In 1917 Mr. Brown purchased a large building and moved his office and the market to this location. A small space in the front of the market and a room upstairs served as the office. Hill was manufacturing a refrigerated single glass display case, with a bunker space for either ice or the mechanical cooling that Brown offered to his customers.

Due to the war the market business was a credit market in place of a cash business. Lack of capital limited the growth of both the market and refrigeration business. Although business continued to slowly grow the refrigerator business potential of the South was recognized and expansion was planned. The expansion required sacrifices at the meat market and in 1922 Brown expanded into a 40x100' warehouse for receiving and servicing refrigerators for his dealership.

In 1925, W. A. Brown gave his son, Dodd, an interest in the business and changed the name of the company to W. A. Brown & Son. By this time the company had begun building prefabricated modular panel walk-in refrigerators. Dodd Brown led the company's manufacturing of walk-in refrigerators to complement the sale of grocery store equipment, which the company distributed.

In 1929, a double brick building was built on South Main Street. The meat market also closed about this time. The North half of the building was to be leased to the local Chrysler auto dealership, while the Southern half of the building was the W. A. Brown & Son office, warehouse, and walk-in refrigerator manufacturing facility. The first refrigerator panels were built of oak framing with granulated cork for insulation, and were connected by lag bolts. The entrance doors and reach-in windows were purchased, and the finishing work and assembly was completed at the Brown plant.

The Chrysler dealer never opened in the northern part of the building, making additional space available to expand the manufacturing shop.
The Great Depression of 1930 all but broke W. A. Brown & Son. If it had not been for the size of the building, which was used as a warehouse for equipment taken back by agreement, the business would have folded and closed. The returned equipment was reworked by the skilled craftsmen at Brown, and produced saleable equipment that Brown financed to make customer purchases possible. W. A. Brown & Son kept expanding the manufacturing of refrigerators. They enlarged and equipped a wood working and sheet metal shop, paint shop with bake oven, service area, and sales departments until World War II. During WWII, business was again limited by the loss of men to the service and wartime production priorities, which affected metal, copper tubing, refrigerant gases, etc. Brown found it urgent to find other means to keep the business going during this time. For example Brown built church pews and utilized the paint-baking oven to bake finishes on concrete bathtubs for government housing projects.