Rebuilding the Mayfield Mercantile Company: Architecture and Commerce in Sonora, Texas, c. 1900

Main Street fire of September 12, 1902, Sonora, looking east. Ruffini’s Sutton County Courthouse stands at the far end of the street. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Sutton County Historical Society.

In the predawn hours of September 12, 1902, a fire began in the storerooms of the Mayfield Mercantile Company, at the head of Main Street in Sonora, Texas. Around 5:30 am, the first alarm sounded, but the fire, probably the result of a kerosene lamp left burning overnight, was already growing fast. A strong north wind abetted the flames, and coal oil tanks within the store exploded, knocking volunteer firemen off their feet and blowing out windows in most of the adjacent buildings, including the Sutton County Courthouse, then barely a decade old. Total estimates of the damage ranged from $75,000 to $100,000.¹

Luckily, the vault of the town’s only bank managed to make it through the blaze intact, as E. R. “Ed” Jackson (1860–1911), the president of the First National Bank, found out via phone call later that morning. Jackson, a recent arrival to Sonora, had been a founding shareholder for the bank in 1900. He owned the building housing the Mayfield store and held liens on much of Mayfield’s inventory, although the specific extent of his losses was not delineated.²

Image 2.

Ed R. Jackson, ca. 1902. Courtesy of Sutton County Historical Society.

The building that replaced the one that housed the Mayfield Mercantile Company was finished in a remarkably brief period between October 1902 and January 1903, even though it was finished in winter, when there may have been some days lost due to bad weather. C. J. Nichols, a local contractor, worked with an industrious crew largely of ethnic Mexican workers to construct the building out of small, irregular chunks of local stone.³In its architecture, advertising, and clientele, the new store, along with the in-town rival E. F. VanderStucken Company, exemplified how the sweeping national trends in marketing and consumption at the turn of the twentieth century were translated into the particular needs and preferences of a small town on the Edwards Plateau of West Texas.

This article argues that Jackson undertook the investment because of his desire to bring the store in line with the major changes in retail merchandising that were emerging in other, more developed, rail-connected regions of Texas by 1903. Additionally, it argues that businessmen like Jackson had direct awareness of these changes due to their experiences in sections of the state to the east of the Edwards Plateau and in other cities nationally. The new store, along with the town’s soon-to-be-rebuilt national bank and the particular consumption habits of stockmen, represented a local response to the rapid emergence of retail economy in the United States based on the consumption of corporate brand names. The architecture of the building represented a modest, expedient attempt to enframe and enhance the pleasurable associations established in the Victorian era with retail marketing of dry goods and specialty items for Sonorans.

Works addressing small towns during the national transition to mass marketing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are few, and studies on non-rail-connected towns are fewer still. Farming communities predominate in the few studies done so far on rural towns; none that I am aware of have focused in sustained ways on the shopping habits of stockmen—habits that are quite different in a number of ways from those of farmers. More generally, cities and towns in the South and Southwest are relatively underrepresented in such research.⁴ This article will show how Sonora represented a distinctive but somewhat impeded variant in the incipient growth of modern marketing and consumer practices: distinctive, because of the particular way stockmen tended to use their money, and impeded in relation to the rest of the country because of Sonora’s newness and isolation from the...