Heat Wave or Not / Pacific Has a History of Keeping Cool 

By Pauline Masson

Pacific today is known for the railroad, the Meramec River, Route 66, and spectacular bluff-top sites where visitors can see all three at the same time. But one of the coolest parts of Pacific history is its mastery of the chemistry of ice.

The railroad surpassed the river in 1853 as the cheapest mode of transportation, but the Meramec held onto one secret – it froze deep enough to support a team of horses  for weeks on end, creating a boon to the local economy that would outlive both the river as a transportation route and cheap train rides, and would make Pacific the ice center of East Central Missouri for 170 years

Ice became commodity here in the winter of 1854, when the Pacific Railroad (later the Missouri Pacific)  began to saw blocks of ice out of the Meramec River to cool the water cans that stood in every passenger car. Railroad workers cut enough ice out of the Meramec to last throughout the grueling Missouri summers.

“They stored ice in this yellow building on the right side of the tracks. They cut it on the Meramec River and hauled it up there,” the late Ed Brundick told us in his published memoir.

They always cut more ice than they needed for the trains and the railroad offices.

“They’d deliver ice around to the saloons. The beer then was all in barrels. They put the barrel of beer down in the container and they’d pack this ice all around it,” Brundick recalled.

There were two or three little butcher shops in Pacific. When they’d have some meat left over, they had a little box about three-feet square where they could hang a quarter of beef. They’d put ice down there.

“When the town had a Fourth of July picnic, the beer, soda and everything would be cooled with the ice that came from this place,” Brundick said. “It seemed to me that they had plenty of ice from one year to another. Practically nobody had an icebox.”

The local economy and the need for ice grew at such as pace that by 1896, the railroad struggled to keep up, and ever faithful to the community began to bring in ice from St. Louis.

Pacific Ice Plant

The ice business took a different turn in 1909 when Robert Schuchart visited his mother in Pacific and learned that the former canning plant was for sale. Schuchart purchased the plant and started plans to manufacture ice and sell coal from the building.

He purchased a horse drawn delivery wagon and a horse, and advertised that he would deliver ice every day but Sunday. Roscoe Hill was hired as a delivery man.

In 2013, the ice plant shipped 25 train car loads of ice to out-of-town customers. This was in addition to wagon loads shipped to Villa Ridge, Labadie, Gray Summit, Allenton, Eureka, and New Haven.

The local newspaper gloated that, “Yes, Washington has to come to Pacific for ice.”

As summer approached, Schuchart advertised that it cost so much make all that ice, he would to have to raise the price by five cents on the hundred pounds.

Pacific Refrigeration Company 

By 1913 the ice business was so good that Schuchart had bigger ideas. Much bigger.

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He solicited local businessmen to form a Joint Stock Company to fund the building of a huge refrigeration plant and cold storage building. Schuchart was president. A. Koppitz, vice president and R. C. Lowry, secretary and treasurer. It would be the largest business venture ever undertaken in Pacific

Stock holders contracted local builder Joseph Ottman to build the huge plant with a floor area of 50 feet by 80 feet and rising 42 feet above a 9 foot below ground basement and storage building adjacent to the ice plant. A smaller wooden frame building, known as the penthouse, rose 13 feet above the roof. A 90 foot iron tower next to the penthouse aided in moving material. The outside walls were built of 12 inch concrete blocks made on the site.

Half the plant set aside for storage would hold 70 carloads of ice when full. Schuchart boasted that from this facility a train car of block ice could be filled in the time it would take to hitch the car to the first train ready to move. The other half of the building were rows of rooms opening on corridors to provide storage space for eggs, vegetables, fruits. Some 600 private lockers were stacked three high in one large room. Local hunters, farmers and patrons rented the lockers to preserve perishable items. The company employed two butchers, often women, who would cut the customer’s stored meat to any cut that they requested.

Each room was entered through a ponderous door the same thickness as the walls equipped with a heavy levered latch that swung the door closed as soon as anyone passed through. 

In December 1914, Schuchart advertised that the newly named ice company was open for business. He gave his ice delivery wagon a new coat of paint that included his name in bold letters, that, “you may read it as it flies by,” the local editor reported.

The plant manufactured ice in 300-pound blocks, which were infused with air to make the ice crystal clear. The blocks were cut into 25-pound blocks for delivery to local taverns and out to the drag race strip concession stand south of town.

In a series of large storage lockers, the refrigeration plant also stored Easter lilies, apples, empty milk bottles for Hogan Dairy and any other commodity customers chose.

For 54 years, the giant refrigeration plant provided jobs, ice for local businesses and residents, freezer lockers for hunters and farmers to store their food supplies and butchers to cut meat to order.

FIRE

At 5:35 in the morning on Friday, July 11, 1969, police officer Ray Sutter spotted flames on the roof of the Pacific Refrigeration Company and sounded the fire alarm. 

