This impression at Lee Avenue at Perkins Street, now gone, was the best example of J. A. Marshall’s stamp in Oakland.
John Albert Marshall (1868-1925), born in Missouri, began his career when concrete craftsmen were still called “artificial stone workers.” That was his title in the 1892 directory for San Francisco, where he lived until 1895 when he relocated to Berkeley. He was known as “J.A.”
J.A. Marshall fulfilled a large paving contract for much of the Adams Point neighborhood during 1897-98, so that would put this and other marks there in the 1800s category.
He sold his sidewalk business in 1901 to Lindgren & Hicks and moved to Portland Oregon, where the city had started a drive to pave all of its sidewalks by 1905. There, with his brother Rudolph Augustus “R.A.” Marshall (1861-1936), a former journalist and supreme court clerk, he launched the Marshall Brothers firm, which laid sidewalks until around 1910. The family made strong connections in Portland during that time, and the Marshall Bros. escutcheon, the same as Oakland’s, can still be found on Portland sidewalks. The firm branched out from sidewalks to more ambitious construction projects.
When the 1906 earthquake triggered a great wave of residential construction in the East Bay, he returned and quickly thrived as a builder of custom homes.
His modus operandi was to build, then sell houses for his growing family, each one more opulent. A practitioner rather than originator of the Berkeley Craftsman style, he left many homes still standing in Berkeley and Oakland neighborhoods.
He became wealthy enough for the family to appear regularly in the society pages both in Portland and Berkeley, especially his wife, the former Emily Virginia Jones (1872-1956), and their three daughters. At the time J.A. died, they were all living in a baronial home at 18 Tanglewood Road. His wife promptly sold the place and moved to a luxury apartment at 22 Domingo Avenue, where the papers followed her doings as “Mrs. John Albert Marshall” long after her husband’s death.
J.A. was the contractor whose young relative, future architect Leola Hall, accompanied him and learned the foundations of her trade. Two of his three sons became contractors, Gardner E. Marshall and J. A. Marshall II. He seems to have had a cantankerous streak, and his sons did little work with him, succeeding or failing on their own. The third son, Eliot, became a car dealer in Concord.
