Our next stop on this great tour is Indiana.   More specifically ...Indianapolis, Indiana.   Mr. Gilbert Van Camp, a native of Indiana, born in 1814, was truly a visionary.  When he was 17 years old he went to work at a flour mill near his home in Brookville, Indiana and learned the trade of miller, and at the end of four years he and a partner opened a store selling tinware and stoves.  Since Gilbert also learned the trade of tinsmithing, he made much of the merchandise he sold at the Brookville store.  Four years later, Mr. Van Camp sold his interest and from 1845 to 1860 he worked as a   tinsmith around Greensburg.  It was in 1861 that he went to Indianapolis, along with a fruit grower and a financier, and became a junior partner in the grocery of Fletcher, William & Van Camp. Soon after, he became proprietor of his own business, The Fruit House Grocery.  Here he put his metal-working skills to use, and built what is touted as the nation’s first cold-storage food warehouse with walls three feet thick, sandwiching cut straw between two sheets of iron...

Read the complete article in the Bevil Newspaper!