The Puritan Ice Companies by David Petry

Author:David Petry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2012-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Ice in the Fields of Lompoc

Lompoc was a natural extension of the Puritan Ice Company’s foothold in Guadalupe. When Puritan arrived in town in the mid-1920s, many of the same Japanese farmers it worked with in Guadalupe leased fields in Lompoc, and the Southern Pacific, with a line in place to the local diatomaceous earth mines, was soon laying a spur to the Puritan site as the region went through one of the area’s quicksilver shifts in economic base. Vegetables in quickly expanding truck farms took a place in the local economy along with English mustard, flower seeds and diatomaceous earth. Cut flowers would come later, spreading over former vegetable fields with their higher profits.

But vegetables, when the fields were first tilled for the new crops, were the great new export that would help make Lompoc, or Puritan’s vision of Lompoc, a place on the map.

Puritan bought land for its ice plant in Lompoc in 1926. Dalzell and Phillips drove out and surveyed the terrain on one of their trips between Santa Barbara and Guadalupe. In August, they purchased a lot a half block off the existing Southern Pacific line “along a portion of Laurel Ave between O Street and 13th Road.” (Thirteenth is now V Street.) The purchase was composed of Town Blocks 267, 268 and 269. Located at 1195 West Laurel, the prior owners were “H.H. Howerton and wife.”137

No plant was started until late 1929, however. Instead, Puritan worked with Southern Pacific to complete the spur up to, and onto, its new property, and it built a simple loading platform. At first, vegetables grown in the Lompoc Valley were shipped either to Guadalupe, thirty minutes to the north, for icing or to Santa Barbara, an hour south. A short time later, “the ice used here in vegetable packing [was] shipped in by rail from Guadalupe.”138

Local fields were not producing at a rate that demanded an ice plant. Not yet.

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