Got Buttermilk?

It's over 2100 miles from Sacramento's R Street to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but with the 2010 running of the Indy 500 only a few days away it seems timely to mention that there was once a much closer connection on R street to the Brickyard. 

The building that used to be at 430 R Street was briefly home to a branch of Meyer and Welch Inc. They were in the engine rebuilding business, specifically Ford passenger car engines. The major work was done in their Vernon California factory just south of LA, so I suspect the building on R Street was primarily a storage and distribution facility. Maybe. There is some evidence it was more. The 1951 Sanborn map includes the notation "WHOL. MOTOR PARTS & MOTOR REBUILD'G", so perhaps it wasn’t just storage. I'd like to find additional evidence to back that up though. 

The founders Louis Meyer and Lewis Welch both had connections to Indy, especially Meyer. He was the race's first three time winner (1928, 1931 and 1936). After that third win in 1936, he became famous for starting the uniquely Indy tradition of drinking milk in the winner's circle.

Also in '36 but well before Meyers and Welch Inc., 430 R was one of two focal points in a California Railroad Commission case. The case, CRC 4066, taught me a lot about how the WP and SP interacted on R Street during the depression era. It also led me down a fun maze of research on tariffs and reciprocal switching agreements. I hope to detail that case here at some point; it's a very interesting addition to the railroad and industrial history of R Street. 

   

Getting back to the milk drinking: The story goes that when Louis was a boy his mother told him that downing a glass of buttermilk was a great way to quench thirst on a hot day. Though perhaps hard to imagine buttermilk being the drink of choice today, it was Louis Meyer's habit to have it as his after race reward. And so it was bound to happen that a photographer captured the post race moment of Meyer drinking buttermilk while holding up three fingers for the number of his Indy wins. A dairy industry executive saw the picture in the paper and, not wanting to let a supreme marketing image melt away, took steps to make drinking milk (not buttermilk) an enduring Indy 500 winner's circle tradition. 

Cheers! 

Module Number One

Modeling may be picking up here at the R Street Project. I've had a mental block when it comes to actual modeling. Tons of research... no modeling. It's sad really.

My current thinking is that by working on modules I’ll get the incentive and momentum I need to get going on the modeling side. Well, my two modules for the Sacramento Modular Railroaders (SMR) are now in my possession.

In the SMR, the 'bones' of the module are built together as a club during our work sessions. This is done to ensure a close fit between modules owned by different members. If the bench work and wiring are all made in a consistent fashion, it goes a long way to proper track alignment. The layout sets up quicker, the trains derail less often- and these are all very good things.  With a bite sized project in front of me I'm very inspired to get going.

Here’s a sketchup pic of what I'm thinking of for the first module.  It's all very 'work in progress' at this point. The track setup is very simple - on purpose. Mostly because it's my first module. Besides, I really want to get to the buildings. The locomotive is too new for my time-frame, but it does give a sense of scale.   And the club does run lots of modern trains after all.

The inspiration is the area around 10^th and R Streets. The big brick building against the backdrop is the WP Fuller & Company warehouse. They sold paint, doors and sashes. Currently the building is home to one of my favorite places for breakfast, The Fox & Goose Pub.  

To the right of Fuller is Gillmore's market. In reality this building is on the other side of the alley track from Fuller but it didn't fit there so well on the module. Gillmore's was a butcher shop. Actually there were two businesses on the ground floor, a butcher shop and a beauty salon. This is one of those things I love about prototype modeling - there is no way in heck I would have come up with that juxtaposition on my own. Gillmore's is a nice representative of many midtown Sacramento buildings, retail on the ground floor, residential on the second floor.  Marquis Gillmore, by the way was in his 80s in 1950 and still a few years from retirement. This building is still standing- currently home to a noodle and fortune cookie factory.

In the foreground on the module will be the Carlaw Brothers Stone Cutters. If memory serves, these were two Scotsmen whose business was in this location for quite some time. There is some speculation that the pre-Carlaw, the site was used as stone staging for construction of the capitol building - the stones having been brought to this location from Folsom.  Nowadays it’s a parking lot.

