Southern Frigid Dough
By Jeremy Britten for Shoals History.
Thomas McGough (1906-2001) purchased the Florence bakery from M.P. Curran in 1941 and 5 years later, phased out the baking side of the business when he incorporated the Southern Frigid-Dough company.
Operating as a licensee of American Frigid-Dough, they wholesaled a line of frozen and ready to bake meat pies & dinner rolls. The plant on the corner of Poplar & College streets in Florence was specially built & occupied 11,250 square feet. They used the tagline “World’s Largest Bakery Without An Oven”.
In the late 1950s, the Southern Frigid-Dough company produced 65,000 pies per day with 90 employees. In 1958, McGough undertook a $200,000 remodeling & expansion program that would increase the plant’s capacity to 172,000 pies per day.
McGough retired and went into the real estate business as a home builder and one of the developers of the English Village Shopping Center.
