This collection of four, or maybe five, Black Ice car air “fresheners” got me thinking.
Arrayed on the dash of this 1992 Volvo 240 which I recently encountered while in the process of getting my (16 year and 150,000 mile older) 245 through its annual state inspection, I imagine that these accessories hold special significance for the owner of this black car. Volvo, being built by practical Swedes, simply calls this color “Black”. Although “Black Ice” might could be appropriate, albeit possibly infringing on Little Trees’ copyright. Maybe the Volvo’s owner chooses only Black Ice Little Trees in honor of his boxy black beauty and its Nordic heritage.
At any rate, this dashboard collection made me wonder…
Where did these things come from?
Well, they might have come from here. This is the Little Tree mother ship (aka corporate headquarters for the Car-Freshner Corporation), in Watertown, NY. Right off I-81, you’ve probably driven by it if you’ve driven from, say, Syracuse, NY to Ottawa Ontario, Canada. I’ve not done that myself, so I can’t vouch for whether or not one can smell the delightful aroma of Little Trees’ dozens of fragrances. But you’d think so. You’d also think that the air there in Watertown is just a bit fresher than almost anywhere else on the planet. Hummmmm. Could be.
The Google car apparently couldn’t get any closer and therefore this is the best shot we have of the only feature identifying what comes out of this factory building.
If the Volvo’s Black Ice trees didn’t come from Watertown, then they might have come from Little Trees’ other factory in DeWitt, IA right alongside Route 30.
DeWitt is also home to “Little Trees Park”, which is one of 10 city-operated parks in DeWitt…along with the DeWitt Dog Park and the town’s Disc Golf Course. It looks like Little Trees Park is probably a very nice place for Little League games on clear summer evenings. The air is warm, and could smell like America.
Provided one has the appropriate car air freshener, of course.
I’ve obviously plucked these images of the Waterville and DeWitt factories, as well as Little Trees Park from Google; and this was necessary given that the Little Trees company seems rather closed with regard to public information. Aside from a single page of history on its corporate web page, the company does not have any photographs of its facilities or historical overview of its products. That one page mentions the often-told story of immigrant chemist Julius Sämann’s fateful encounter with a milkman in 1952 and said milkman’s suggestion that Julius use his perfume-making skills to create something that would help to disguise the smell of spoiled milk in his milk truck. And the rest (including questions about what kind of milkman drives around in a truck smelling of rotten milk…hopefully he got a job with Julius, because one would guess that his career in dairy product delivery may have been kind of shaky) is automotive accessory history.
Julius Samann – He never met an odor he could not mask freshen
Except, that’s it. What? I have to say that it strikes me as strange that a 75 year old company whose products are in every convenience store, gas station, and auto parts store around the nation (i.e., at least a quarter of a million locations) has no more documentation or demonstration of its corporate history than a few sentences about a smelly milk truck.
Betty Brosmer – who is still with us, just not on Little Trees display cards, as of 2022.
For example, there’s nothing on the company website about the woman who is perhaps most responsible for establishing Little Trees as an eye-catching – “Sure, I’ll grab one of those at the register” – product for its first 50 years.
I called the Little Trees company headquarters, and asked if they had any public-accessible museum or displays at their Waterville or DeWitt facilities. The very nice employee on the phone said “No”. She also confirmed that there are no factory tours available to the public.
Although not exactly unexpected, I find this fact – no factory tour – incredibly disappointing. If there is one constant in all of my travels it’s that if there is an opportunity to go on a factory tour, I will make time for that tour. There is pretty much no physical object that I will forego the opportunity to see manufactured.
The Buffalo, NY Trico factory is on the National Register of Historic Places. And why wouldn’t it be?
And when I can’t get inside the factory, I still make an effort to get a picture of the outside, like I did with the Trico factory in Buffalo recently. I apparently missed the last tour (if they had them) at the windshield wiper factory by about 25 years, but the building is still there and is being rehabbed for partial use as a hotel. You can bet that I’ll want to stay there on some future trip to Buffalo.
