Railroad Magazine Vol. XXIII, No. 3, February, 1938, Pages 65-69
The First Refrigerator Car
By Watson B. Berry
Who built the first refrigerator car, and when? You might as well ask who named the Johnson bar, who invented the caboose, or who started the engine-picture hobby.
These and other facts are buried in oblivion and are subjects of controversy that may never be solved. We do know, however, that “reefers,” as they are called, date back to the time when ice was first used to preserve milk and butter while they were being hauled by train from the farming districts to the cities and towns.
Railroads had been in use only a few years when the necessity arose for some form of equipment that could accommodate the traffic without spoiling the perishable products. One of the earliest references to refrigerator cars was published in the American Traveller of Boston, Mass., and copied in the American Railroad Journal & Mechanics’ Magazine on June 15th, 1842. Under the title “Freaks of Railroad Transportation,” it said:
“We understand that the Western Railroad are about preparing refrigerator cars, in which fresh beef, pork, veal, poultry, pigeons, venison, wild game, and other fresh meat can by a moderate quantity of ice be kept in perfect order in the heat of summer; and in which (in winter) they can be kept from freezing; thereby, in either case, adding much to the value of the article when carried to market.”
There were several railroads bearing the name ‘‘Western,”’ but the one referred to was the Western Railroad of Massachusetts. The article said further:
“These refrigerator cars will be used for the like advantageous purpose to carry eggs, butter, lard, fresh fish, oysters, lobsters, vegetables, cheese, lemons, oranges, strawberries and all berries and fruits and roots, being a mode of transportation of great value for nice delicacies, which bear a good price.
“We also learn that it is contemplated that these refrigerator cars shall go with the passenger trains in twelve hours through from Albany to Boston, and shall be placed between the tender and the passenger cars, giving additional security to the passengers in case of accident.
"If our Michigan and Ohio friends will put in refrigerator cars the fresh meat and the wild game they intend for this market, they can send their cars to Buffalo on the lakes, and from Buffalo to Greenbush,
partly by railroad and partly by canal, or wholly by the Erie canal. Then from Greenbush it can come to Boston quickly and in perfect order, the moment the system now proposed is perfected. In like way, a chowder of fresh Massachusetts codfish will readily be obtained at Chicago.
"It may be asked: ‘What is a refrigerator car?’ It is simply a common car, with a hole at bottom which you stop by a sponge, the sponge allowing the water to drop down while it impedes the air coming up into the car. Then you have four inches of powdered charcoal on the sides and top and bottom of the car compactly, between the two boards which form each of the sides as well as the top and bottom.
"If it be said that it is difficult to make so large a refrigerator as an eight wheel car will be we need not only reply that the ice-houses at Fresh-pond are, in fact, large refrigerators and that some of them are large enough to contain 8,000 tons of ice, and have kept ice from melting for a whole year and longer too. “In sending a cargo of ice to Calcutta, we so arrange the hold of the ship, as to make it virtually, a large refrigerator, and we do this so efficiently that crossing the equator twice on her passage and being for a long time in the warm water and under the burning sun between. the Tropics, she yet wastes scarcely any of the cargo. Barrels of apples kept cool in this refrigerator arrived in Calcutta from Boston in the most perfect order, and command a great price.”
We have no record of such cars having been actually built or put in service at the time mentioned. However, the American Railroad Journal of July, 1843, carried an interesting item on the transportation of milk, which seems to be the earliest printed discussion of that subject. The editor stated:“At this moment pure and wholesome milk is sold all over the city (New York) at four cents per quart. The previous concoction sold at six cents per quart. This wonderful revolution has been wrought through the agency of the New York & Erie Railroad and affords a fine example of the benefits of railroads. The following is the mode in which the transportation is performed:
“The cows are milked in the morning at Goshen and its vicinity, the milk put in cans containing from sixty to seventy-five quarts, into which a tin tube filled ice is inserted and stirred until the animal heat is expelled from the milk. It is then sent by the railroad, and arrives, a distance of eighty miles, at the milk depots (which are numerous in the city) in four and one half hours. The tube filled with ice is again inserted and the milk thus kept cool and sweet until sold. It can be afforded to the public at four cents per quart, which the farmer gets two cents per quart and is well satisfied, as it yields more butter at 25 cents per pound.”