The Pacific Volunteer Company of firefighters, some just rising, dressed quickly and headed to the fire station at Second and Union streets. They brought the Pacific Volunteer Company’s three trucks and collection of hoses to the scene and fought the fire alone for approximately two hours. 

“That building was in flames before we got there,” firefighter Ed Bruns recalled. “The inside of the building was lined with cork and that could burn for hours before anyone knew it. The fire had a tremendous jump when we got there.”

According to Water Commissioner Jim Dunn, the water in the city reservoir dropped from its normal 8 feet to 3 feet during the time of the fire, using approximately 310,000 gallons of city water.

“At that time we probably only had a little over 400,000 gallons of water in the reservoir,” said Ed Gass, assistant water commissioner at the time. “The fire just about ran us dry.”

When water pressure dropped, Gass threw a dam across Wild Horse Creek which ran beside the building and the Washington Fire District began to pull water from the creek for its snorkel hose.

Eventually five fire companies would fight the blaze. Pacific firefighters, an all-volunteer company, remained at the scene for 60 hours, eventually pulling down walls and cordoning off the area to protect the public.
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Baker Ice

By the time of the Pacific Refrigeration plant fire local businessman Lloyd Baker had already determined that customers preferred ice cubes to the cumbersome blocks of ice.

In 1962, Lloyd and Mary Ellen Baker opened Baker’s Standard Service Station adjacent to I-44. The station was a popular stop for vacationers to pick up supplies as they headed for the Lake of the Ozarks. Ice was the most frequent request for their weekend trip as motorists bought their gas.

Baker bought a commercial ice machine and began to bag Ice cubes in a small shed beside the station. On a good day, the little ice machine could produce about 400 pounds of ice cubes.

In 1972, Baker built an ice manufacturing plant (his first) on what then was Business 66 across the street from Baker’s Standard Service so he and Mary Ellen could manage both businesses. The ice plant had a capacity of 9,000 pounds of ice per day. But the demand grew, especially after the refrigeration plant fire. The Bakers expanded the plant. Additions were built in 1980 to increase production and storage to 25 tons, in 1985 to increase production to 48 tons and again in 1990 to 87 tons.

With still a need to produce more ice to service customers, in 1985 the Bakers purchased 15 acres of wooded land on Lamar Parkway. A bridge was built over the creek and the land was cleared to build an ice plant that occupied half an acre under roof, and was equipped to produce 200 tons of ice per day.  

In 2011 entered into a franchise agreement that tripled the firm’s market area from a 75-square-mile radius to service east central and southeast Missouri to the Arkansas border. The marketing agreement added five trucks and 10 employees to the Pacific plant, and increase production from 200 tons per day to 500 tons per day over the next three years.

Lloyd Baker was a larger than life personality, who, I once reported, almost never took ‘no’ for an answer. He persuaded the Chamber of Commerce to keep Pacific relevant as a regional city. He fostered a high school queen pageant to provide college scholarships for local girls. Baker Ice was the first local business to contribute big money to Helen Preiss’s campaign to build a senior center here. Baker’s original grant of $1,000 grew to $40,000 over the next few years.

I once called Mr. Baker the ‘Pied Piper of Ice Street.’ He would donate hundreds of pounds of crushed ice to local fairs and festivals to provide snow cones and would stand at the snow cone cart and buy back his own ice to hand out free snow cones to kids of all ages.

His daughter Jill Baker Pigg would serve as mayor of Pacific. His son Tim Baker currently serves as Franklin County Clerk.

From what began by bagging ice cubes in 1964, by 2000 Baker ice was staffing 42 full-time employees with up to a staff of 80 during the summer months. 

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Home City Ice

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After Lloyd Baker’s death in 2002, Mary Ellen Baker and the couple’s son Tim Baker continued to operate the business until 2012. After 49 1/2 years of service to the area, Mary Ellen Baker sold the family ice company to Home City Ice, headquartered in Cincinnati.

Home City would invest approximately $1 million for improvements to the facility and update production equipment to increase ice production capacity

Home City Ice also lays claim to being a family business. In operation since 1924, Home City Ice operates plants in half a dozen U.S. cities and reports current annual sales of $200 million. ________________________________________________________________________________________

Christopher A. Harris, great-grandson of Anna and Robert Schuchart posted this.

Bob and Anna were my Great-Grandparents. They lived at the corner of Osage & Columbus. Both of them were children of German immigrants. My grandfather Dewey Hughes (married Helen Schuchart, a daughter) worked for Grandfather Bob and said that during his time there, they processed close to 1,000,000 lbs. of beef (7 years). The inventor of 7-UP was a client who rented a locker. He gave grandpa Hughes a sample and all grandpa could say that, “it was cold.” There were a handful of customers who rented lockers that lived in or near St.Louis.