They even had free samples…at the plastic box factory.
Recently I was able to tour a factory that makes those plastic boxes that hold salads, bakery goods, etc. at the grocery store. It was pretty straight-forward, but that didn’t matter to me as it was a factory tour. The managers were quite proud – justifiably so – to show off their facilities. It seems that if the plastic box people could offer a tour, Little Trees might want to highlight how they make their arguably much more interesting product.
Plus, I should emphasize something mentioned in passing a moment ago about the Little Trees DeWitt facility, and that’s the fact that it sits right alongside U.S. Route 30. How fitting that a ubiquitous piece of American motoring history – the tree-shaped air freshener – is produced in a factory that sits directly on the nation’s ur-road, the New York City to San Francisco Lincoln Highway.
I see tremendous potential for corporate sponsorship of a vast museum of American car culture. Along with naturally a car museum, they could have displays of automotive ephemera — imagine the Fuzzy Dice gallery, the JC Whitney Hall of Automotive Spray-On Wonders, a huge company gift shop that sells ALL of the current Little Tree fragrances plus themed and “retro” aromas, and of course a factory tour.
All of the fragrances, including one of the latest, “Wild Hemp”. I remember when just about the last thing you’d want your car to smell like is weed. Times, they have changed.
I’ll go for broke here and suggest that the building housing this new attraction should be shaped like the iconic Little Tree itself, so that when viewed from the air it would be abundantly clear that this is where those things come from. Right smack dab in the middle of the country.
If anyone at Little Trees is reading this, I’m ready to head out to Iowa to start planning.
See, if you build it, they will come. Am I right? Another potential Iowa connection! And in a couple of years, watch out Hershey.
Maybe it is just a crazy dream. But who wouldn’t want to have a deeper hands-on connection to and knowledge of even the little things that compose day to day life. Where do these things come from and what do they mean? Well, the Little Trees Museum of Automotive Culture (as long as I get bragging rights for coming up with the name first, they can copyright it) would help answer those automotive-related questions and we’d all be richer for it.
Plus, it would make one more reason for a great road trip.
For more about Route 30 and its history here on CC, see Jim Grey’s post on American Highways and Paul’s Vintage Photos of Highway 30 in 1948.
Popular in the UK, these air fresheners have been with us a long time ! It annoys me though when my wife takes new ones straight out of their wrapper instead of exposing the contents a little at a time , we then have a car that smells strongly for about two days then nothing !
And she’s actually voiding a significant part of what Julius Samann patented.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US3065915A/en
Not wanting to get too far into the weeds (or cardboard forest), I didn’t include Samann’s patent application in the article. But there you have it in the link above. See, what he actually held the patent to is the plastic bag and string! Seems like a little thing…but as I’m sure the Car-Freshner (note the spelling) Corporation would tell you, it’s those little things upon which one builds an empire.
I don’t think there are many people out there that don’t just rip it out of the bag and hang it up w/o the bag. Back in the day I’d see them with the bag being used as intended but it has bee ages since I’ve seen one in a car with the bag still present.
And she’s actually voiding a significant part of what Julius Samann patented.
Yes, but trying to explain it to her is a waste of time, and after 40 years I’ve learned not to argue ! lol
Well put .
-Nate
Thanks for this refreshing (sorry for the pun) look at a product that’s so commonplace that I’ve never thought about where it came from.
What amazes me most about this story is that the Car Freshener Corp. – which I suppose invented the whole concept of car air-fresheners – has managed to remain the leader in its field for seven decades. And that’s in a field where the barriers to entry are extremely low and the product itself is very cheap. Just about anyone can produce a product made of scented paper… yet this small, closely-held firm has somehow fended off competition.
I do recall, perhaps back in the 1990s perhaps, imitation products made as gag gifts (instead of trees, for example, they were in the shape of feet had an odor of smelly feet). Usually, that sort of thing spells the beginning of the end for the original product, but these Little Trees have endured… and endured. Good for them – may these Trees endure as long as the sequoias!
