On Market Street near 20th Street two historic buildings stand side by side: the only survivors of an entire block of a bustling part of downtown Galveston 100 years ago.
One of those structures, the 1888 Wegner Brothers Building, housed a series of food establishments for many years. They provided locals with fresh goods to enhance their everyday lives and special occasions.
Brothers Ernest Phillip Wegner (1850-1913) and John Charles Wegner (1847-1922) immigrated to America from Germany as small children with their parents and older brother in 1852 and settled down in Galveston.
After operating a grocery store together on the corner of 15th Street and Avenue K for several years, the brothers commissioned architect Eugene Heiner to design a new store for them.
This new market was to be built on land they had purchased in 1885 at 1921 Market Street. The rectangular, stuccoed brick building was two stories and showcased Heiner’s preference for Renaissance Revival style.
The ground floor featured a series of six sets of double doors with transoms, separated by cast iron columns. Three sets of paired arched windows on the second story were supported by carved columns and topped with decorative insets.
The building featured electric lighting and four fireplaces for use during the colder months.
Designed to house the Wegner Brothers grocery and liquor store on the first floor, the second floor provided additional income as a lodge room for rent. The Sons of Herrmann, Chosen Friends Odd Fellows Lodge, Oleander Chapter of the Woodmen of the World, and Concordia Society regularly held meetings and events in the second floor space.
The Galveston Daily News announced that the building was completed on November 13, 1888, and that the family grocery would carry a complete stock of first-class offerings.
Though the business belonged to both brothers, John took care of the daily operations as Ernest was the chief of the Galveston Fire Department.
A 1904 advertisement for the Wegner store claimed to have the cheapest groceries in Galveston and offered S&H trading stamps to its customers. The popular S&H stamps were offered by retailers across the nation from 1896 to the 1980s. As a reward for purchases, customers would redeem the stamps for goods in the Sperry & Hutchinson catalog.
One of the most active organizations to utilize the upstairs meeting hall was the Galveston Spiritualist Society. Members believed that living people could communicate with people who had died. They also believed that those spirits could provide guidance on moral and ethical issues.
The Spiritualist Movement was highly popular in the 19th century and this society conducted progressive lyceums, monthly business meetings, ladies’ society meetings, celebrations, dances, and lectures in the hall.
The lectures were offered by some of the most renowned spiritualist speakers and mediums in the nation. Topics included: “How Do We Communicate with the Friends Whom We Call Dead?”
Mediums also held seances for the society in the upstairs meeting hall. Some seances took as long as three nights and involved trumpet speaking and other occult phenomena.
In 1910, the Wegners sold their stock, fixtures, and cash registers due to bankruptcy. They sold the building to a pair of Austrian immigrant brothers named Schaefer for $9,000.
The Schaefers remodeled the grocery store into a bakery, spending $3,000 to install a brick oven, an employee cleaning and changing room, and other upgrades. Their focus was achieving an impressive degree of sanitation during the food preparation process, which was highly scrutinized after the 1900 Storm.
They had the only automatic flour scaling system in the city and proudly boasted that human hands “touched no dough” during preparation.
Elder brother Frank J. Schaefer (1883-unknown) made a living selling pet canaries on the island after arriving in 1904. His brother Joseph Franz Schaefer, Jr. (1884-1965) moved to the island in 1907.
Once both brothers resided in Galveston, they set their minds on opening a combination bakery and ice cream parlor in their newly renovated building. They soon expanded their enterprise to several bakeries around the island, maintaining the Market Street location as their main store.
By April 1911, the Schaefers had achieved enough success to afford the purchase of a new Everitt 30 delivery wagon. The automobile enabled them to increase their business by over 300 percent in the following months.
In May 1911, they advertised to sell their horse, mule, two carts, and sets of harnesses as they no longer needed the outmoded delivery method.
For Thanksgiving that year, the bakery specials included a dozen oyster patties for fifty cents, cranberry and pumpkin pies for twenty-five cents, twenty-cent chicken pies, and homemade fruit cake at thirty cents per pound.
