For decades, locals in Mendocino enjoyed walking down Main Street to the City Meat Market to purchase holiday turkeys, hams, and even ice cream before family gatherings. Unlike local grocers like Mendosa’s, which passed down ownership within the family, Mendocino’s meat market operated under eight different names over the decades. Its most prominent location on the south side of Mendocino’s Main Street no longer exists; the building was demolished in 1960.
In 1874, Dudley Orville Philbrick built and opened a butcher shop, calling it Quincy Meat Market. Philbrick was employed by the Mendocino Lumber Company but left with a contract to build and operate a butcher shop with lumber furnished by the company in exchange for his work. He stocked beef, pork, veal, lamb, canned fruits, vegetables, fresh butter and eggs. Just four years later, Philbrick retired and sold the business to Martin Murber, who quickly sold it again to William Kent.
Kent worked as the market’s butcher for a decade. He quickly bought a butcher wagon, which traveled throughout Mendocino delivering directly to people’s homes. In 1879, Kent added a sausage machine that “eclipses anything of the kind we have ever seen.” George H. Bowman continued modernizing the business after Kent retired. He installed a gasoline-powered cold storage to keep meat and other products fresh. The new storage also enabled Bowman to make ice and ice cream, both growing in popularity at the time.
Tomas Beggs bought the business next, moving it in 1901 from the corner of Albion and Lansing streets (where Mendocino’s Rotary Park sits today) to the south side of Main Street, near the intersection of Main and Kasten. He, too, installed an “ice and cold storage plant,” which “cost considerable money.” The most popular employee of the business was Jerry, Tomas’ fox terrier, who would carry notes and packages to and from the market “in much less time than the average boy.”
Beggs died suddenly in 1915, and Tony and Joe Quaill took over the business. The brothers had been employees previously and ran the market efficiently. In 1918, they took a page from William Kent’s book and bought a Ford automobile to replace the delivery wagon. They modernized the cold storage, which made ice daily for sale. By 1952, the brothers closed the shop for good.
Today, the site the City Meat Market operated on remains vacant, the building demolished along with most of the structures on the south side of Mendocino’s Main Street. It was the last building standing.
Averee McNear is the curator at the Kelley House Museum in Mendocino, Calif.