In Apalachicola sits a small museum to honor a man named Gorrie.

Many Floridians know him as the man who invented refrigeration.

John Gorrie was an early physician and scientist who lived in northwest Florida, primarily Apalachicola, but also in what today we know was Sneads, for a brief time in Jackson County.

He was the father of modern air conditioning and refrigeration.

Well, John Gorrie, within this area or state of Florida, is known as the inventor of the ice machine or the cooling process of ice machines.

That is which is what he was known to do.

He came here from South Carolina in 1833.

He's one of the founding members of the Episcopal Church that was founded in 1836.

He was basically Mr. Apalachicola because not all at once he was the mayor, the town treasurer, the town postmaster general.

He was also president of the Panama City Branch Bank in Apalachicola.

And first and foremost, he was a physician.

When John Gorrie arrived in Apalachicola, he would have found a swampy, antebellum seaport surrounded by vast Florida wilderness.

30 years before the Civil War is when Dr. Gorrie arrives in Apalachicola, but Florida at this time has been part of the United States, you know, for only about 12 years.

So it's Florida is a very fresh frontier.

At the time that he arrives in Apalachicola.

It was an interesting timeframe because a lot was going on in Apalachicola.

I mean, it was a busy, busy sea port with, you know, exporting millions of pounds of cotton every year.

So it was a working port with sailors coming in and out from all over the world coming here.

And a lot of his original business is not just taking care of the people of the town who are the free, prosperous people.

He's taking care of the enslaved people.

They're hiring him to take care of the enslaved people.

He's taking care of the sailors who arrive on the ships, who are bringing in things like yellow fever or who are sick with malaria.

At the time, they thought that yellow fever was caused by bad vapors.

And I know we all think that that sounds kind of ridiculous in this day and age.

But you have to have it in context for the time.

So Gorrie gets hired by the lumber company here to drain all the swamps in the town, and you've got to keep people healthy.

If you don't have a healthy population, you don't have a workforce.

Every heat wave is bringing in waves of fevers, and the fevers immediately depopulate the town every time there's a heat wave fevers break out.

They don't know at that time they're caused by mosquitoes.

So, Dr. Gorrie, at the time, he's close to kind of figuring it out.

He comes up with the thesis that it seems like the changing of the seasons terminates the fevers.

Well, what happens during the changing the seasons?

One, mosquitoes don't breed, and we now know that it's a mosquito vector disease.

But what also happens is that you have less decaying vegetation and it gets cold.

And so those smells go away.

So he's close to figuring it out, but not quite.

And that's what gets him thinking that, okay, it seems like cold is a cure for yellow fever.

So he embarks on his journey to create cold.

And so he began to experiment with ice.

And at that time, ice had to come down from the north.

It came down on ships.

They packed it in salt dust.

It was cut in the Great Lakes or on the lakes up in New York.

And an ice syndicate controlled the ice.

And that's kind of funny to think about today, but there was a syndicate that controlled ice, shipped it down south, they packed in sawdust as insulation, and you had to buy ice from them and you bought it in blocks of ice.

And so he would buy ice and he started developing ways to hang ice in the rooms of his patients to see if he could cool those rooms down and try to help his patients.

What he set out to do was essentially create cold so he could cure his yellow fever patients because he thought that cold was the cure.

What he ended up with was an actual functioning machine that froze water into ice.

The first time he revealed that he could make ice.

The French emissary there in Apalachicola hosted a banquet and promised ice champagne, and they everyone wondered how they were going to do it because the ice ship, you know, hadn't come.

But Gorrie didn't need an ice ship.

He had created a machine that could make artificial ice.

The patent was granted, patent number 8080 ...May six, 1851.

Sadly, Dr. Gorrie dies in 1855.

The backers that were going to help him mass manufacture this machine, they had backed out.

So sadly, Dr. Gorrie dies at 53 years old and he never does get to see the tremendous invention that this would essentially be and the benefit to mankind that it would eventually come to be.

So sadly, he doesn't make any money off of it.

And it's kind of kind of fitting in a way, because I think I don't think and this is conjecture, but I don't think he was interested in making money.

I think that he was really interested in helping his fellow man.

And there you have the basic story of Apalachicola's ice making doctor, John Gorrie.

But there's a lot more of a story to Florida's Dear Dr. Gorrie Beginning at his beginning.

Even he would not quite tell the same story about his birth.

So one story is he came over from the Caribbean and he was in Charleston, South Carolina, and he was raised there and he was from Spanish royalty and his mother was the mistress of the king of Spain.

And he came over and he was born in the Caribbean on an island.

