“It’s History!”
This phrase often means something is past its usefulness, dead and buried, not worth remembering. An abandoned building, an old relationship, a hobby grown uninteresting, a painful event erased by time.
I grew up on the Beach Road north of Sister Bay, Door County in the 1950s, and can barely remember places from my childhood. The ferry dock at Gills Rock. Wildwood, Ellison Bay and Sister Bay grade schools. The canning plant at Appleport. Zion Lutheran Church. Rudy’s Bakery. Krist’s Red Owl. The Bank of Sturgeon Bay and its gumball machine. The list goes on. It’s History.
Sister Bay has seen radical changes, but many places simply transitioned. Al Johnson’s has expanded the turf-roofed complex. The Village Hall will (thankfully) be preserved. The extensive park along the shoreline has the best of all the villages’ beaches. The Library is beautiful, with its secret garden paths. Husby’s is still there (I vaguely remember Emma and the café on the south side of the building….and the bean bag game in the bar room). The Sister Bay Bowl remains an anchor point, continuing to provide families with fun and the world’s best perch fry.
And an imposing hotel sits on the property that once held my grandfather’s business, right in the heart of town.
E.F. –better known as Andy—Anderson established the Masterfreeze Corporation in 1945, to build home and farm freezers, lockers, and milk coolers. Part of the post-war manufacturing boom, it grew to building pre-fabricated walk-in freezers and erecting them nationwide. The company employed dozens, and at times hundreds, of local workers. My father, my uncles, family friends and countless other men from northern Door earned a good living there.
There were complicated reasons why the business closed in 1966. I was a young kid and didn’t really understand what was going on. My knowledge was just based on family hearsay.
Skip forward to 2022. I discovered a treasure trove of photos, clippings, and souvenirs while helping my mother move. She’d saved the brief presentation she made when the building was razed, but there was so much more that I had never seen. I whipped up a rough draft of a booklet in time for an Anderson family reunion two months later.
The memories became a book. I dug into Advocate archives, and the County Register of Deeds, and the longer history of Door County. I prodded high school classmates for stories, discovering that even the existence of Masterfreeze was fading from living memory. I interviewed my uncle Fred Anderson and got a whole new, personal perspective on the life span of the business.
It’s History. It lives in our blood, in our bones, and perhaps is preserved a little bit in this book.
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