EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of a weekly series on our region’s history coordinated by the Trumbull County Historical Society.

Six years after Shawneene (or Shahnine) George Whabee survived the sinking of the Titanic on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, her son Albert George started an ice cream cone company with his brother-in-law, Thomas J. Thomas.

This Brookfield company, George & Thomas Cone Co., eventually became the familiar Joy Cone Co.

Shawneene immigrated from Thoum, Syria (now Lebanon) to Youngstown in 1906. She returned to Thoum in late 1910 or early 1911 to care for one of her sons. It was upon returning to the United States in 1912 that she survived the sinking of the Titanic and resumed her life in Youngstown. In 1914, Albert George followed in his mother’s footsteps and immigrated to Ohio.

Albert started a grocery store and a bowling alley before another Lebanese immigrant approached him with a small hand-operated cone oven and asked him to handle the business side of selling ice cream cones. In 1918, Albert and Thomas started George and Thomas Cone Co. at Brookfield Avenue and Ulp Street in Masury. Thomas left the business after several years, but Albert continued to expand it into Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York.

The cone company did well throughout the Great Depression and people got garbage bags full of cone scraps to turn into cereal or feed to their animals. In 1934, they moved the company to 840 S. Irvine Ave. in Sharon, Pa., because it had outgrown the location on Brookfield Avenue.

Disaster struck nine years later in 1943 when most of the plant burned to the ground and the company struggled to rebuild because of the material shortage caused by World War II. The plant burned again in 1964, only two months after Albert’s sons, Joe and Mike, took over. This destruction followed a steady decline of sales after the first fire until the cone company had just one customer, the Isaly Brothers. Their total sales that year was just $25,000.

Joe moved the company to a third location in Hermitage, Pa., and rebranded to operate under the current Joy Cone Co. Though Mike left after a few years, Joe expanded the company into other markets and places.

They began selling their products in retail stores, rather than just to wholesale providers, and gained Dairy Queen as a customer.

Albert George’s single hand-operated cone oven evolved into a company that annually produces billions of cake, sugar and waffle cones, plus waffle bowls, cookies and wafers.

Now, over a century after Shawneene and her family immigrated to Youngstown, Joy Cone Co. is the leading global producer of ice cream cones.