Willowbrook

Southland Corporation, originally known as the Southland Ice Company, headquartered in Dallas, is one of the nation's largest operators and franchisers of convenience stores. At one time, the company operated five distribution centers and six food-processing centers and held a 50 percent interest in the refining and distribution of Citgo petroleum products. Southland Corporation grew out of the Consumers Ice Company, run by owner J. O. Jones and Joseph C. Thompson, a University of Texas business administration graduate. After college Thompson went to work for Jones, foreshadowing the convenience store business, when he successfully launched the sale of chilled watermelons at the company's retail ice docks. In 1927 Denison ice manufacturer Claude S. Dawley and several friends combined four ice plants in Oak Cliff, San Antonio, McKinney, and Sherman, Texas, including Consumers Ice, to form the Southland Ice Company. Dawley, who had started an ice business in 1909 and served as the company's first president, obtained support from Thomas Insull's financial and public utilities empire at a time when ice companies were considered public utilities, the only real source of refrigeration for goods and beverages before the mechanical refrigerator appeared in 1926. Initially, ice companies hired young women to visit homes to explain how better refrigeration could be obtained through the use of standard ice boxes than the mechanical refrigerator.