People come in all sorts of packages and bring a wide variety of things to this world. We see this every day when we look around. There are car mechanics and rocket scientists, bread bakers and candlestick makers. We know shopkeepers and beekeepers. Every person does their thing, and we do ours.
Who knew what C. Jacob Fussell would bring? First, let’s just clear this off the plate. I don’t know what the “C” stands for. But apparently, he didn’t care for it, mostly dropping it from his name altogether. His parents were Jacob Fussell and Clarissa Whitiker. Perhaps it was Clarise. I might have dropped it too.
Regardless, he was born in 1819 in Fallston, Maryland. The family was Quaker, and most people farmed back in those days. But not our C. Jacob. When he grew up, he ran a four-route milk and cream delivery business in Baltimore. Yes indeed. Drove his little black wagon around, dropping off bottles of milk and cream to all his happy Baltimorites. Baltimorians? The good people of Baltimore.
Anyway. He made the rounds to the dairy farms in York County and would bring the milk to the folks in town. Then, it seems — like the old phrase always comes into all our lives at one point or another — C. Jacob “knew a guy, who knew a guy.”
He found out about a dairyman who operated a small catering business. That caterer sold a frozen concoction of milk, eggs, and sugar in Baltimore. But it just so happened that the selling wasn’t so good, and the guy defaulted on a debt to an older Quaker. The older Quaker asked C. Jacob if he wanted to take over the operations. For a price.
So, C. Jacob (if you are calling him Clarise by now, so am I, in my mind) knew the supply and demand of milk were highly unpredictable. Yet, yet. He probably had a sweet tooth and reasoned that he could use his surplus milk and cream to manufacture ice cream. Then, he would market it “for 25 cents per quart, delivered in moulds or otherwise day and night.”
Here was his schtick. Ice cream at the time was selling for sixty cents a quart, but C. Jacob was selling his ice cream in volume at a discount. As such, he was raking in the profits.
But he was faced with a dilemma. Should he manufacture ice cream close to the market or near the supply? Fussell decided in the winter of 1851 to relocate to Seven Valleys, where he contracted a local miller, Daniel Henry, to build an ice house. C. Jacob opened the first-ever ice cream factory on Main Street. All of this is in York County, Pennsylvania. And all on this date, June 15, 1851.
He kept the production of ice cream going for the following two years. His good old frosty ice cream was packed in ice and shipped by rail to Baltimore through the fall of 1854. C. Jacob, Ice Cream Guy, decided eventually to move his operation to Baltimore and abandoned the Seven Valleys ice cream factory.
But, York County, PA, will always be known as the location of the first commercially produced and distributed ice cream in the United States. And C. Jacob earned the title of the Father of the Wholesale Ice Cream Industry.
So, every time you reach for a Klondike bar or a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, you can thank C. Jacob Fussell. Ice Cream Guy, aka Clarise.
Whatever ever we bring into the world today, let’s hope it is better than ice cream.
That’s a tall order. Never mind.
Let’s hope it’s better than Cod Liver Oil.
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“It is good people who make good places.”
― Anna Sewell, Black Beauty
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“How good life is when one does something good and just!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
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“Kindness is a magical spell—performed by enlightened beings—meant to enchant hearts and lift weary souls that they might fly.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
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The first frozen factory. People licked. That’s right. Licked.
