Benton County Nursery
Thomas Lee Jacobs started the Benton County Nursery in the back bedroom of his home at 1204 S. Fourth St. in 1915. The business prospered, and Jacobs soon moved the office above an old barn that he used for a packing shed. He operated his business in this building at the corner of South Fifth and Mulberry streets for 10 years. Margaret Puckett lived down the street and wrote in her scrapbook, "I remember stopping there when I was in grade school and watching the office ladies type. How I wished that I could learn to do that when I grew up." Later, after graduating from Rogers High School, Margaret went to work for the nursery and worked there for 13 years. Warren Puckett, Margaret's brother, also worked at the nursery for many years. (Information courtesy of Ann Nickell, daughter of Margaret Puckett Nickell.)
In 1925, Jacobs acquired a tract of land on U.S. 71 S. just north of the former Daisy Manufacturing Plant, and built a concrete block building to house the nursery. In 1935, he expanded again and built a big two-story brick building for the office and packing house between U.S. 71 and the railroad tracks. The business was heralded as one of the showplaces of Northwest Arkansas. Carolyn Duty Banks described the nursery on a Rogers' website: "It had a gorgeous botanical garden of Oriental design on the north side. As a small child, I loved it when my parents took me to visit the garden."
The company thrived, and during World War II, when food was being rationed nationwide, the government encouraged home gardens and fruit orchards. Benton County Nursery aided this effort by offering a Victory seed collection which included a large variety of vegetable seeds for 65 cents and a fruit orchard kit with enough trees for one acre -- over 1,000 plants -- for $60.
The company appealed to "regular" folks in their catalogs and literature: We are a bunch of old-fashioned, hard-working blue-eyed hillbillies, who grew up right here in these Ozark Mountains, on the farm, and made our living from what we could grow out of this mountain soil, and all we know is to treat you exactly like we would want you to treat us if we were in your place and you were in ours."
Benton County Nursery guaranteed their plants to live and offered an installment plan of 50% down and the balance in three monthly payments. The catalogs quoted: "This enables you to have the stock coming on while you are paying out the balance due."
By 1950, the nursery owned and operated 300 acres and employed about 100 people during the shipping season. The nursery mailed thousands of mail order catalogs to "practically every locale on this earth," offering a large variety of vegetables but specializing in vines, shrubs, roses and trees. Over 99% of the company's mail order business was from out-of-town, making the company the largest customer of the Rogers Post Office. Shipping charges were included in the price and in one year alone -- 1949 -- the nursery paid $16,000 to ship plants all over the country. (Rogers Historical Museum website.)
The business was always a family owned business while T.L. Jacobs was living. A 1943 company booklet described the nursery family: T.L. Jacobs, president; Mrs. T.L. Jacobs, vice president; Verna Jacobs Rhoads, secretary; George W. Eoff, landscape gardener; Lee Jacobs, second vice president; Russell Driver, manager, Seed and Plant Department; Maxine Jacobs Driver, advertising manager.
After T.L. Jacobs died in 1960, the company incorporated with manager L.L. Lincoln, Verna J. Herndon and Mary J. Finley as principal stockholders. In 1961, the nursery announced plans to build a new $50,000 sales center at their location on U.S. 71 South. They were also working with the University of Arkansas in the development of specialty trees, such as fruit trees that produced five different varieties on one tree, a single vine that produced a variety of grapes and a peach tree that produced the world's largest peach. (Rogers Daily News, April 5, 1961.)
No one knows why the company declined in the early 1960s, but they filed for bankruptcy on May 3, 1963, ending 48 years of service to the nation. It is gratifying to think of the many fruit trees, shrubs, flowers and assorted plants that continued to produce food and pleasure around the nation for decades after the company closed.
Rogers Ice and Cold Storage
Several times in recent years, interested people have asked about the history of the old ice plant in Rogers. I had little in my files about the big imposing red brick building on East Pine Street beside the railroad tracks, so I did a little research.
The site between East Pine and Pecan is the site of Rogers' first ice factory, the first electric light plant, the first bottling plant, and a cider mill and vinegar factory built by H.Y. King about 1895. King sold his electric company in 1905 to J.L. Dunn, who built a new power plant at Diamond Springs (Lake Atalanta Park). King's Rogers Ice and Cold Storage continued and expanded, and the company still makes ice today.
In 2012, I met a wonderful lady named Sarah Clark who said that she had some information about the ice plant. Since I had practically no information about it in my files, I jumped at the chance to get the story. Sarah is the daughter of Guy Carter, who worked for Rogers Ice and Cold Storage all of his adult life from 1921 until 1970. Sarah's uncle, Earl Carter, age 97, also worked at the ice plant, and he supplied much of this data.
On Jan. 11, 1913, Rogers Ice and Cold Storage was acquired by the Ward family from Fort Smith and was at one time was the largest ice plant between Chicago and Dallas. When Guy Carter started working in 1921, the ice plant served a very important function to the fruit and poultry industry, as well as the homes in the area. At the time, ice was manufactured in 300-pound containers with "vacuum cores" to make clear ice (air bubbles removed) and also milky ice without "cores" for commercial use. At the plant by the Frisco railroad tracks there was a dock several hundred feet long with conveyor belts to move ice from the plant to trains with refrigerator cars for shipping fruit, meat and produce.
Guy Carter's first job was to deliver ice to homes in Rogers using a tarpaulin-covered wagon pulled by horses. He would start the day about 7 a.m. by catching the horses and hitching them to the wagon. Then he would load about 3,600 pounds of ice and run his route, delivering the ice to homes and putting it in their ice boxes. The ice was made in 300-pound blocks and scored so that it could split into blocks from 12.5 pounds to 100 pounds. The customers would leave little cards in their windows that indicated how much ice they wanted. Typically, a customer would want 25 or 50 pounds every one or two days and pay about a penny a pound. Customers would leave the payment (exact amount) on the icebox for Carter to collect. During the day, Carter would return to the ice plant four or five times to reload and worked 10 to 12 hours per day at 25 cents per hour.
Horses were used to pull the wagons until about 1941. Old-time residents of Rogers remember the way Carter used to walk out of one house, and signal his waiting horses to walk down to the next house. Guy Carter had several teams of horses during his years, but his favorites were two little white horses, Chalk and Babe. It is very sad, but the horses stampeded during a fire and were hit by a Frisco freight engine.
"Long after my dad's death, individuals would share stories about him and his job," said Sarah Clark. "Most related to young children following the ice wagon to beg ice chips, which Dad willingly handed out. I also recall one man shared with me that Dad's horses could read the sign in the window and knew when to stop. I never quite accepted that one. ... He worked seven days a week until around the mid-1950s. He saw remarkable changes in those 49 years. ... Most of the business after the late 1950s came from selling ice commercially, in machines and from the rental of freezers."
For an update on the plant, in 2012, I contacted Larry Reed, the plant manager for the previous 30 years: About 30 years ago, Rogers Ice and Cold Storage was sold by the Ward Company to Triple T Foods Inc., a pet food company based in Springdale. The name was changed to Rogers Cold Storage, and in 2012 the company still manufactured ice, but for its own use. (Data supplied by Sarah Clark, Larry Reed and the Rogers Historical Museum.)
