Save Food, Flavor, Money with Ice
LITTLE RIVER ICE COMPANY –
By MaryBeth Carpenter
As we endure these last hot days of August, we salute an early business that bought cool comfort to folks from Zebulon and the surrounding area. The Little River Ice Company was formed by Robert Hoyle Bridgers in 1923. He built the structure on 126 E. Vance Street and began delivering ice and coal to area households and businesses.
By 1939, the business employed 16 men and had a delivery fleet of five 1.5 ton Chevrolet trucks built to hold 19 blocks of ice, each weighing 300 pounds. The plant had a capacity to produce 14 tons of ice a day, and a storage capacity for 600 tons of ice in addition to its daily storage. In addition, Little River Ice Company had sold 1,100 “modern air conditioned ice refrigerators” and ”commercial beverage coolers,” according to a news article.
In an article printed in a trade magazine in September 1939, it boasted of the commercial equipment sale to City Market of Zebulon. “This equipment consists of one ten-foot Warren display case, one 6 foot fish box, one 4×6 Warren walk in cooler, and one 6 foot beverage cooler.”
Power for the ice company was supplied by a 70 horsepower Fairbanks – Morse engine, “which pulls a generating system for lights and utilities in addition to the compressor,” the article from the Ice and Refrigeration trade magazine reported.
By the late 1940s, Little River Ice Company also sold gas and coal, and made deliveries to homes and businesses in a 12 mile radius around Zebulon.
Operating at the site where the Ferrell Gas company on Vance Street sits today, the Little River Ice Co also included a larger building adjacent to it, which has been torn down and is now a parking lot.
Bridgers sold the company in 1949 and he became Zebulon’s mayor from 1942 until 1950, and also served 19 years total in Zebulon’s municipal government. He was also a master of the Zebulon Masonic Lodge, and a local contractor building homes.
After Little River Ice was sold, it became known as Little River Gas, and the company changed hands until Thompson Gas bought it and it became part of a network of gas companies throughout the East Coast.
Linda Johnson, R.H. Bridgers’ daughter was a little girl when her father owned the ice company. A life-long Zebulon resident, she remembers visiting the business and riding in delivery trucks. She recently commented on the photo above. “Daddy’s business didn’t have that many trucks (as shown in the photo), so I bet this was a display from Gill’s Buick before the company,” she stated.
Glen Hicks, a delivery driver for Little River Gas for 27 years, remembered making deliveries over a six county area stretching from Chapel Hill to Louisburg and Youngsville to Carrboro. “Little River had all the routes on a book, and now Thompson Gas has them all computerized.” Hicks retired from his post in 2019. When he saw the photo being taken down from a wall at a local Thompson Gas branch, he asked to keep it and donated it to Preservation Zebulon. “I was afraid it would end up in the trash can and a part of Zebulon’s history would be lost,” he stated.