News

Feb 16, 2024

At 120 years old, the Bradford Building remains a gift to downtown Sonora

Time travelers in downtown Sonora will find the Bradford Building their sweet spot in more ways than one. Just beyond the landmark’s gleaming copper doors is an old-fashioned confectioner with sugary

Time travelers in downtown Sonora will find the Bradford Building their sweet spot in more ways than one.

Just beyond the landmark’s gleaming copper doors is an old-fashioned confectioner with sugary treats ranging from jawbreakers and jelly beans to lollipops, chocolate bonbons and ice cream awaiting waffle cones.

For baseball fans, there is an added dynamic as rewarding as a strawberry soda on a hot summer day: Joe DiMaggio once climbed the Columbia marble steps on Bradford Avenue to an Elks Club meeting, where he was the most famous speaker the men’s club ever had.

It was Oct. 27, 1937, and DiMaggio was back on the West Coast following another New York Yankees triumph in the World Series. Lefty O’Doul, an old San Francisco buddy, accompanied Joltin’ Joe, then 22 and only two seasons into a legendary major league career.

Jamestown resident Hap Collard, a pitcher for Cleveland and Philadelphia in the late 1920s, was able to pull off the memorable evening through his connections to the sport. Dinner plates brimmed with spaghetti and roast beef, but the young Italian was heard to comment, “I hate spaghetti.”

This regal brick gift to the street is part of the Queen of the Southern Mines’ commercial, social, art, agricultural and financial history dating to 1903, when the first tenants set up shop in Samuel Stillman Bradford’s final achievement in a lifetime of business successes.

Over the years, it has been home to clothing and grocery stores, offices, a hospital, flour mill, social organizations, art galleries, a law office, title company and real estate developer.

Sadly, multi-millionaire lumber baron Bradford died in July 1903 before work was finished on the two-story building on the corner of South Washington Street and Bradford Avenue, once named Hospital Street before being retitled in September 1904 by city trustees to honor the former 49er who found his gold in Tuolumne County’s primeval forest.

In 1850, Bradford was mining at Rattlesnake Creek in Big Oak Flat. After returning home to Maine, he and his wife Nancy had three children before the family moved west, where they settled in Columbia in 1857.

Bradford apparently did what came naturally for a native of the Pine Tree State: He established a sawmill and lumber yard on Bigler Street on the eastern edge of the Gem of the Southern Mines only eight years removed from its founding, ironically by argonauts from Maine.

Bradford and a partner of his named Benjamin Franklin (Frank) Way prospered. After 10 years, they decided it was time to move their operation to Sonora, where over time they built warehouses, a planing mill and stables on both sides of Hospital Street, then the main western entrance to Sonora.

There, they received lumber rough cut at four forest mills they operated and transformed it into doors, window sash trim, siding, fruit boxes, tanks and blinds. They offered horseshoeing and blacksmithing to the general public.

An early part of their holdings was a roller-skating rink the pair opened to the public in 1873. Accessed from West Jackson Street, opposite St. Patrick’s Church, it was quite popular with the town’s younger set.

Much later, the planing mill at Pine Street was transformed into the Bradford Pavilion, becoming Sonora’s largest and favored events venue where everything from basketball games to masked balls took place.

Although fires at Bradford’s mills in Columbia and Sonora were discouraging, he carried on and even expanded his activities to include ownership of large tracts of forestland to keep his mills busy, other real estate, mortgage lending, and mining properties. He was a great advocate for economic progress and, in late 1876, led a local group interested in building a rail line from Columbia to Oakdale.

When he died, Bradford’s estate — except for a few contested bequests — passed to his widow Nancy and was valued at $6 million in today’s dollars. He was, at 78, Tuolumne County’s wealthiest man and very much engaged in tending to his holdings through ill health that had slowed him down.

In moving forward with the Bradford Building, he was aided by Frank W. Street, a Sonora attorney who was daughter Ada’s husband and a trusted advisor, as well as Johnston Blois, a long-term business associate who did his leg work.

The project’s first step was acquisition of the corner from Ernestine Rocher, widow of Prosper Antoine Rocher. When she and her druggist husband returned to their native France in the late 1870s after over 20 years in Tuolumne County, they sold all of their properties except the two Gold Rush brick and stone corner buildings and lot, which they bought in a sheriff’s sale in 1863.