Although vehicles carrying milk at period could hardly be termed refrigerator cars, this was probably the beginning a large and lucrative railroad freight business that continued until recent years, when the automobile milk truck chiseled in on the game, using the public highway for right-of-way.
The first reefer which we know was actually built and put into service on any line made its debut on the Northern Railroad of New York, later known as the Ogdensburg & Lake Champlain and now part of the Rutland. This was in the summer of 1851, less than a year after the road began operation between Ogdensburg and Rouse’s Point on Lake Champlain, and nearly ten years before the outbreak of the Civil War.
While we were assembling material for history of the O&LC, Mr. J. A. Proctor, assistant general freight agent of the Rutland, unearthed a newspaper clipping, yellowed with age and bearing no date, which throws some light on the subject. This item is a reprint from the St. Louis Republic, clipped, Mr. Proctor thinks, from a New England paper of many years ago. It said:
“The refrigerator car was never invented, but just ‘fixed up.’ It was the idea of a New England railroad man who needed some such thing as far back as 1851. In June of that year the first refrigerator car is said to have made its trip from Ogdensburg, New York, to Boston. The car owed its origin principally to the fact that the farmers near Ogdensburg, who made a great of butter, were unable to ship it except in cold weather.
“A railroad man named Wilder, at that time in charge of the through freight, thought it would be a good idea to rig up an 'ice-box on wheels,’ and he told this to the pesident of the road, who gave orders that the master mechanic should plan several them. At this time farmers were receiving only twelve cents a pound for their butter. The iced car was loaded with eight tons of it, sent through and allowed to stand in Boston till the product was sold. It brought seventeen cents a pound, after paying all expenses and commissions, and the plan was voted a success. In a short time the road had a regular service on, using a number of cars; and the idea spread rapidly. Wilder did not patent his idea, but allowed it to be used by whoever so desired.”*
Early reports of the old Northern Railroad (O&LC) have unfortunately been destroyed, so we don’t even know Mr. Wilder’s first name. However, your author, as a native of that section, recalls a family of millwrights named Wilder living near Malone, N. Y., in the seventies. Their grist mill at Lawrenceville was a famous local institution. It is more than likely that the unidentified Mr. Wilder belonged to that family and built his car at Malone, where the O&LC main offices and car shops were located.
The road’s first president was T. P. Chandler. If his personal papers can be found, they may give the answer to such questions. Your author is in touch with his grandson, C. Lyon Chandler, a Philadelphia banker, who is searching for those papers right now.
Old records of assessed valuations, census reports, etc., show that within two years after Wilder’s first carload of butter had been shipped to the Boston market in the hot June of 1851, the values of dairy farms in that stretch of 118 miles from Ogdensburg to Rouse’s Point increased in value 100 per cent. Evidently Wilder’s refrigerator car did it.
Up to that time farmers had been obliged to heavily salt their butter and store it in cool cellars or icehouses. It was impossible to ship it very far in the warm-weather months, The result was a great accumulation of butter which had to be moved to nearby markets in the cool months.
The news of that first shipment in an iced car spread like a prairie fire. In no time at all the O&LC put on a “butter train” that ran from Ogdensburg on Mondays, picking up carloads of butter at the principal stations where the new-type cars were shunted under cover into the hundred-foot freight houses. These shipments reached Boston early Wednesday morning in perfect condition.
For years Monday was “butter day” all along the O&LC. At the important butter stations the buyers attended, sampled the product, agreed upon prices and paid cash. Your author recalls them very well. Mr. Wilder certainly did a lot to bring prosperity to the North Country.
