Ice cream has a long pedigree — frozen milk and honey were reportedly served to Roman Emperor Nero nearly two thousand years ago — but along the Gulf Coast, the story that matters most starts in 1969 on Old Shell Road in Mobile. That year, a transplanted Sylacauga businessman opened a small ice cream shop in a former Texaco station, and more than five decades later the shop he founded is still scooping, now under the name Cammie’s Old Dutch.
From Widemire’s Old Dutch to Cammie’s
The original shop was Widemire’s Old Dutch Ice Cream, opened by Mr. Widemire on Old Shell Road at Florida Street. The ice cream itself was not made in the store: it came from Dairy Fresh in Greensboro, Alabama, a company with its own Guernsey dairy herd producing rich, high-butterfat milk, churning out ice cream to the Widemire family’s old recipe.
Camilla Wayne — Cammie to everyone who knows her — grew up on Dauphin Island Parkway and took her first job dipping ice cream at Widemire’s at sixteen, while she was a student at B. C. Rain High School. After graduation she moved into retail jewelry, spending time at Gulf Coast Jewelers, then eight years at Zales in Bel Air Mall, and roughly five more at Friedman’s Jewelers under owner Billy Walker. She still credits Walker with teaching her the retail fundamentals she uses today: hands-on ownership and the same treatment for a five-dollar customer as a five-thousand-dollar one.
A handshake purchase
Years later, Cammie stopped by the Old Shell Road shop to show her two young children where she had worked as a teenager. When she jokingly asked the owner when he planned to retire, he told her he was looking for a buyer — one who would keep everything the same. He offered to sell her the business and financed the purchase himself, staying on about a month to teach her the bookkeeping. She kept a handshake instead of a bank loan she says she never could have gotten, kept doing her own books, and renamed the shop Cammie’s Old Dutch Ice Cream.
The shop itself needed work. A cigarette machine was long gone, but years of indoor smoking had left a film on the famous Pennsylvania Dutch wallpaper; a determined scrubbing restored it, and customers swore she had redecorated. She trimmed the long hours Mr. Widemire had kept, opening from noon to 9 p.m. while raising an eleven-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son alone, and she built a staff model she still uses: hiring high school and college students, working around their schedules, even driving them home, and firing only for bad attitude.
The creamery scramble
Then Dairy Fresh announced it was getting out of ice cream. Overnight, Cammie’s supplier vanished. Her husband Larry Wayne — whom she met after a LuLu’s Hot Trot race in Gulf Shores and married in 2010 — took out a loan, and the couple bought their first ice cream machine, an Emery Thompson that makes six gallons, two buckets at a time. Larry built a work space so small the family calls it the Creamery Closet.
The mix was made to Cammie’s specifications using the Widemire recipe: 12% butterfat and no eggs, lighter than the 14-to-18-percent butterfat of most commercial ice cream. For a couple of years the shop could not produce enough, and Cammie supplemented with other brands while she bought Dairy Fresh’s flavors. She started making ice cream at 9 a.m., worked the counter all day, and churned until two or three in the morning.
Wholesale demand found her anyway. A Gulf Shores shop owner wanted to sell Old Dutch by the scoop; Tommy Cain, who owns the Fairhope Piggly Wiggly, wanted half-gallons of peppermint for the holidays; then Greer’s called. That was the breaking point. Larry quit his store-manager job — he had kept it through the transition for the 401(k) and health insurance — and joined the business full time.
The Halls Mill Road plant
Scaling up required a real creamery. The couple found a bank-owned former seafood restaurant on Halls Mill Road in Mobile, and in 2017 a state health department surveyor confirmed the building had everything needed for approval. Equipped with one small machine and one twice its size, Cammie’s Old Dutch can now produce fifty three-gallon tubs a day. In 2020 the family added a retail shop at the plant itself.
Today the business turns out roughly 800 gallons a week in 53 flavors, with three employees making ice cream from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. and three freezer trucks on delivery routes. Distribution stretches across the Southeast, from Louisiana to Panama City, Florida, and Cammie still sells to small-town shop owners face to face. She bakes the brownies and cakes that go into the ice cream, and rotates seasonal specials — King Cake, Moon Pie, carrot cake, a Halloween Monster Mash, and eggnog for the holidays. Pumpkin spice, she notes, was on the menu before it was everywhere.
Three shops and a Fairhope foothold
The family lives in Fairhope, and the third Cammie’s Old Dutch opened there in 2024, in the former Biscuit King building where Larry and his father used to meet for coffee. The new shop is built for celebrations: birthday and graduation parties, wedding catering, and events for local offices. The original Old Shell Road shop remains open, closed on Mondays since the pandemic years — Cammie’s one day off, with Larry’s full support.
The business never closed during COVID. Deemed essential, it moved the register to the front door and served customers lined up outside, a decision Cammie says made things feel normal for neighborhood children when little else did. It is a fitting chapter for a shop that has survived a supplier collapse, a pandemic, and a generational handoff — and that still answers special requests with a simple promise: describe it, and she will make it.