And the his mother or the king's mistress and him, we was escorted by a captain of the ship and brought to Charleston.

And the captain's last name was Gorrie.

And that's where he got the name Gorrie.

That's one story, you know, and that's that's probably the most official story that we have.

It is my understanding that he was born a Gorrie.

And everything that I've seen indicates that.

I've never seen anything that indicates otherwise.

There is a story there that says otherwise, but I've never seen any evidence that would suggest that.

I've never seen any evidence that suggests an adoption or a naming or anything in legal paperwork that would indicate that he was not born a Gorrie.

And what about the rarely mentioned story about the Ice syndicate and their smear campaign to discredit his ice making invention?

Freddy Tudor started the artificial ice business in 1806 up in Boston.

Fresh Pond.

He got to cut the ice.

He was a young man.

He cut the ice out of the fresh pond and said, you know, an entrepreneur.

And he said, you know, I think we can sell this down south if we do this, If we if we get it on ships, we do it right.

We can sell this stuff.

So we started cutting it there.

And they had to build special ships and special holding containers.

And every port it went to had to build a icehouse or thick straw or mud or something to hold it.

So he built they had to do all the infrastructure and they did it.

So they were making millions, if not billions of dollars.

By the time Gorrie started perfecting and actually making ice in this country.

Right.

And that scared the ba-jeebers out of them.

The ice syndicate realized that Gorrie's invention stood to destroy them, to destroy their industry, to bankrupt them.

And they knew his invention worked.

And so the only way to stop Gorrie was to turn him into a laughing stock.

And so they planted stories in newspapers all over the world that basically labeled him a quack.

And pooh poohing that, saying, no, it was a guy in the South who thinks he's God Almighty.

He thinks he can create ice.

So.

So there was a smear campaign against Gorrie or against whoever is making artificial ice.

And so funding was not going to be had because it was the it was a powerhouse up there saying, No, we're not going to have this.

You're messing in our business.

So when the civil war came and the blockade was put in place and the ice shipments stopped, there was some problems going on now in the South.

I mean, and it wasn't just because they were having a war for the north and the south.

You're messing with their ice now.

That was serious.

Messing with the ice.

So by 1862, the two French guys in New Orleans smuggled in actual good working of artificial ice machine from France, which the Carre' perfected off a Gorrie's design, but he used ammonia instead of saltwater like Gorrie did.

And that was the difference.

If Gorrie would have had more resources here.

He would actually made volumes of ice with his machine here to make some tweaks.

But the principles are exactly the same.

But instead of salt water brine, which Gorrie used, he used ammonia.

Wham!

He made tons and tons and tons of ice within days, you know, just amazing amount.

And then there's the gory story of the good doctor's feet.

Gorie died in June of 1855.

He was buried at that time at a cemetery that was on the Bayfront in Apalachicola.

His remains were later exhumed and moved up to Gorrie Square, where they're buried under a monument to him in Apalachicola, right in front of the Gorrie Museum State Historic State Park.

There's a great story that is told here in Marianna about that.

Whether it's true or not, I don't know.

But you know what great legend would be A legend if we knew it was true.

The legend is at the time that they found or moved Gorrie, they did not find the bones of his feet.

And according to legend in Marianna, the Myrick family was very upset that they moved Gorrie and reburied him in Apalachicola because the Myrick family in Marianna felt that if he was going to be moved, he should be brought here and buried alongside Caroline Gorrie.

And so a year or two later, some bones of of two feet washed up along the Bay Shore in Apalachicola, and someone who knew the Myrick's made contact with them and they secured those feet bones, foot bones and brought them to Marianna.

And they were interred here at St Luke's Cemetery at the foot of Caroline Gorrie's grave.

So why has the Dr. Gorrie story been so thin on detail?

Most of Gorrie's notes the second larger copy of his machine, his detailed research.

They've all been lost for many, many, many years.

Decades.

No one has known what became of them when Gorrie died.

His research just disappeared.

But recently, the tale of Apalachicola's favorite physician, has taken a turn.

Historian Dale Cox has tracked some of Dr. Gorrie's writings to his New Jersey descendants.

What we have since learned is that, yes, it's Gorrie's research papers, along with some diaries, some journals, some letters.

You know, our goal with this is to make this collection publicly available.

And we want it to be we feel like it's a treasure for the people of Florida and for we want Gorrie to finally receive his due.

And our hope is that this collection is going to reveal who all helped him with this.

So although Dr. John Gorrie may be history, his story appears to have new life.

For WFSU Public Media, I'm Mike Plummer.