This is a reprint of a “From the Local History Room” column that first appeared in April 2014, before the launch of this weblog.
Woody Lawson: Pekin’s last ice man
By Jared Olar
Library Assistant
This week we’ll revisit a subject that this column previously addressed in January 2014 – the ice industry in Pekin.
In the prior column, we focused on the W.A. Boley Company, which had lines of ice houses on Gravel Ridge, the eastern shore of Pekin Lake, and the Grant Brothers Company, which had its ice house on Bailey’s Lake (i.e., Lake Arlann or Meyer’s Lake).
They were the two largest ice companies in Pekin, but there weren’t the only ones. One of the other Pekin ice companies was the Stark Ice Company, also known as Stark & Son Inc. It was located at 304 Illinois St. and also had a storage house at 230 Fayette St. “Stark” was Chris Stark and “Son” was Carl Stark. In the early 1940s, the company’s manager was Oscar C. Curtis, and among their ice men were John Urish and Oscar Jackson. Another of the Stark ice men was a 17-year-old young man named Ellwood “Woody” Lawson, who learned the ropes of ice work from Urish.
The Stark Ice Company went out of business around 1943 due to a fire caused by welding torches during renovation work. The fire destroyed the building on Illinois Street, and the Stark family then sold their business to the Peoria Ice Company. World War II was raging during those years, and several of the former Stark ice men went off to fight, including young Woody Lawson, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a machine gunner in Okinawa and China.
After the war, Lawson again found work as an ice man in Pekin, this time with City Coal & Ice. However, the increasing popularity and affordability of the refrigerator around the middle of the twentieth century would eventually put an end to the ice industry. In the 1950s, Lawson ended his years in the ice industry with the distinction in local history of being Pekin’s last residential ice deliveryman – but he had already taken a second job in 1947 at Keystone Steel & Wire in Bartonville.
However, many Pekin residents probably will better remember Lawson as the co-owner, with his wife Darla, of Woody’s Corner Tap in downtown Pekin, which he operated from 1979 until his retirement in 1994. He died about 10 years ago and is buried in Lakeview Cemetery, Pekin.
Lawson’s widow Darla has generously provided the Pekin Public Library’s Local History Room with copies of photographs of her husband and his co-workers from their days as an ice man during the 1940s and 1950s. As for the old Stark & Son building that once stood at 304 Illinois St., if anyone can assist in locating photos of that building, please contact the library at 347-7111, ext. 2.
