By Pauline Masson –
The Knobel Building, the two-story mixed use brick building at 146 West St. Louis, carries the traces of 185 years of Pacific history.
This building was the second structure that held the name of the builder.
According to the anonymous historian who recorded Pacific’s early years, Joseph Knobel, one of the town’s earliest settlers, established a general store and family home west of the Keathley farm in about 1839, arguably on the promise that a railroad was headed to Pacific. There was no post office, no paved streets, no municipal government. It would be 14 years before the arrival of the railroad, which gave birth to the city.
Three yeas after the first train arrived, Joseph’s son William Knobel built the building pictured above, and relocated the store and family home to St. Louis Street. The market and storage space occupied the first floor. The Knobel family made its home in the spacious second story.
Two generations of two distinct families – the Knobels and the Brandts – would make the Knobel Building the lynchpin of the St. Louis Street business district.
The historic structure has literally had nine lives: It has been home to three grocery stores, a movie show, a sports cards and Yu-Gi-Oh games center, an art and plant store and antiques mall, a barber shop, and now, an insurance company and the Chamber of Commerce.
For those first heady boom town decades new businesses and new buildings sprang up on St. Louis Street – from Columbus Street (originally Adelaide), to Third Street – every week.
Although it was still a general store, in addition to groceries, Knobel’s Market sold home canning supplies, simple tools and even shoes. In 1912, Knobel provided space in the store for Miller & Lundquist to offer their plumbing, tinwork, guttering and soldering service from the building,
First Movie
When Henry Hirth and Lorenz Leber bought a hand-cranked projector and 150 folding chairs, with the intention to show the new movies that were sweeping the country, in Pacific, William Knobel rented them the storeroom of his building. Hirth and Leber projected their first movie there on April 18, 1913. Cost to see the movie was ten cents for adults and a nickel for kids. For two years, until 1915, Hirth and Leber showed their movies in the Knobel building. For the next two years, during warm weather they projected their movies onto a screen set up in a large tent on the lot across the street where they would build their theater, but they returned to the Knobel Building in the winter. Business was so good that by 1917, they opened the new Royal Theater building, which still stands, with 250 seats and a new up-to-date projector.
Friedel’s Market
In 1923 William Knobel retired from the retail business. He sold the business and the building to E. H. Friedel and his wife with the intention Mrs. Friedel would operate the business. Mrs. Friedel turned the general store into a grocery store and meat market, which she ran for three years.
Brandt’s Market
In 1926 Valentine Brandt – always known as Val – bought the business and building from Mrs. Friedel. He opened Val Brandt’s Market, which would be a mainstay on St.Louis Street for 47 years.
Val Brandt plunged the market into the modern age with all the gusto of the Roaring Twenties. According to a 2016 feature story in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the 1920s were, “The food decade that roared.” Grocers had formerly bought coffee, flour, sugar and rolled oats in bulk, which they stored in barrels or bins in the store, and scooped out the amount ordered for each customer. But the food industry was moving into the modern age. Big factories were rolling out tin cans, small paper sacks and cardboard boxes with the name of the product they held printed on the outside. Val Brandt embraced them all.
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By time Val’s sons, Adam turned twelve and Joe turned ten, they were working in the store, stocking shelves with one-pound tins of ground coffee, family-sized boxes of Quaker Oats and Kellogg Cornflakes from Battle Creek, Michigan, sliced Wonder Bread from Indiana, and Kool Aid, the powdered drink mix sold in small packages that cost pennies compared to bottled soda. Local food providers also entered the modern age. Adam and Joe were stocking paper sacks of flour from Koppitz Mill – where Val had worked before he became a grocer – and tin cans of tomatoes from the summer growing season well into the winter, provided by the Pacific Caning Company on Union Street. In the years of abundant crops, canned tomatoes would be available year round.
Val changed the name of his store in newspaper ad to Val Brandt & Sons Market. He bought a delivery truck and offered free home delivery two days a week. He advertised “fresh milk daily,” as well as fresh fish, herring and oysters. He sold fireworks in July and Christmas fruit cakes in December. He hosted Queen’s Daughters’ bake sales in the store. He gave away glass tumblers and placed newspaper ads inviting customers and would-be customers to come in and pick theirs up.
In 1931, Val Brandt was injured when a vehicle he was riding in was struck by a switch engine at a grade crossing. He died a few days later. The town was electrified by the death of its popular grocer. A front page obituary in the local newspaper reported the huge turnout for his funeral at St. Bridget Church, which, the editor noted, “attested to the high esteem in which he was held by his fellow citizens.”
Adam and Joseph took over management of the store. Adam displayed the same outgoing tendency his father had shown. He changed the name of the store again, this time to Brandt Bros. Market.
So many regular customers came into the store that three clerks were needed to help Adam and Joe hand write each customers’ purchases in individual account books to be paid for at the end of the week or month.
On January 14, 1933 Adam made the boldest change in the business’ history. He announced in a series of news articles that from then on, the market would operate on a Cash and Carry plan. Shoppers would now pay for the items they bought before they carried them out of the store, eliminating the account books that were tedious and costly. The plan, Adam stressed, would enable the market to lower all grocery prices.
And it worked.
On Saturday 25, 1933, only ten days after the change, Adam told the Transcript editor that the store had the greatest sale day in its history when some 400 customers entered the store.
