STATK rOMOI.OGlCAL SOCIETY 



53 



temperature and there were half a dozen men in there picking 

 over apples and those barrels were half of them a mess of rot. 

 They were apples that the dealers had had shipped them, or 

 bought, and finding little or no sale for them in the fall, the 

 markets were so filled with apples, and what to do with them 

 they did not know but thought it would be the better way to put 

 them in cold storage. Well, those apples had begun to ripen and 

 they continued to ripen there. While in one room apples were 

 kept way into the spring. On my lot of 600 barrels, the shrink- 

 age was only half a barrel, apples picked and barreled in the 

 orchard and probably not over four days' time from the tree to 

 the city storehouse, if there was that. So that after apples have 



Rear of Mr. Clark's Cold Storage — Filling Ice Box. 



begun to ripen they will gradually go on, as Air. Powell has said, 

 they will gradually go on and ripen in your cold storage. 



Xow in running this house of mine, I found that I needed ice 

 in it in winter just as much as I did in summer. Xow my house 

 is built with a brick floor, except a concrete driveway nine feet 

 wide and a walk to the work-room four feet wide, f built it of 

 brick for this reason. If I put in a floor of wood, or if I put in a 

 solid concrete floor, as I found by some that have done it, the air 

 in the house is liable to wither the fruit if the fruit is open, but 

 with a brick floor there is the moisture gradually coming 

 through that brick into the atmosphere which keeps the fruit 