And should there ever be a Little Trees Museum of Automotive Culture, I’ll certainly be among the visitors!
Thanks Eric! I probably spend way too much of my time trying to understand all of the little stuff that we take for granted in day to day life. Oh well.
I agree with what you say about the product cycle and how tough it would be to defend your marketshare for something so common. I believe that Car-Freshner Corporation fought off the competition through aggressive pursuit of their patent rights. They literally held the patent (see above) for putting scented cardboard in a plastic bag with a string to hang it from the rearview mirror. There are references in the literature about them suing others who tried to replicate the idea, thing, or name. It obviously worked for them!
Nicely researched article about a product that I loathe. They reek! When I bought the Chevy Tracker, it had a Black Ice freshener hanging from the rear view mirror (which I instantly tossed), and I had to drive it with the windows open all the time. It got a bit better but it still smelled horrible, even after a few weeks. That’s when I found another one semi-hidden in the back somewhere. After that went, it started to clear up.
Stephanie’s nose is more sensitive than mine, and she almost throws up at the smell of strong fake smells, including all those dryer products. When we are walking in the neighborhood and someone is drying clothes with them, she practically gags!
A very dark side of these is the fact that numerous young black men have ended up dead after being pulled over by cops because they had a little tree hanging from their rear view mirror. Another reason one will never grace my car, even if its scent was natural and pleasant.
I’m with you so far as stating that I will never hang one of these things in my own car. First, I cannot stand things dangling from the rearview mirror (that includes parking passes, which when I’ve had to use them, I always remove them except for when actually parked). But second, I don’t think I could deal with the actual smell.
Even during the days when I had to drive a child-stinky (it’s simply unavoidable…) vehicle, I worked to get the various odors out of the van/car before I reverted to trying to mask the odor.
The only air freshener I have ever had in my car was the sprig of freshly plucked Oregon wild oregano I stuffed in one of the dash vents of my Tacoma, on this summer’s Exbro outing. Very pleasant, unlike these probably toxic chemicals. Still, a very interesting history – thanks Jeff.
I’ve heard of motorists being stopped by police for having a GPS navigator or phone blocking part of the view forward – legal in some states – but not for an air freshener, much less heard of people (mostly black people) being shot by police during the stop, but a quick Google search quickly brought up many examples. Lots of tree air fresheners were hung from the fence surrounding the police station as a protest after Daunte Wright was killed by cops after being stopped for having a little tree hanging from the rearview mirror. Apparently, having almost anything in the windshield field of view is illegal in Minnesota, California, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas and Illinois. Virginia does too, although it was recently amended so police can no longer stop you just for having an obstructing object in your car, but merely add that violation to another infraction they stop you for. There may be other states too; this hasn’t received much attention. I wonder if Car-Freshner avoids selling their products in states where they aren’t legal to hang from the mirror (although hanging them from a dashboard knob or such would be legal since it doesn’t block the outward view).
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/daunte-wright/air-fresheners-become-a-symbol-following-the-death-of-daunte-wright/89-3278aab4-2d78-4dd6-a9af-7ba9f7586be5
https://apnews.com/article/death-of-daunte-wright-shootings-police-minnesota-laws-830f67a66eee832a87d3642fe8ca50e8
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/12/us/police-shooting-air-freshener-trnd
Paul, I agree with you on the loathing. I never had and never will have one of those disgusting things in either one my cars. The only thing I use is the cedar blocks that are used for your dresser drawers. They smell great, and if you notice that the scent starting to fade, all it takes is some sandpaper to bring it back.
Growing up we always had cut or live tree at Christmas. Once us kids were grown Dad decided he would just put up an artificial tree. Any guesses on what he hung on the tree to get that pine aroma? Yup, Little Trees air fresheners.
