Bassetts Ice Cream: America's Oldest

Bassetts Ice Cream has been made since 1861, when Lewis Dubois Bassett, a Quaker schoolteacher and farmer, started it with a mule-driven churn on his farm in Salem, New Jersey. It is often called the oldest ice cream company in America. Bassett opened a shop at 5th and Market Streets in 1885, and the company has sold at Reading Terminal Market for well over a century: by its own account since the market opened in 1893, while the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia dates its stand there to 1898. The Bassett family still runs the business.