Browns Cow Serves up Ice Cream With Phoenixville Flavor

Browns Cow is about as all-American as it gets when it comes to businesses in Phoenixville. The ice cream parlor on Main Street is more than just the place to get old fashion ice cream, it's like stepping into a museum of Phoenixville ice cream history.

Brown talked to Phoenixville Patch about knowing his customers, being part of the fabric of Phoenixville and how he found all the cool decorations that make his shop a living Phoenixville museum.

Name: Warren Brown, Owner of Browns Cow

How did Browns Cow come about?  This is our seventh season.  I always wanted to open a shop down here. It was either going to be a sandwich shop or an ice cream parlor and I opened an ice cream shop and I love it. This is like a little general store in the summer time. Everybody comes in, has a few things to say. You get to know everybody, you get to know what's going on in town. It's great, it's just a great thing. We love it."

What's it like living above the shop?  I live here. I raised my family upstairs. I've been here since '76.

What was in this space before Browns Cow? This originally was Logan's drugstore. That happened in 1927.  When the building was built in the early 1870's it was a telegraph office. One of the guys from the Penn Railroad retired and opened a telegraph office here.  So before phones if you had to sent a message across the country you came to this store to send a message.

Tell us about some of the memorabilia that decorates the store.  Well a lot of the things here are ice cream-related are actually from the old stores in Phoenixville, from the old ice cream shops and candy stores. A lot of the equipment and things like metal servers, the ice cream trays, they're from Phoenix Candyland. I've just been collecting ice cream memorablia.

Tell us about the old fashioned phone hanging on the wall behind the counter: I don't have it hooked up now but it does work (Brown pulls on the face of the phone to reveal a rotary dial inside). I used to have to talk on thi phone when my mom and dad were in the kitchen, so you couldn't go off and take a call in the bedroom. So that's why that's there.

When do you open for the season?  I open on April 15th. I give away green ice cream on the 15th, you get a little green back at the cow.

What's the most popular flavor? Vanilla and Chocolate, just because of milkshakes. 

Do you have specialty flavors? We do. There's over 40 flavors of ice cream here.