OUR HERITAGE

Our story is rooted in hard work and the incredible stories of real people and hard-earned success. Since the first record of our doors opening as P. B. O’Neil’s “dry goods, groceries, and hardware store” in 1874, we have hosted our neighbors through growth, decline, expansion, prohibition, two world wars, and the Judgement of Paris. We have been built, expanded, burnt, restored, and carried forward through history by passionate and innovative owners who were not afraid to open new frontiers. Through changing hands and time, we have always kept our daily intention simple: To be a gathering place where people can eat, drink, share, learn, and grow together.

Today, we proudly operate a value-driven business, promoting California food culture through a highly curated selection of the best products from farmers, artisans, and purveyors in Napa and Sonoma Wine Country. As always, we believe in learning from history as we explore the future, ever pursuing our lifelong mission of creating community through food.

Napa Valley enterprises turned over fast in the 1870s, as most people who went into business did so with little prior training and poor financial skills. Then as now, making a profit required a reliable flow of visitors with money to spend as well as the presence of items people wanted. Together, the miners, wheat farmers and wine growers of Oakville lacked the economic mass necessary to support much commerce. There is no evidence that O’Neil possessed suppliers to keep his stock fresh, either: another prerequisite for running a successful retail store.

While Smith & Elliott were writing their history and preparing their lithographs, the Oakville Grocery and the land on which it stood changed hands several times, from John Garner to P.B. O’Neil to a wheat farmer named T. J. Roberts, to a former gold-miner-turned-quicksilver-miner, Jim McQuaid.

The store’s success lured others into trying their hand at retail sales nearby, including a blacksmith and a butcher shop. At least two saloons went into business to “serve the men of the community” and offered wine from the nearby wineries. The transition from wheat farming to grape growing and winemaking was well underway, and times were good.

Things hummed along nicely for the McIntires and McQuaids until 1884, when a tragedy in the McIntires’ family changed things in the McQuaids’. Elizabeth McIntire was thrown from a wagon in which she was riding and died of her injuries, along with one of her children. The grieving James McIntire sold the store, the house and the one acre they stood on to Jim and Jennie for $700.

Years of mining caught up to Jim. His health deteriorated. It is possible that Jennie divided her time between managing the store and raising their daughters, Ethel and Cynta. Depending on Jim’s health, she might also have run the post office. When Jim became too sick to work, a German named Melchior Kemper Sr. bought Oakville Mercantile (its name at the time). Jim McQuaid passed away on August 4, 1889.

Melchior Kemper Sr. was a miller with the Starr Flour Company in Vallejo. He lived in Vallejo with his wife Alice, but his job may well have brought him to Oakville to handle the wheat harvest. Kemper’s teenage son, also Melchior Kemper, came to Oakville to be a clerk in the store and gradually took over many of Jim’s old duties, including operating the telegraph. He lived on the second floor of the railroad depot. After the marriage between Mel Sr. and his wife Alice ended, Jennie McIntire married Mel Sr. in 1892 and spent at least part of her time in Vallejo.

Jennie and Mel Sr. enjoyed the company of their prestigious Oakville neighbors. Inspired by affluence, Mel Jr. installed a public telephone in the store: the first of its kind in Oakville. It was expensive, but the novelty could have attracted curious, would-be shoppers.

 The night after the Fourth of July, 1893, disaster struck the hamlet of Oakville. Jennie was sleeping in the old Victorian, but the

elder Kemper happened to be spending that night on the second floor of the train depot with Mel Jr. According to the Star, he was awakened shortly after midnight by a bright light coming from his store across the road. He roused his son, who had just gone to bed after celebrating the Fourth in St Helena, and the two ran out to find the back room of the store on fire. The blaze spread quickly to the blacksmith shop, a barn and butcher shop, accelerated by the explosion of two cans of powder and 10,000 cartridges the Kempers were storing. Oakville Mercantile, the barn, the blacksmith’s and Walters’ shop all burned down, but the Victorian was spared, although the explosion blew out all the windows on the south side of the house.

Except for the depot, some saloons and the wineries, the entire commercial center of Oakville vanished that night.

