Northern Cold Storage & Warehouse Company

Northern Cold Storage & Warehouse Company was located in Duluth’s waterfront warehouse district from about 1907 to 1968. The photo above is credited to Hugh McKenzie circa 1935.

The address was 702 W. Railroad St., which puts it at the western edge of where Bayfront Festival Park is today. (Initially I guessed it was farther southwest in the area known today as Lot D, just to the southwest of Pier B Resort and boating slip #2. Evidence in the comments makes it pretty clear that’s wrong and the Bayfront area is correct.)

The Archives and Special Collections at the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Kathryn A. Martin Library contain this historical note:

The Northern Cold Storage and Warehouse Company was started in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1907 by William H. Cole, D.B. MacDonald, Joseph Sellwood, and Alex MacDougall. It specialized in storing dairy products and poultry products. It also had common storage facilities and handled merchandise warehousing. The business was sold to Kodiak, Inc. of St. Paul in 1965. The warehouse building, located on the Duluth waterfront at 7th Avenue West and Railroad Street, was razed in 1968.

Below is a periodical ad circa 1946.

5 Comments

Gina Temple-Rhodes

about 5 years ago



I think this location might have been closer to present-day Bayfront. The origin of the photos in this piece on streets.mn isn't listed, but they show the evolution of the space. Interesting to see the fishing boats and net-drying reel in the right foreground ... hard to believe they were doing much commercial fishing in that harbor area.

Gina Temple-Rhodes

about 5 years ago



Here's an angled aerial view. It was an interestingly shaped building.

Paul Lundgren

about 5 years ago

Indeed, the present-day Bayfront Park area must have been the location. It gets a little tricky to match stuff up in that area with all the changes over the years, but focusing in carefully on the aerial photos does tell us what we want to know.

It's weird how one wouldn't think the building had a rounded edge when looking at the McKenzie photo, but once we see in the aerial photo how the building was shaped it becomes apparent it's also rounded on that side in the McKenzie photo. But in the image in the advertisement it's quite rectangular with hard corners, yet it still looks like a similar-enough building that one wouldn't think they are different buildings.

Gina Temple-Rhodes

about 5 years ago

Just one side was curved... the other side (shown in the advertisement) was flat. I actually went looking for the aerial views because I couldn't get the bearings of why the water would be on both sides of the building... makes sense when seen from above.

Paul Lundgren

about 5 years ago

Ah ha! Yeah, I didn't catch that the advertisement was a different perspective on the building, shot from the water with the hillside in the background.

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