Because I'm having to work around modular standards, I'm moving buildings around and spinning them from their original locations to make everything fit.  Fuller indeed was served by the WP from their alley line but also faced R Street. Fuller's warehouse is too big to fit between the club's mainline and the branch line so I've moved this building back against the backdrop and spun it. The middle row of buildings is all speculation at the moment, but I want to convey the feeling of R street on the foreground and the alley line in the background. I can’t really keep this area an open field and get that feeling. I think I'll use several buildings from other parts of R Street to fill this area. There were a number of small automotive service businesses and small scale electronic supply warehouses that should work in this location and not look too out of place.

History of The Thomson-Diggs Company

The search for details of this wholesale hardware company has led me in a research sprawl that has taken a number of interesting directions.  However, before I start digressing let me go over the basics of Thomson-Diggs.

The Thomson-Diggs Company came about from the merger of two hardware firms. In 1900 Frederick and Herbert Thomson bought out the other partner of Stanton-Thomson Company. Frederick had been the junior partner with them since 1884.  At the same time they combined forces with Marshall Diggs, former mayor of Woodland, who had moved his "Diggs Vehicle and Implement Company" to Sacramento just two years prior.   Incorporated January 4th 1900, Thomson-Diggs was the first chartered California corporation in the 20th century.

In 1932 Thomson-Diggs bought out competitor Schaw-Batcher which could trace its company lineage back to the Huntington & Hopkins Hardware store of early Central Pacific fame. 

In the August 1950 time frame of my layout, Thomson-Diggs was celebrating their golden anniversary and business was booming.  They were being led by their sixth president, Charles L. Mason, a grandson of founder Frederick Thomson. Their headquarters consisted of two big buildings which housed their warehouse and office space.  These were on the south side of R Street straddling either side of 3rd Street.  This site was their second location, having moved here in 1911 from J Street.  It also happened to be the birth place of the Sacramento Valley Railroad completed in 1856. 

Thomson-Diggs' "Main Plant" on the west side of 3rd and the subject of my illustration in the last post (as well as the three modern pictures here), boasted 220,000 square feet of air conditioned floor space.  It was built up in stages over a number of years.  The oldest section was designed by the architectural firm of Cuff and Diggs.  It had a square foot print 160 feet on a side and was 48' tall on the north (R Street) elevation. On the south elevation, where there was a pronounced dip in ground level, the building was 54' tall.  That dip, I think, is an artifact from when R Street ran on top of a levee, the city's southern defense against flooding until about 1900.  The Main Plant building expanded in 1937 with a low basement and ground level warehouse addition that more than doubled the footprint and filled up the block west to 2nd Street. Two additional stories were built on top of the warehouse addition ten years later.  This last section was designed by noted Sacramento architect Harry Devine. 

Across 3rd Street to the east was their heavy warehouse, Plant No. 2.  This corrugated metal structure was equipped with six 5-ton capacity electric hoists which facilitated the unloading of five rail cars an hour.  Plant No. 2 stored "iron, steel and wire products." Both buildings were rail served with a total of 650 feet of railroad spur. 

On a recent visit to the Center for Sacramento History I was able to view three different Thomson-Diggs Company catalogs - one dated from 1922 one from 1936 and one from 1950.  Each of these is a massive leather bound book. In addition to the illustrations of the Thomson-Diggs' buildings, the sheer breadth and depth of the product offerings is of great interest - nuts and bolts, of course, but also, electrical, plumbing, household items (like my sister's roasting pan), agricultural supplies, tires, toys (including magic sets), knives, latches, and on and on.   Thomson-Diggs' customers were retail hardware businesses in California, Nevada and Oregon and the catalog admonished them not to let their retail customers paw through the tome unsupervised. The catalogs appear to have been expensive to produce.

Thomson-Diggs remained on R Street until 1986 when they moved to a new warehouse in Natomas.  The 'Main Plant'  building was then refurbished as office space. Plant No. 2 is gone the space currently occupied by a parking lot. They were the second to last independent wholesale hardware company in California in 1991 - the recession and changing market forces cleared out all businesses of its type in California by 1997.   The Thomson-Diggs Co left the wholesale hardware business in the early 1990s and entered the commercial real estate market.  By 1997 even this venture wound down and Thomson-Diggs ceased to exist three years shy of their 100th anniversary. 

Bob Clark took this picture in the mid 1970s - we're looking west. Thomson-Diggs Plant  No. 2 can be seen in the middle background. The main warehouse is in the middle background a little further back.

Another Bob Clark photo taken the same day as the other.  This time a detail shot of Thomson-Diggs Plant no. 2

Ready for some digression?