Following local court proceedings that transferred her late husband’s separate property to her, Prosper Antoine Rocher sold the real estate to Bradford in April 1903 for $4,000, thus ending the 30-year tenancy of Herman Oppenheimer’s general merchandise store and another business.

Information about who designed the building could not be found, but it is quite likely that it was Clarence Warwick Ayers, a Sonora architect with an impressive record of commissions. He had worked for Bradford and had even been an investor with him in the Rawhide Valley’s Omega Mine during the Mother Lode’s second gold rush that began in the 1890s.

Son William Frederick Bradford’s home was an Ayer’s work. The incredibly ornate Queen Anne confection still presides at the corner of Dodge and Norlin streets, though it once overlooked Bradford’s own near square-block estate with two-story rambling home and extensive gardens directly opposite the courthouse. The county’s A.N. Francisco building is there today.

Decorative metal fencing panels were salvaged from the home and now lend an old-fashioned touch to city parking lots on South Stewart at Lyons Streets and South Washington at Church Streets.

A year later, in 1896, Ayers created a new home for Ada and Frank, the iconic flaming red mansion on Snell Street, opposite St. James Episcopal Church. And, shortly thereafter, while working on the new county hospital and the Jamestown branch jail, Ayers whipped up the Curtin Mansion that still commands admiration on Columbia Way.

With the architectural exuberance of the Victorian era in decline by 1903, the architect produced a more subtle, restrained design for Bradford’s new building.

Thousands of red bricks made in Tuolumne County near the confluence of Wood’s and Sonora creeks rise from a slate foundation. Big plate glass windows resting on detailed millwork, probably from Bradford’s mill, are the main features at street level.

The building’s personality really shines above with two big bay windows and curved brick “eyebrow” accents above five pairs of double hung windows. Bays and windows are unified with a decorative wooden cornice anchored to a brick parapet. Soaring above it all is an octagonal zinc or tin dome with scalloped imprints crowned with an attractive finial.

A sturdy, fluted wood column has supported the corner bay since 1909 when a new owner, the first National Bank of Sonora, moved in and added more character to the outside and outfitted the inside for banking.

Charter first-floor tenants were the grocery store of Jules Michel and a women’s clothing shop owned by E.E. Warne, whose son, J.T.B Warne, later served as Tuolumne County’s Superior Court judge from 1922 to 1956. The space upstairs was taken by Dr. R. Innis Bromley for a hospital and office.

The doctor and Michel moved out in 1909, Michel to make way for the bank and Bromley to his own medical facility further south on South Washington Street.

The bank’s significant improvements were on top of the $16,000 the new corporation paid Alice Bradford Street Parsons for the property. Parsons had not fared as well financially as siblings Fred and Ada, and her public displeasure with her father’s will in 1903 was a reminder of the sorrow and disappointment Bradford’s children brought to his and Nancy’s lives.

Son Charles was working at the family’s Columbia lumber business when he was stricken with cancer and died in April 1872. Charles’ younger brother, Fred, ran afoul of the law in January 1888 when he roughed up Maud Evans and pleaded out to misdemeanor battery in the Sonora justice court. His demons got the best of him in 1896, when he killed himself in his room at the Yosemite Hotel in Stockton, where he was in charge of the company’s office there.

Alice and her second husband, Charles Street, a cousin of her brother-in-law, lived in San Francisco so Ada and Frank, whose first two children died as infants, were of considerable help to their aging parents and were rewarded in Bradford’s will with significant cash bequests, including $35,000 to son Horace, the family’s only grandchild.

Alice balked at her legacy: $100 a month for life from a $10,000 trust fund. She sued and settled for a lump-sum payment of the $10,000. It wasn’t until her mother, Nancy, died three years later that she received the Bradford Building and other property in the distribution of her mother’s estate as Nancy divided her considerable assets evenly between her two daughters.

The First National Bank prospered at the corner and soon bought out the Tuolumne County Bank. Several years later, in 1917, it acquired the Sonora National Bank and its impressive headquarters, now the location of The Union Democrat, where it relocated. Bank and building were purchased by the Bank of America in 1932, and the former local financial institution became a Bank of America National Trust and Savings Association.

Thomas F. Symons, vice president of the First National, purchased the Bradford Buildingfrom the bank, adding to his growing real estate portfolio. He and William J. Hales were proprietors of Hale and Symons, major Sonora suppliers of hay, grain, coal, ice, and mining supplies. Their long line teams had hauled lumber out of the woods to Bradfords’s downtown mill.