Excellent. You know, they make that stuff (pine aroma) in spray cans. Just like snow. 😉
But there are of course several Little Trees and popular holidays crossovers.
http://www.aboutcostume.com/little-trees-car-freshener-costume-p-18018.html
In case anyone here is still looking for a Halloween costume. I’m sure it could also be adapted to “Sexy Little Trees Costume” if so-desired (since it’s mostly the “sexy” versions that seem most advertised online nowadays)
Given that these were designed, marketed and apparently originated in the desire to cover up nasty odors rather than solve them, anytime I see one hanging from a rearview mirror I’m grateful it’s not a car I’m about to get into.
The Top Secret public profile that corporate maintains is a bit amusing given the goofy tree sign at their headquarters. Perhaps for the best. I may not want to know what chemicals I’m breathing in when these are offgassing.
Very good point about the sign. Given the company’s low-profile nature, you’d expect just a plain black-and-white sign that said “CFC” or something that.
The view from the other side of the sign is amusing too because the company’s driveway is lined with… pine trees. Of course.
Fascinating! Thanks for the post! If anyone ends up going to Watertown to drive by the Little Trees headquarters, you may as well swing through Gouverneur and see the Life Saver roll.
Also, can’t believe I’m the first to quote Repo Man: “Find one in every car. You’ll see.”
Ah good old “stinky trees” as the owner of the parts store I used to trade at called them. He loved them because he made a 50% margin on them. Of course that didn’t mean much in the way of profit since the are so cheap.
It is amazing how long they have had a lock on the market and how many different stores you’ll find them in and if they only carry one line of car air fresher it will almost certainly be the Little trees.
It is surprising that they now have the hemp version, but you do have to keep up with the times. As mentioned back in the day you didn’t want that smell in your car, in case you got pulled over and for many the choice of coverup was the Vanillaroma stinky tree. Of course those that went that route never seemed to take the old one off their mirror and throw it away, they just kept adding one after the other. To me that didn’t seem to smart because to me that told everyone that you had weed in the car.
For what it is worth, the shape of the air freshner is so that the plastic bag can stay on the air freshner throughout the month, each widening branch holding the bag in place until it is pulled out further.
It couldn’t have been shaped like a stalagtite, or it couldn’t hold the bag.
I don’t care for the scents these trees provide. I’ve never used them as a result.
I love pieces like this – histories of mundane bits of automobilia (or automobilia adjaescent things). I am pretty certain I have never had a car where one of these things has hung.
The thing I find most amazing is that there is still a low-margin consumer product still being manufactured in New York. I thought that almost all such manufacturing decamped for the deep South or overseas decades ago.
I did a bit of looking online, it seems that Julius Samaan, Ltd. is an affiliated company that litigates the snot out of its patents, including trademarks depicting a fir tree.
And what, exactly, is “Black Ice” supposed to smell like? Perhaps the smell of hot anti-freeze and air bag propellant following a chain reaction collision on a northern highway in winter?
That’s what I wanna know!
For the matter of that, I’d also like to know why North Americans feel compelled to swim in perfume—usually very bad perfume—at every opportunity. It’s in fraudulently-described air “fresheners” like these detestable tree-shaped stinkbombs, it’s in laundry detergent and fabric “softener”, it’s everywhere. But I’d settle for that gross cultural phenomenon remaining a permanent mystery if people would just stop. Just take a damn shower and clean out the car every so often!
I do have to say that the CC effect was in full swing when I found the Volvo with the dashboard full of Little Trees…not long after reading your piece on the 69 Rebel. The resulting confluence was too much for me to avoid looking deeper into the artifact. 🙂
Well, according to the Car-Freshner Corporation, Black Ice is:
None of those things obviously go together and neither are necessarily “black” or have anything to do with ice. So I suppose we’re no better off than before reading the description. I have read that Black Ice is their most popular scent; and some say that it does a better job of covering up the smell of weed in the car (contrary to Vanilladude’s assertion that the vanilla one – that would be “America” according to the Little Trees website – does a better job of that). But when you can actually get a Ganja-scented Little Tree, I’m not sure why anyone would care about removing pot odor from their car. Which brings us back full circle to Black Ice….and its illusive odor of men and oranges. In the woods.