The oldest section of the Main Plant building, as I noted earlier, was designed by the architectural firm of Cuff and Diggs in 1911, probably one of their first projects as a team.  Note the second partner's name, "Diggs". This was no coincidence; Maury I. Diggs was co-founder Marshall Diggs' nephew.  The firm of Cuff and Diggs was perhaps best known in Sacramento as the designers of the Traveler's Hotel.  Traveler's was completed in 1914; however, Cuff and Diggs were released from their contract in 1913.  As reported in the Bee and picked up in the trade journal Architect and Engineer, Maury Diggs was unable to supply some of the plans for the ornamental specifications.  What was keeping Maury Diggs from completing work on such a high profile project?

In March of 1913 Maury, along with his friend Drew Caminetti, became embroiled in a bona-fide sex scandal.   Both were 27 years old and married.   Both had children.  They started having affairs with two young women they met via a saloon keeper.  The ladies were 19 and 20 years old which at the time made them minors.  As adulterers, they weren't terribly discreet and the background scandal radiation of the town was getting quite warm.  Warm enough that Maury Diggs decided to skip town until things cooled off.  Drew and the girls decided to go with him.  They met down at the Southern Pacific station and were going catch a train to Los Angeles.  As fate would have it they missed that train and took the next available which happened to be the east bound China Mail.  They went as far as Reno where they rented a cottage under assumed names.  

Their departure from Sacramento didn't cool things off as hoped.  Far from it, things became unhinged.  The papers had a field day with the story and a massive man hunt was on for the delinquent husbands.  After three days they were found and the authorities hauled them back to Sacramento.  Three days after that U.S. District Attorney John McNab announced that he would prosecute the pair as being in violation of the Mann Act. 

Signed into law nearly three years earlier by President Taft and known officially as the White Slave Traffic Act, the Mann Act was promoted as an attempt to stop the spread of prostitution especially among recently arriving eastern European immigrants.  However, the key section of the act made it a crime merely to transport a woman across state lines for 'any immoral act'.  Buying your under-aged mistress a train ticket to run away from your wife and children across state lines seemed to fit the bill.  

Both Diggs and Caminetti were from prominent, wealthy, politically well-connected families.  Marshall Diggs, Maury's uncle, had been a California State senator from 1902 to 1906. Drew Caminetti was even more politically charged than Maury.  Drew's father, Anthony Caminetti  also a former California State senator, had just been appointed to be U.S Commissioner of Immigration by Woodrow Wilson. Politically, it didn't help that Anthony Camenetti asked the Attorney General for a delay in the trial so he could settle in his new job and attend his son's trail. McNab, a hold over Republican appointment, very loudly and very publicly resigned in protest when he was so ordered by the Attorney General from the  Democratic administration.  Even President Wilson himself became involved to quiet the firestorm in Congress that erupted.  

Ultimately they lost the federal case and, when appealed, the Supreme Court case in early 1917.   Maury Diggs ended up doing eight months in prison of a two year sentence before being paroled.  He divorced his first wife, married his mistress, Marsha Warrington, who stayed with him until he died in 1953.  They had one daughter together.  After prison Maury continued as an architect in the Bay Area.  He designed several buildings including the Fox Theater in Oakland (also recently refurbished) and a number of horse racing tracks.   

President Wilson came to Sacramento on a hot September day in 1919.  He was beginning the return leg of his national train tour to advocate U.S. entry into the League of Nations.  The Presidential Special traveled west down R Street before turning north on Front Street on its way to the S.P. passenger depot.  In spite of the heat, the reception was enthusiastic.  Wilson chatted with the crowd, many of them children, from the rear platform of the train as it slowly made its way across town.   I wonder, when his train passed by 3rd Street, if he noticed the prominent Thomson-Diggs signs on our two buildings.  Much had occurred, including World War I, since the Diggs-Caminetti case, but I wonder if he made the connection. 

The things I do on my vacation...

I had a few days off last week. What do I do? More research of course. But this time it was research in the guise of touring an old warehouse.

I was following up on a tip from my friend Dan who pointed me in the direction of a guy who manages a self storage business that just happens to inhabit the old Bekins building on R Street. My new friend at the storage place has spent some time digging up history on his building and there is a very nice historical display in his office befitting the ol' place.

Built in 1920 for Capital Van and Storage, the five story warehouse was one of three in Sacramento owned by that firm.  If my initial Google research holds,  Capital was bought by Bekins Van and Storage company around 1926.