The newspaper clipping about Wilder was not available to W. F. Dietrichson, of the American Car & Foundry Co., in 1933, when he wrote an article for Refrigerating Engineering, in which he claimed that the earliest attempt to refrigerate freight cars was made on the Michigan Central in the early sixties to carry meat from Chicago to New York and Boston.
“Ordinary boxcars,” he wrote, “were fitted with platforms at each end about three feet from the floor with metal catch basins to carry away water as the ice melted. Heavy swing doors were suspended from the ceiling to hold the ice in place These bins held from 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of block ice.
“At about the same time the Pennsylvania Railroad was experimenting under the direction of W. A. Chandler, head of the Star Union Line. They had thirty boxcars fitted with double sides, roof and floor, and the space between sheathing and lining packed with sawdust. There was a hole in the floor between the doors for leakage of icewater and a box with ice was put in the doorway after the car loaded.
“Experiments were also going on in Detroit, the first patent being taken out J. B. Sutherland, of Detroit, on November 7, 1867. Then in 1868 D. W. Davis, Detroit, who had been experimenting since 1865, patented his improved refrigerator car which was widely used in the early years. These cars had no means of ventilation."
Other inventors also worked on the problem, and three types of reefers evolved. In one of them the ice was suspended in baskets or crates built under the roof. Another type used ice bunkers located at one or both ends of the with fans driven by the car axle to circulate air over it. The third type - which is practically the one universally used -—has the ice bunkers at each end of the car with an opening at the top and bottom w natural circulation of air within the car body. All of these cars were insulated with either sawdust or some form of felt to keep the temperature low.
Gustavus Swift, well-known Chicago packer, is generally conceded to have the founder of refrigerator service for meat. He began with ten cars in 1857, and other firms of packers started afterward. Whether or not he got his from Mr. Wilder, we do not know. And then in December, 1875, six and a half years after the Golden Spike at Promontory, Utah, had linked the Atlantic and Pacific by rail, The National Car Co. announced:
“A fruit-car is being constructed at San Francisco for the transportation of fruit from that city to Chicago. It is provided a fan-blower driven by one of the car-axles, by means of which the air is driven through ice, which reduces it to a low temperature and then distributes it among the fruit boxes through a large perforated pipe laid along the bottom of the car. After the cool air has passed among the fruit it returns to the blower and is again forced through the apparatus. By this means the atmosphere of the car is kept at the uniform temperature of forty degrees Fahrenheit. If the experiment succeeds, extensive shipments of grapes and fruits will be made.”
At length, in 1885, fresh garden truck was hauled from Norfolk, Va., to New York City. This important event marked the spread of a rapidly growing refrigerator-car system for fruits and vegetables that now covers the entire country, extending into Canada and Mexico.
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*Jonas Wilder was born October 2, 1813 in Wendell, Mass., and was involved in construction of the Vermont Central, and the Northern New York Railroad (later the Ogdensburg & Lake Champlain). In 1851 he became "traveling solicitor of freight traffic" and several sources credit him with designing and building the first refrigerator car. Eventually a total of eight 36-foot refrigerator cars were built at the Ogdensburg shops. Sources claim he was involved in the organizing of the Northern Transportation Company that had a fleet of propeller steamers on the Great Lakes with headquarters in Ogdensburg. In 1852 he became superintendent of the Rutland & Washington Railroad that had a fleet of 300 freight cars and 10 refrigerator cars.
Wilder also is said to have devised the first coupon tickets ever issued by a railroad. Overworked, he resigned and contracted to furnish all the wood used for fuel on the railroad for a period of three years. Later he was superintendent of the Boston, Hoosac Tunnel & Western. Later he supervised construction of railroads in Virginia. He died in Woodstock, Vermont, July 7, 1906 and was buried in Rupert, Vermont where he had been involved in other business ventures, including a sawmill. - Sources: The Saratogian, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., July 13, 1906; New York Times, July 8, 1906.
An early refrigerator car of the 1870s period.
