56 THE STRAWBERRY IN NORTH AMERICA 



open hostility of railroads and express companies, he con- 

 tinued his experiments until they were successful, and 

 paved the way for the great refrigerator interests of today. 

 The story of these early struggles has been told by him : ^ 



"I think it was in 1868 that I built the first twelve re- 

 frigerator chests for shipping strawberries. I sent them to 

 Chicago, Pittsburg, New York, Memphis and New Orleans, 

 by express. ^Mlen the express companies followed in- 

 structions and re-iced the berries they carried quite well. 

 They held 200 quart baskets each and 100 pounds of ice. 

 The express rates were so high and the neglect of re-icing 

 so frequent that I had to give it up. Similar chests, only 

 larger, were used from Charleston to New York by steam- 

 ship lines at about the same time. It was later that the 

 small pony refrigerator boxes began to be used from 

 Florida. My boxes weighed 600 pounds when loaded; 

 these pony boxes weighed about a hundred pounds. 



"The first attempt at carrying carloads of strawberries 

 under refrigeration was made by IVIr. Davis, of Detroit, 

 about 1868. He came to Cobden with a car that was made 

 for refrigerating beef and fish. It contained a vertical 

 cylinder in each corner, about fifteen inches in diameter, 

 and was iced from the top of the car, using salt with the ice. 

 The consequence was the freezing of a part of the berries 

 while the balance of the load was very unequally cooled. 

 The result was a loss which did not invite a repetition of 

 the venture. 



"The experiment interested me greatly, and I thought 

 I saw why it failed, — that the refrigeration was very 

 unequal and, in parts, very excessive. The following year 

 (1869) I got a car from the Michigan Central Railway that 

 was being built to carry dairy products. It was loaded 

 1 Yearbook, U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, 1900, pp. 444-5. 