Son Irving Symons recalled old timers telling of the intricate maneuvering of man and beast to make the 90-degree turn off of South Washington Street to Bradford Avenue and the mill. It was a beautiful sight to behold, he remembered, adding “The wheel horses and a pair of animals called pointers, which were immediately ahead of the wheel horses, had special assignments so that a wide sweeping turn would be made without cramping the tongue of the wagons. Spectators enjoyed watching this turn being made and the teamster always did his utmost to please his audience by demonstrating his expertise.”

A short stone pillar once stood at the intersection to prevent wagons from cutting the corner too close and damaging Oppenheimer’s store.

Tom Symons inherited two tenants, Warne’s and the Tuolumne County Club, and found a new one in the Sonora Abstract and Title Co., which leased the bank’s former space. The company was owned by brothers Eric J. and Charles H. Segerstrom, the latter a director of the Tuolumne County Bank, which kept its identity as the savings division of the First National. The title business was there until the 1960s when it was purchased by Fidelity Title.

Eric J. Segerstrom sits at his desk in the Sonora Abstract and Title Co., a former business located inside the Bradford Building. His assistant is Leonore Harry in this 1939 photograph.

The Tuolumne County Club was a new organization when it moved into Bromely’s foreigner spot, and it was followed by the Antlers Club and then the Elks Lodge until the latter’s new hall on Elks Hill was dedicated in 1961.

The Elks’ large meeting room was devastated by a fire of mysterious origin just before Christmas 1932. The blaze consumed “furniture of fine quality with elegant upholstery,” as well as scorching the billiards room, reported the Union Democrat. The abstract company suffered water damage, and the women's shop next door, then operated by Sanford Goldman, escaped with little damage. A few charred timbers still remain in the attic.

Perhaps Symons’ most unusual tenant was a flour mill operated by Hales and Symons at the rear of the second floor from 1920 to 1932.

Supplied with grain from Blanket Creek farms, the flour was sold under the Tuolumne Flour brand. Manager Fred Leighton described part of the production process in an interview in 1977.

Leighton said a conveyor belt carried wheat upstairs to the millstones and sacks of the finished product were conveyed to Green Street for distribution. It was not unusual, he said, to see sacks awaiting pick up on the Bradford Avenue sidewalk. Bits of flour, now a century old, still fill cracks and crevices in the bricks along Green Street.

The weight of the grinding machinery Leighton and crew used was likely matched by the safe the First National installed when it outfitted the building for its offices, but left behind when it moved out. Its massive door stands open today, and its thick concrete walls, ceiling and floor surround bubble gum, candy canes and other temptations sold by the Candy Vault, one of two businesses to take their name from the walk-in safe.

The unit was made in Cincinnati. A dozen inch-thick steel deadbolts slide into place when activated, and two more about 3 inches in diameter complete the seal. When closed, it provided safekeeping for bank assets, safe deposit boxes and valuable records. A nearby small chamber was available to open up their boxes, and it is still there.

As the years passed, Sanford’s women’s shop gave way to art galleries and then the candy store. The big corner office was leased by Boise-Cascade in the late 1960s and into the 1970s as a sales office for lots in the Lake Don Pedro subdivision.

James R. Hardin’s law office was also there for a time before he was elected Superior Court judge in 1980. In a coincidence so typical in a small community, his grandfather, James P. Hardin, had been a director of the First National Bank in 1909 after serving on the Tuolumne County Board of Supervisors during courthouse construction.

The tenant mix also changed upstairs, with a beauty salon, framing and graphics design studios, and today’s businesses: an art gallery and an accounting firm. Women’s apparel is still available in a shop off Bradford Avenue.

At 120 years old, this graceful and prominent Sonora landmark, eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places, is in good hands. Owners Hazel and Dick Mitchell bought the place from Irving Symons in 1994 after retiring to Jamestown from Willow Glen in Silicon Valley.

The Mitchells have gone the distance with maintenance, water damage repair, and upgrades to HVAC, wiring, and plumbing. They marvel at the marble-tiled first floor and decorative pressed metal ceiling the bank installed.

They even painted the dome, which had been silver, a coppery hue, to match the majestic copper-clad entry doors to the candy store that occupies the entire first floor.

“It’s a great building,” Hazel Mitchell said.