As a kid we always had old cars. It seems like they always had a green pine tree air freshener in them to “spruce” up the fragrance. That smell used to make me car sick. The one Little Tree fragrance that I really liked was “Bouquet” which was on a blue gray pine tree. They stopped making it about 40 years ago but I wish they’d bring it back.
That’s the “retro scent” feature of the (proposed…by me) Little Trees Museum of Automotive Culture gift shop. You know that they must still have all the scents available in the lab. They could have a device not unlike a Mold-a-Rama machine where you could feed in some money, select your scent, and watch a device print, imbue and package your souvenir Little Tree.
There’s not a kid alive who could resist something like that!
I’ve never heard of these, and I’m a big fan of electro-mechanical arcade games that reached their zenith in the mid-1970s, just before video games replaced them. Who knew they had 3D printers (of sorts) way back then!
You’ve probably found info on these online, but they first came to my attention at the 1964 NY Worlds’ Fair where they were used by Sinclair Oil to dispense plastic dinosaurs…molded right before your eyes. This video has a little bit right at the end showing one of the machines in action.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtbfuOlgtuc&ab_channel=PinchHitter59
After the fair, some of the Sinclair Mold-a-Rama machines were distributed to Sinclair stations around the country. This lead to many a car trip where I pleaded with my parents to ONLY buy Sinclair gas so that I could check out if the station had a Mold-a-Rama. Somewhere in the annals of Sinclair marketing, I have a gold star (me and other dinosaur-obsessed preschoolers in the mid-1960s).
While the last machines were built in the late 1960s, you can still find functioning Mold-a-Ramas in the Chicago area and in particular at the Museum of Science and Industry (where I took the photo above) and also I believe at the Brookfield Zoo.
Barrett Jackson sold one of the original Sinclair machines last year for $150,000. Probably to someone who like me first saw it at age 5; but who has no doubt done a bit better financially in the ensuing half-century.
https://www.barrett-jackson.com/Events/Event/Details/SINCLAIR-OIL-1964-NEW-YORK-WORLDS-FAIR-MOLD-A-RAMA-MACHINE-246358
For some reason, this story reminded me of my shopping trip to Publix in Florida back in 2018. Being snowbirds, we drove our 2017 Lexus Rx350 NY to FL. Grabbed all the bags and brought them up to the condo. Couldn’t find the package of chicken my wife bought and figured the checkout girl misplaced it oh well.
Weather was bright sun 90+ and we didn’t go out for two days. Went out to the parking lot, about 5 ft from the car, got this horrible smell. Opened the car and well, guess where the package of chicken was?
It took alot of these trees, dryer sheets etc, etc a looooooong time!!
Two friends of one of my kids were visiting today…I walked down the driveway and past the cars to investigate – The ’99 Audi A4 was sporting four Black Ices and something Rainbow colored in the middle of the mix and the ’05 Forester has a Supernova flavored little tree. I strongly get the impression that Axe Body Spray is on the shopping list for these fellas as well. At least they are exceedingly polite to me and both cars were quite clean inside.
In other news the vast majority of junked cars have at least one of these, but with a preponderance towards the newer rides (post millennium). Almost nothing genuinely vintage does – it could be that those cars’ owners are never in the car wash waiting room and/or make a bee-line for the exact part they need at Autozone or O’Reilly or wherever with no dilly-dallying around looking at stuff like this.
They may only make pennies per item in profit on these but there are billions and billions and billions out there, it adds up.
