PROVIDENCE – The former General Ice Cream Corp. building, a historic ice cream factory in Providence, has been named to the National Register of Historic Places, according to the R.I. Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission.
The three-story brick building, at 485 Plainfield St. in the city’s Silver Lake neighborhood, was constructed over a three-year period ending in 1918.
It was built by Sam Dolbey, an English-born entrepreneur who had opened a retail ice cream shop on Manton Avenue in 1901. Because Silver Lake and Johnston were largely rural and contained an abundance of dairy farms, the factory site allowed easy access to milk, cream and other dairy products needed for the ice cream business, the heritage commission noted.
Dolbey eventually dubbed his business first Dolbey Ice Cream Co., then Eastern Dairies Inc., before consolidating with General Ice Cream Corp. in 1928.
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“Most of us enjoy ice cream without giving much thought to its history,” Edward F. Sanderson, executive director of the historical commission, said in a statement. “However, the General Ice Cream Corp. factory is a significant piece of the larger story of Providence’s metropolitan development.”
The company operated on Plainfield Street until the 1950s. It pioneered the paper ice cream can and, in the 1930s, the first commercially produced ice cream pie, the heritage commission said. Like other companies of the time, it also “promoted ice cream as a nutritious food,” the commission added.
The former Dolbey Ice Cream building later was used by the Sealtest Foods Division of the National Dairy Products Co., then for a variety of jewelry-manufacturing uses until 1990.
The now-vacant building boasts such exterior features as brick, metal and wood cornices and double-hung wood-sash windows. Inside, there are painted brick walls and rows of columns supporting steel and wood beams, “typical of early 20th-century, fire-resistive construction,” the commission said.
The R.I. Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission – the state office for historic preservation – operates a statewide historical preservation program that identifies and protects historic buildings, districts, structures and archaeological sites. Additional information is available at www.preservation.ri.gov.
The National Register of Historic Places, a program run by the U.S. Department of the Interior National Park Service, is a list of more than 80,000 properties in the United States. For additional information, visit www.nps.gov/nr.