The following year the brothers made an additional $5,000 worth of repairs and improvements to the building.
An experiment in offering German specialties for one week in 1913 was so successful that the items were regularly requested. The most coveted items were butter pretzels, apple kuchen, schnecken (German sticky cinnamon buns), peach and apricot kuchen, honey cake, cinnamon kuchen, cheesecake, apple strudel, coffee wreaths, German butter streusel, and stollen.
In 1916, the Schaefer brothers incorporated with Gerlach Baking Company but continued to operate under the Schaefer name.
As former citizens of Austria, the brothers encountered discrimination during World War I. In April 1917, Frank Schaefer felt obliged to take out a newspaper advertisement to address “fraudulent rumors that have been maliciously circulated in our city relative to our loyalty to the United States and our adopted home and flag.”
The ad stated that since coming to America 10 years earlier, they had been loyal, honest, and upright citizens and that they were “at present fully fledged American citizens.”
In 1920, the Gerlach Baking Company assumed the proprietorship of the Schaefer operation, but the building was listed as being vacant by 1921.
After Charles F. Gerlach (1872-1921) passed away, the administrator of his estate sold the bakery to Sirsividas T. Constantine (1879-1958) in 1924.
Constantine, a confectioner and immigrant from Turkey, operated the White Star Confectionery on 23rd Street and leased the Market Street property to Bernard
LaCoume (1855-1927).
LaCoume had previously been a baker at the Martinelli Brothers grocery store. The native of France had moved to Galveston after immigrating to New Orleans when he was 19 years old.
Shortly after he came to the island, he opened the New Orleans Bakery on Mechanic Street, conducted by him and his sons. The Market Street location allowed them to expand their operation.
LaCoume’s Bakery produced the popular Butter Krust bread sold in local grocery stores, along with their specialty cakes, pies and pastries. At Christmas, they took advantage of the fresh ingredients coming into the port including nuts, fruits, and spices.
They also made their popular fruitcake, advertised as being so delicious it would “make you smack your lips and call for more.”
The bakery, by then operated by Bernard’s sons for almost 15 years, suffered bankruptcy in June 1942 and all of their furnishings and equipment were sold at auction.
Constantine sold the building to Victor Furhop in 1944, and it was sold to W. G. Russell two years later. That same year, George A. Clark purchased the property from Russell. The property changed hands several more times over the years, with both upstairs and downstairs tenants changing regularly.
The upstairs space was rented by the ABC Upholstery Shop which became C. W. Mulliken Upholstery in the 1940s. It was later utilized as an artist’s studio.
One of the longest tenants of the building was the Isabel McKenna School of Dancing in the 1950s and 1960s. McKenna offered beginning and advanced classes in ballet, toe, tap, jazz, and acrobatic dancing as well as gymnastics and even pre-ballet classes for babies.
The second-floor hall also served as a children’s theatre and sponsored children’s cotillion dances. At one time, the school had five teachers offering instruction.
In the following years, like so many other historic structures in the area, the Wegner Building’s downstairs space had a variety of tenants, including an automobile mechanic shop.
By the early 1990s, the building had fallen into a state of disrepair and neglect. It was in need of immediate attention because local officials had condemned the structure.
In late 1994, local architect David Watson purchased the historic building before it was approved to be demolished. The roof had collapsed onto the first floor and the sky was visible from inside the building. There was little left of the front facade beyond the masonry and cast iron.
Soon after, Watson began the process of stabilizing the building structurally. Once this was completed, he began the painstaking process of a full restoration of the building inside and out.
The beautiful iron façade was also restored and after it was completed, the upstairs loft apartment was featured in the Galveston Historical Foundation Homes Tour in 2002.
Today, the historic building is still owned by Watson and is home to his firm, David Watson, Architect & Associates. A couple of years ago Watson had the exterior painted for the first time since it was built in 1888.
What is in store for the building in the future has yet to be seen, but its location across from the American National Building positions it as a highly visible opportunity.