The building looks almost exactly (besides the lack of Bekins signage) as it did after the 1948 expansion.

The highlight of the tour was riding the freight elevator.  It's the original Otis model that was installed in 1920 - still operational and running quite smoothly.  It's exactly where the 1951 era Sanborn map, that I've been studying for years, shows it should be. 

The warehouse had a 3 car capacity spur on the Southern Pacific side of the street. 

The Two Freight Houses

As part of the original construction of the line in 1909, the Western Pacific built two freight houses in Sacramento on R Street. Both were adjacent to 3rd street, and both were originally built with corrugated metal panels over a wooden stud frame. The house on the west side of 3rd was designated for incoming freight and the house to the east of 3rd handled outgoing freight. We know from Jeff Asay’s Track and Time that these roles switched for some unknown reason in 1932 and that the easterly of the two, the now inbound freight house, burned down in 1941. It was replaced the following year by a larger building of wood siding with an attached two story office (it’s the building in the foreground of my simplified sketch). This was a joint Western Pacific-Sacramento Northern-Central California Traction freight office. According to Stanley and Moreau’s The Central California Traction Company many of the clerical functions formally handled at the Sacramento Union Freight Station were moved to the new freight office by the mid 1950s.

From my own digging in the WP presidential files (in the care of the California State Railroad Museum library), I know that by the early 1950s, the easterly 96’ of the new freight house was leased for car loading operations by freight forwarders. There were three of them that operated a joint car loading operation in the new freight house: Universal, Merchant Shippers and Stor-Dor. A fourth forwarder, International, occupied an unknown, but likely equivalent amount of the ‘westerly end’ of the old freight house.

Freight forwarders, by the way, made their money by consolidating less than carload (LCL) freight and charging the public less than the LCL rate the railroad would have charged but more than the carload rate that the forwarders themselves paid.

There was a plan in early 1953 to consolidate and move the loading operations of all four forwarders to the old house and to provide more office space for them on the 2nd floor office of the new house. I’m not certain the plan was implemented fully if at all. The listing of industries on the line in WP’s original “167-E Circular”, which likely dates from 1957, lists the four forwarders in the same locations where the 1953 memo placed them. Another company document, the ‘Training Manual Maps’ (see Asay’s Track and Time which includes this document in an appendix), has a R Street page dated 1958 which labels the old freight house as solely occupied by Universal and no mention of forwarders in the new freight house.

Did things really change that much in one year? Are one or both internal documents inaccurate? I’m not sure I care for purposes of the layout since I’m modeling 1950 when things were still likely as they were in the clearly stated 1953 memo. They were also potentially at their messiest with WP LCL and 3rd party forwarder operations all mixed up in the two buildings. I wonder though, when a railroad begins to lease out space in its terminal facilities to forwarders, would they still bother with an inbound and outbound freight house for their own needs? Certainly the company documents I’ve seen of the 1950s don’t mention the words ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’ when referencing the freight houses but rather ‘old’ and ‘new’ or ‘House No.1’ and ‘House No. 2’.

My current plan is to devote an entire wall of my spare bedroom layout to the two freight houses. In spite of my aforementioned doubts, I intend to switch them with the assumption that the WP still operated an inbound and outbound house for their own LCL business concurrently with the forwarders leasing space in August 1950. I figure there must have been a transition period when LCL traffic was increasingly going to the forwarders, but the railroad still retained enough traffic to warrant two houses in Sacramento.

This sketch of the number of car spot locations is probably a little ambitious for my available space, but the idea is to show that there could be WP LCL inbound spots (red) WP LCL outbound spots (yellow) and independent freight forwarder spots (blue). Some of the cars destined for WP inbound can have an additional move, once 'emptied', to WP outbound spots later in the same session or as a starting move in the next session.

Will this be ten pounds of switching in a five pound bag? Possibly, but it is a switching layout, and I think it would be easy enough to dial back on the complexity if needed.

There is no trace of either building on R Street now. They were both gone before I started studying the area. The old freight house was still around as late as the mid to late 1970s but otherwise I don’t know when it met its demise. The new freight house appears to have been leased to a trucking firm by the mid 1980s but ultimately the property was sold by the Union Pacific, (who merged with the Western Pacific at the end of 1982) in 1999 or 2000, and the site has the brand new CalPERS expanded headquarters on it now.