The Puritan Ice Companies: The Ice Empire of California's Central Coast

by David Petry

Overview

The Puritan Ice Companies operated at Santa Barbara from 1922 to 1986, opening the vegetable markets in the Santa Maria and Lompoc Valleys to wide distribution by pioneering the use of refrigerated railcars. Puritan ran the world's largest poultry plant and, during the World War II homefront era of the 1940s, was pivotal in facilitating Mexican labor in California, expanding vegetable and melon markets at Blythe and providing ice for General Patton's Army Desert Training Center near Indio. The rise and fall of one company parallels stories of domestic ice use and the impact of ice on the rail business, which declined with interstate refrigerated trucking. Join Santa Barbara historian David Petry as he examines the history of a unique Central Coast corporation's impact on the national scene.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609498771
Publisher:	Arcadia Publishing SC
Publication date:	11/27/2012
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.31(d)

About the Author

David Petry is a historian, technical writer and journalist. He wrote The Best Last Place: A History of the Santa Barbara Cemetery and enjoys telling offbeat stories of Santa Barbara County history.

Table of Contents

Introduction 11

1 Ice on the California Riviera 17

Likely Story 20

The Ice Window 21

The Icemen Cometh 24

The Ice Plan 31

2 Creating Guadalupe's Salad Days 33

The Southern Pacific Ice Pact 34

The Lettuce Train 37

Ice Hardware 39

Icing on the Train 42

Odd Little Man 45

Ice Needs Produce Needs Ice Needs Produce 48

The Ice Expansion 49

3 Ice Wars on State Street 53

Icing the Competition 56

Domestic Ice 58

Depression-era Ice 60

4 Borders of Empire in Oxnard 65

Southern Lettuce 67

Union Ice Never Plays Nice 70

Icing Oxnard 72

5 Poultry Utopia in Atascadero 77

Gay Engineering Believes in Atascadero 80

The Lewis Snowball Melts 84

Willett Wills a Future 86

Chicken Man 88

Most Chickens in One Place on the Planet 93

Back in the Dumps 95

6 Ice in the Fields of Lompoc 99

Fields of Ideals 100

Tempering 101

Growth Industries 104

Riding the Bear 107

Fits and Starts 109

Vistadores Days 112

Seeds of Destruction 114

Birdseye on the Future 115

Lompoc's Meltdown 117

7 Darker Days in Guadalupe 121

Cold and Calculating 123

The Sins of the Fathers 125

Local Dynasty 127

Winds of War 128

Ticklish Task 130

Freezing Point 133

Nothing Is the Same 136

Frozen Assets 137

Frozen Out 139

West Versus East, on a Small Scale 140

8 Ice in the Desert 145

Blythe, in Shorthand 146

Palo Verde Perishables 146

Planning for War 147

A Grande Move 149

Production Runs 152

The Southern California Market 153

Air Lettuce 154

The Reorg 155

9 Meltwaters 159

New Lease on Life 162

Closing Chapters 164

Postscript 167

Telling the Puritan Story 167

Publication Notes 174

Holes in the Ice 174

Notes 177

About the Author 191