In a recent telephone interview, Adam’s son Jim – who, like his father and uncle was stocking shelves in the store by age ten – reminisced about the final days of the family business.
“Large grocery chains like Kroger and IGA that were opening grocery stores across the country made their way into Pacific,” he said. “I think that, more than anything brought about the decision to close the store.”
Adam Brandt closed Brandt Bros. Market on March 8, 1973 after 47 years.
“It was pretty big news in town,” Jim Brandt said. “The paper wrote it all up on the front page.”
Mueller’s Card Shop
In 1990, Paul Mueller eyed the empty building as an ideal location for a new business. Mueller was a baseball fan. He bought his first nickel pack of baseball cards in the building back when it was occupied by Brandt’s grocery store and he, Mueller, was in the sixth grade at St. Bridget’s School.
Mueller added to his collection through the years, but it was only when he retired from a thirty-year stint at Chrysler’s in Fenton, that he bought $500 worth of baseball cards from a wholesaler and rented the first floor of the Knobel Building and filled the glass cases and wall shelves with a colorful display of sports cards and collectibles. He threw in an entire section of Pokemon trading cards to attract youngsters.
R&R Sportscards
In 2003, Rhonda and Rich Blum, frequent customers of Mueller’s bought the business and opened R & R Sports Cards, a sports card and collectibles store, and Yu-Gi-Oh game room. Like the movie shows of 1913 and the canned and paper sack food of the 1920s, the iconic building was still offering what was new.
In April, 2004, when I visited R&R, locating an empty table in the game room at R&R Sportscards was a challenge. Four boys had just launched their first duel of the day. They were lucky to find one of three game tables open. More than a dozen youngsters made do with empty spots of floor.
Some 150 contestants had registered to play since the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game was introduced a year earlier, and R&R Sportscards introduced the weekly tournament in the former grocery store crammed full of all things related to sports.
Bragg Station
In 2015, Patti Bragg, who formerly sold advertising for the Missourian newspaper, opened 142 Bragg Station, a local art and antique store in the one-story annex of the building. After the Pacific Antique Mall at North First and Union streets closed, she expanded business into the former store area of the building creating an antique mall for other sellers.
G’s Barber Shop
In 2019 it was seen as something of a lucky happenstance – and another new customer service was introduced in the building – when two lady barbers, Lisa Gildehaus and Courtney Gullet, wanted to open G’s Barber Shop in the Knobel Building. They happened to be married to men in the building trades. And what they did with this former grocery store / card shop / antique mall was worth bragging about. The popular hair cutters would soon need more space and moved their shop down the block to 113 West St. Louis Street.
Farmers Bureau Insurance.
Today, Farm Bureau Insurance Agency operates its multi-line sales agency, which offers Auto, Home, Life, Business and other insurance needs in the first floor store area of the building at 146 West St. Louis Street. The firm states that it has more agents in more communities in Missouri than any other insurer in the state.
Chamber of Commerce
In January 2019, the Pacific Area Chamber of Commerce moved its office into the one-story annex of the venerable Knobel Building. Greg Myers, then Chamber president, and executive director Tiffany Wilson orchestrated the relocation after the Chamber of Commerce lost the Missouri license bureau, which it had operated for decades from its West Osage Street headquarters. Myers, who operates his financial service business in another historic St. Louis Street building, said locating the Chamber of Commerce in the heart of the historic district was a great move for the business community.
“This is where it all started,” Myers said.
When was the annex built? What is its history?
Very interesting article of the history of this building. I enjoyed reading it.
Even though we’ve only lived in Catawissa for 20 something years, I love hearing the stories about the towns beginnings. Please keep more stories coming.
Pauline, Thank you for the informative article regarding the Knobel building (Note the correct spelling of the name). I knew Adam and Joe Brandt when I would visit my great Aunt in the early 1950’s. They were two of the nicest and friendliest gentlemen, I don’t know if it would have been possible to include information about the families who lived and were born in the building. Joseph Knobel was my great, great grandfather, his son William was my great grandfather and his daughter Agatha Knobel Gross was my grandmother. She and her three other sisters and two brothers were all born upstairs. Willam’s daughter Frances Knobel Brennan, her husband L. Pearl Brennan and their son Neil Brennan lived in the house until they moved to Columbus street. In effect a Knobel family member lived in house from the time it was built to 1951. No other family has since lived upstairs.
Gary, Thanks for the comments and correction — I fixed the spelling — and the lead in to another post. I knew about the Knobel family. My close friend, the late Carl Zitzman’s mother was a Knobel and was born and raised in the building. Carl grew up across the street where his father’s barber shop occupied the site where Brown Jerry’s now stands. Their home was in the fenced garden in back of the shop. It was later dismantled and moved to North Sixth Street. When I first came to work in Pacific, Carl took me to Neil’s house. I knew with all the Knobel daughters and grand-daughters (marrying local boys) that many local families would have ties to the building. It would have been too much to try to include that in this already lengthy story but with your encouragement I will work on it. — AND — I don’t know if I conjured it up, but in the substrata of my memory the name KNOBEL, spelled out in huge upper case letters, was once spread across the front of the building above the second floor windows. I was not able to confirm that. Were is Neil Brennan when you need him?
What a great read. You should pick other buildings and write about them.
I enjoyed reading about this building. Very interesting article and I would second knowing the history of some of the other older buildings in town!