(upbeat music) - A lot of the community in Hallock, they thought of Fred McKinley Jones, as they called him Casey, if they had a problem, if they needed something fixed, they would go and ask him.

As long as he was in a shop with tools and machines he was creating.

As early as five years old, he had an interest in tearing apart items and trying to figure out how they work.

Frederick McKinley Jones was a self-taught inventor and engineer.

He was born in Covington, Kentucky in 1893, and his father was American Irish and his mother was African American.

His father worked for the railroad and he felt that he needed to have a better life for Fred, and he brought him to this church and that's where he was raised.

And he never saw his father again.

When he was 16, he ran away and started working on his own.

He ended up in Effingham, Illinois.

And then he met a guy who was talking about a farm up in Hallock, Minnesota.

And it was a big farm that belonged to Walter Hill, James J. Hill's son.

And he heard about all these machines that he needed to work on up there, so he thought this would be a perfect opportunity.

And on Christmas day in 1912, he arrived in Hallock and in the spring he started working for the Hill Farm.

(upbeat music) He became like their head engineer for their steam engines, their tractors.

He was fascinated with motors and how to fix things.

If there wasn't a tool to fix something, he'd make the tool to fix the item.

So he was so innovative and creative.

He felt really welcomed here.

He mentions how they never really looked at his color.

People just accepted him for who he was.

But he was always working on items for people.

(upbeat music) (paper shuffling) He built a radio transmission system.

He built a portable x-ray machine for the local hospital.

And one of the big ones that really got his start, he put sound to the silent movies in the local theater in Hallock.

That caught wind of Joseph Numero, who had the cinema company down in Minneapolis.

They were having a lot of problems switching over the sounds on their machines, and he heard through the grapevine from other theaters about this Fred McKinley Jones in Hallock, Minnesota, who had put this sound to this machine.

So he contacted him and asked him to come and work for him.

Well, that was the beginning of where the invention started to get patented.

(upbeat music) He had like over 60 patents.

And the major invention while he was with Numero was the refrigerated car.

Well, once the refrigeration thing came into place, it turned it into Thermal King Industries.

Fred McKinley Jones was the main engineer there.

Jones developed a unit to go inside the trailer of a semi and keep it refrigerated.

And from then on we got fresh eggs, chickens, ice cream.

When you think about it, we get our frozen items from all over the United States.

- [Announcer] From the time food is prepared for use or picked on farm and orchard, refrigeration protect it and keeps it fresh and safe.

Food is refrigerated on trains, in trucks, and then in the retail store where you buy it and take it into your home.

- The whole world actually benefits from what he invented.

During World War II, he was also hired by the Department of Defense to work in the industry to help keep the hospitals cool, to keep the blood and plasma cool.

So he worked on things like that, too.

I don't think he really got financially credited for all the work he did.

I think he was maybe taken advantage of because of his color, too.

You never learned about him.

There was nothing in our history books about him, and I think it's really important for our youth now to learn about him.

We have a small exhibit here of him.

Hallock has a mural that they put up of him.

He contributed a lot to our society, and I just wanna carry it on forward that he is continued to be recognized.

(somber music) He came from nothing and he just had a drive that made him move forward.

I think Fred McKinley Jones opened the path for other black inventors.

I think that they were able to see that anyone can do anything if you put your mind to it.

- [Announcer] But while we've had many spectacular inventions in our time, it's doubtful of any of these has added as much to your comfort and convenience as modern refrigeration.

- What is cool to this day is if you're sitting watching the train go by, if you look, pay attention to the cars, you can see some cars that still say Thermo King on the front, or you meet a semi going down the road, Thermal King is across the top.

These are all from Fred McKinley Jones.

(somber music) - [Speaker] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.