Someone somewhere (here?) recently posited that Black Ice smells like Drakkar Noir. If you were coming of age in the ’80s that stuff was unavoidable back then…
“Black Ice smells like Drakkar Noir”
That’s probably an apt description since Black Ice is supposedly “A mysteriously enticing masculine scent of woods and citrus”. That descriptor almost universally signals the presence of bergamot and cedar when involving products geared towards men, and the three prominent components to Noir? Bergamot, lavender, and cedar.
I always think of pine Little Trees as “Used Car Smell”, most used-car dealers must’ve bought them in bulk.
In about 1995 my mother bought a new car, a once-per-decade thing for her. She refrained from smoking in it – her old one was a rolling ashtray by that point – and said she wouldn’t as long as it smelled new. So for Christmas I bought her a 10-pack of “New Car Scent” Little Trees.
A Little Trees museum in Watertown would be a worthwhile side trip to any vacation in the Thousand Islands.
Looking back It must have been all those Little Trees back in high school friends cars that makes me nauseous whenever I smell one now. They usually had a four pack of the same scent all opened at the same time. I thought people stopped using these when they decided hanging their HS graduation tassel from the rearview mirror was no longer cool.
As to why they don’t offer factory tours? I think that’s pretty simple. They would be too embarrassed for people to see the piles of cash they make selling them. I mean how much could some paper pulp, screened image, squirt of scent and plastic wrapper cost? Like ten cents each max?
In an odd version of the CC Effect, while mowing the lawn this afternoon, I saw this on the grass by the road.
I hadn’t thought about these Little Trees in eons before reading this article yesterday.
I’m surprised they’re still in business. I perceived them to always be in smokers cars, to cover up the smoke that they shouldn’t be a problem if it was blowing in my face. Yeah, I’m an anti smoker. Anyway, to me if I was looking at a car to buy or just getting in a friends, it was like a flashing red light that it was a smokers car. Since tobacco use is way down from what it was a generation or two ago, I would think the “Little Trees” would be to. I guess it’s one of those “shows what I know” sorts of things.
Now what by what I read into the authors words is a strong “go away” from the company rep, it really makes me wonder about what’s in them?
Oh, I wouldn’t say it was really a “go away” tone…first off, they clearly note corporate hq’s phone number on their website. But I do think that it’s a very closely held private company that may have a corporate culture that’s used to being a bit off the public radar. They may also assume, as sadly many do, that “no one” would really be interested in learning more about something as commonplace as a car deodorizer. I think I observed that effect in place when I went on the plastic box factory tour. The managers and employees were really quite happy to share info about their work, because as the plant manager noted, relatively few people ever ask or ever bother to think about where those boxes that hold salads actually come from (and who would know that you have to wear a hair and beard net when touring the box factory, since it’s a food-safety issue!).
Finally, as others have noted here, Car-Freshner Corporation did pretty much stay in the game by strongly defending their copyrights and patents in court…which of course is their right to do.
That said, lots of private companies still have tours and museums 🙂
What a great piece Jeff Sun, as others have said something one sees everywhere and never thinks about.
I associate the pine smell with highway trucks growing up, when almost every trucker smoked and the smell of vinyl, diesel, cigarettes masked somewhat by pine scent was present in every truck cab.
My son uses the black ice in great quantities for some unknown reason, and it’s even noticeable with the windows closed. I did give in an put one in my latest project truck, as when the temp heats up the smell of the previous inhabitants (about 200 mice) tends to come back despite painting the whole inside of the truck, and replacing all soft goods.
Well done!
Thanks! Good point. Although I’ve gone on record multiple times that I wouldn’t hang an air freshener in one of my cars, I probably should consider this with the Honda Fit I currently have that spends long times between drives. It seems to have developed into something of a rodent condominium (except, they don’t pay a condo fee. hummmmm….) due I’ve been told to the soy-based ink used on the car’s wiring. The little critters apparently just love the stuff. I know I should just spend the time to pull the headliner and clean it out. But maybe a Little Tree would be a lot easier.
Too bad Little Trees doesn’t make a freshner that smells like “cat”. That’d probably do the trick.