I had about an hour to walk around downtown from the El Paso train station. The sidewalk stamp right outside was the only one I found, but there was plenty of street stuff. J.A.R. Concrete did business for 65 years, but went bankrupt in 2023.
El Paso Foundry & Machine dates back to the 1890s, but I can’t find anything about its current existence.
It seems like an interesting city, and a fellow passenger, an El Paso native coming back for a visit, praised it to the skies.
All I know of Salinas is what I saw at the train station, where the Coast Starlight stopped for a “fresh air break” for all the smokers to light up. The Amtrak station appears to have been renovated, and it has a little rail museum. Plus this mark, dated August 2020. Cen-Cal Construction is a modest sized firm, without a website, that was founded in 2011.
1736 Franklin Street
John Henry Harris (1902-1978) was a Berkeley-based grading and excavating contractor during the mid-century years, not so much a sidewalk contractor, but here’s a single, very obscure example of his stamp in Oakland. Other stamps survive in Alameda.
Harris was born and raised in the Sierra foothills. He’s listed in the city directories from 1924 to 1943, but this stamp and other sources show he was active until liquidating in the early 1960s. He lived at several Berkeley addresses during those years, first with his wife Billie (1908-1961) and their three children and later with second wife Mabel (1903-1992). He had a brickyard down near the foot of University Avenue at Third and Bancroft. During the late 1940s he advertised paving services as well as grading. In the 1950s he did a lot of demolition work.
Harris wasn’t totally obscure; he was head of the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce in 1952-53 and fulfilled contracts in the north Bay as well as locally.
My thanks to Ken Zinns for spotting and sharing this mark.
Frank Coelho Vieira (1885-1940) first appears in the newspapers in 1926 as a “sewer and cement contractor,” at this address, where city directories show him living there, with his wife Ida (Fereira) and children, as early as 1912 and into the 1930s. They had at least three children. He was born in Portugal, like many Oakland Portuguese-Americans, but Ida was Hawaiian Portuguese, like many others. He’s buried in Hayward at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery.
His stamps are few. I’ve documented dates from 1935 to 1938.
7558 Greenly Drive
Kemble drew the date underneath, rather than inside the stamp here.
2118 Eighth Street, Berkeley
A definitive double stamp from this obscure, long-gone maker.
480 23rd Street
“09.25.30–05.17.09”
Oakland Underfoot 