the block ice business are in a book by Elli Morris entitled “Cooling the South.” Morris, a freelance photo journalist, discussed her book and related stories Wednesday at the McComb Rotary Club.
A graduate of the University of Kentucky with a background in various jobs and adventures, Morris’ interest in block ice manufacturing was linked to her family’s former ice plant in Jackson.
Intrigued with her findings, she worked on the book for five years. It includes accounts of the accidental beginnings of manufactured ice, the rise of ice from luxury to necessity, the amazing amount of machinery and power needed to make the big cakes of ice, the variety of businesses that relied on ice in their production and why manufactured ice was once one of the top 10 industries in the United States.
Here in McComb, she noted, the Ice House, which is now used as a night club, was the largest railroad icing complex in the world in 1926.
An article by the late Oliver Emmerich about that era, written for the 1972 McComb Centennial Edition of the Enterprise-Journal, said:
“Southern United Ice plant, built by the McColgan brothers, later bought by X.A. Kramer and then sold to the Southern United Ice Co., had a manufacturing capacity of 180 tons of ice daily. It annually iced 5,000 Illinois Central cars to carry strawberries from the Amite City-Hammond area and tomatoes, beans and cabbage from the Hazlehurst-Crystal Springs area to the markets of the nation. The loading ramp was sufficiently long to load 50 cars simultaneously. Reports had it that a train load of truck and berries could be iced in 20 minutes.”
Most of the block ice plants gave way to refrigerated rail cars and trucks, as well as home refrigerators, by the 1940s and 1950s. About 50 or 60 plants remain in the United States, Morris said, many of them related to the seafood industry.
“Cooling the South” — the Block Ice Era 1875-1975 — sells for $35. visit www.coolingthesouth.com.
