581 18th Street
The Ingram Hardware Company formed in 1902 to take over the long-established business of E. R. Tutt, who sold it to concentrate on large plumbing contracts in San Francisco. The firm’s founders were William Ingram, William McCaslin and John S. Gallagher and the store was at 511-513 13th Street, where the City Center development is today. They sold lots of stoves, furnaces, household wares, and plumbing, gas and electrical supplies.
After failing to win a contract for part of the construction of the new City Hall, the firm went bankrupt in 1912.
William Ingram, Jr. (1852-1934) had a strange and scandalous story. He was doing business successfully in Sacramento as part of the firm Schaw, Ingram, Batcher & Company when in 1901 he “disappeared one day, and for nearly a year his whereabouts baffled the efforts of shrewd detectives. Voluntarily he came back, but never told his experiences. It was learned, however, that Mr. Ingram had followed the vocation of a common farm laborer and that his contact with nature in the fields had wrought in his mind a calm which restored him completely and which has reinstated him as a useful member of society.”
He spent the time at farms in Hollister, recovering from overwork and intense frustration with his partners’ failure to buy him out. His dream was to run a stock ranch! Nevertheless, he ended up in Oakland running a hardware business. The 1920 census shows that he had divorced and gotten his farm, up by Laytonville. In his last days he returned to Oakland, where he died and was buried at Mountain View Cemetery.
