Lucius Beebe Memorial Library, Wakefield, Mass.

Title

Morrill-Atwood Ice Company, 1933

Description

"The Morrill-Atwood Ice Company on Spaulding Street was one of the many ice houses in Wakefield which operated from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century. Owner John Merrill built an ice storage facility in 1878 on Spaulding Street and later joined forces with J. Reed Whipple, a Boston hotel owner, in 1890. They purchased a portion of Hartshorne's Meadow, now Veterans Field, and started supplying ice to Whipple's hotels and to other large users in Boston. Whipple sold his shares to Frank H. Atwood, a partner in Morrill's Spaulding Street ice house, in 1897. Whipple-Morrill exported its ice while Morrill-Atwood sold its ice locally. Atwood remained as the owner of both ice houses following Morrill's death in 1904. He left the wholesale ice business when he sold the Hartshorne Meadow ice houses to the Porter Milton Ice Company in 1919, and eventually sold the Morrill-Atwood company to Albert S. Anderson in 1926. Anderson started an electric ice manufacturing business in 1932 after several bad ice-harvesting years. He sold his business to the Metropolitan Ice Company of Somerville in 1945. Metropolitan eventually razed all the buildings, except one which was leased to Salvatore and Antonio Palumbo, who later purchased the property and operated their wholesale fruit and produce business there until the 1990s. The last remnants of the structure were demolished in 1988."

Image from the Wakefield Municipal Gas and Light Department annual calendar, 2014

Photo courtesy of the Lucius Beebe Memorial Library, Jean Nauss and the Nauss family, whose father, Larry Nauss, is standing on the far left

Contributor

Institution: Lucius Beebe Memorial Library

Wakefield Municipal Gas & Light Department (Wakefield, Mass.)

D'Onofrio, Jayne M.

Coverage

Massachusetts--Middlesex (county)--Wakefield

Date

1933

Format

image/jpeg

Publisher

Wakefield, Mass. : Wakefield Municipal Gas & Light Department

Subject

Ice industry

Morrill-Atwood Ice Company (Wakefield, Mass.)

Type

still image

Photographs

Original Format

1 picture: b & w

Extent

30 x 16 cm.