The 1900 Census reveals that Booth was a grocer, as was his brother Willis, whom the Census lists as a grocery clerk. It also mentions an Englishman named Frederick Durrant as the owner of a “grocery store” in Oakville—not a dry goods store.

The Booth brothers and Fred Durrant had what appears at first like a complicated relationship. Fred Durrant, born in 1872, was the step-father of Joseph Booth (born in 1874) and Willis Booth (born in 1878). Fred had married their mother; a widowed German named Helena, who was 17 years his senior. They had a son together, Fred Durrant Jr.

They built out the 20’ x 14’ area to the width of today’s Oakville Grocery, although not the length. Common for buildings of that time in the Napa Valley, nothing was insulated, nor was there a foundation: Wooden pilings dug into the ground supported the structure.

After the building was completed it settled into the terrain a bit. The soil may have been softer on the southwest corner because the floor sagged in that direction. A modern-day examination of the wiring suggested that there was no electricity at first. No phonebook lists the store until 1926.

Behind the store on the north side, they built a separate, approximately 8’ x 8’ stone cellar for storing perishable meats, cheeses and other items requiring protection from the warmth of the day. A cement slab incised with “1904” lay at the entrance to this partially sunken chamber, and a vent located on the southern wall near the roof allowed heat to escape. It was made even cooler by the placement of blocks of ice packed in cork or sawdust and brought in daily by the train.

The first decade of the 1900s was transitional for Oakville, as the fire and a costly phylloxera situation across the vineyards in the previous decade had closed some doors but opened others for those in the wine industry. This evolution meant more shoppers at the store, and Durrant & Booth were happy to procure hard-to-get items for their new, upper-class neighbors. The rest of the small but very human population of Oakville did not necessarily welcome this gaggle of newcomers at first.

Infrastructure features like churches and schools would be essential if Oakville were to grow into an actual incorporated town. There were some indications that this was on peoples’ minds because when all the debris from the fire had been cleared away, other buildings went up on and around the one-acre square. A new store on the corner of the county road and the Oakville Cross Road replaced the old butcher shop. It was a saloon with lodgings of some kind on the second floor. An upgraded 

blacksmith shop between the new pub and the grocery/mercantile store weened itself from horses and offered autos for hire. Above it was a meeting place, Oakville Hall, that served as a combination town hall and gathering place for community events, like dances.

Cars gradually replaced the horses and buggies of the past. Real estate magnates, business tycoons, and wealthy families flocked to the area. Everyone in Oakville, rich and poor, now shopped for necessities at Durrant & Booth. They came by horse, on bicycles, in cars, and on foot.

Patrons bought 200-pounds of flour at a time and sugar in 100-pound sacks. The store sold chicken feed and salt licks, clothing, ammunition, shoes and many other things useful to rural families. Eggs, dairy products, and some produce were available, as well as a lot of candy, medicines and local wines by the bottle.

When Joseph Booth left the OG in 1911 to take a job at the Naval base at Mare Island, Fred returned to Oakville and did a brief stint as grocer/postmaster again. He found new partners for Oakville, Benjamin Hooks (a former mining superintendent whose father had run a small Oakville winery) and Arthur V. James. This arrangement seemed to work well and continued for another six years. Hooks and James handled the mail and dealt with the store while Fred returned to his business in San Francisco to sell wine and other Napa Valley items. The supply chain was preserved, and the store experienced a period of stability, at least for a few years.

Life in America in the 1910s was difficult for a large portion of the populace. Health care was inadequate, money often hard to come by, and there were few safety nets to prevent the afflicted from falling into severe poverty. Women continued to be especially vulnerable to penury, particularly women with children. Increasingly, the finger of blame for many of life’s evils was pointed at the consumption of alcohol.

The Women’s Suffrage movement and the Temperance movement proceeded hand in hand, each empowering the other. In most households, men brought home the paychecks and subsequently spent time and money in saloons. Women drank, too, but rarely in public. Women often fell victim to addiction to the opiates regularly peddled as cures for various ailments. Old bottles recently discovered hidden beneath the floorboards of the Oakville Grocery originally contained cure-alls with high alcohol content and may have included more harmful ingredients, as well.