By Sarah Eyer

In 2008, lifelong Dayton resident, Pat Wood, recalled what it was like to go shopping as a little girl in the early 1930s.

“On Saturday mornings my mother would dress me up in my finest attire and off we would go on a street car downtown. After shopping at the Old Market on Main Street we would go to the Arcade to buy fresh peanut butter and pickles from Disher’s Stand, coffee from Bogart’s and special cheese from Noll’s.”[1]

Wood’s experience shopping with her mother was quite different from the way Daytonians shop today. Her experience described walking from vendor to vendor to get items instead of picking them off shelves and then paying for all goods at a check out counter. However, Wood’s experience was different from the earlier markets in Dayton, as well. Much of that had been done for years at publically owned indoor markets. However, as the years passed privately owned markets and grocery stores prevailed over public markets. The Arcade had a private food market not a public one like the earlier markets in Dayton. Privatized markets were a transition point between Daytonians shopping at public markets and shopping in grocery stores. The development from public to private markets took place over the nineteenth century as food distribution, transportation, and business practices changed in America in order to efficiently feed large urban populations.

The Evolution of Food Distribution in the Nineteenth Century

In the early nineteenth century, the forms of transportation and farming practices greatly impacted what the people in early Dayton could eat. Both farming and transportation became industrialized in the nineteenth century, and Dayton could get processed foods from farther away. The canals facilitated food, such as flour and pork, in and out of Dayton. However, the city continued to depend on local farmers for fresh produce. Farmers across America began to commercialize their farming techniques, so greater amounts of food could be produced.

Transportation and storage prices varied from city to city, and since they could not restock quickly, as transportation was slow, if there was a shortage, prices could spike rapidly for a short time before goods came in again.[2] Luckily, the Miami Valley’s fertile soil supplied Dayton with abundant crops. However, most farmers had to walk their goods to cities. In the first half of the nineteenth century, farmers would walk their livestock or fowl (Turkeys) sometimes a hundred miles to a city. Butchers would then slaughter the animals before bringing them to market. Ohio supplied much of the meat for the East Coast markets even as far away as Baltimore during this time.[3] Such slow transportation over long distances made meat expensive to buy.

For much of the nineteenth century, most people’s diets were based on what could be grown in the region and thus varied from place to place.[4] One of the first men to open a store in Dayton was Jonathan Harshman. He supplied it and a few stores in Cincinnati with crops from his farm and the products that came from his mill and distillery which were only five miles outside of Dayton.[5] There would have been other stores like his before the first markets in Dayton. However, his farm, mill, and distillery could not supply the population alone. Early Daytonians bought most of their flour, groceries, store goods, and whisky from Cincinnati. These goods were brought in on horseback. Whisky at that time was $2.50 per 100 lbs.[6] At this time, both processed goods and produce came from within the area around Dayton, but with advancements in farming and transportation processed goods would soon come from farther away.

This photo is from the Lutzenberger collection at the Dayton Metro Library. It showcases a canal boat near the fairgrounds.

With the birth of the canals in Dayton, the city could bring food in from farther away, and the farmers in the Miami Valley could sell their food throughout the Eastern portion of the United States without having to travel themselves. The first canal boat launched in 1828 from Dayton. People could now use the canal to get to Cincinnati in twenty hours, which was quite a rapid pace at the time.[11]

In its first year, the Miami canal brought Dayton 27,000 barrels of flour. Within three years, the amount of flour more than doubled. By 1831, it was near 60,000 barrels. The staple products that Dayton produced then shipped out on the Miami River before the canals were built were flour, whisky, and bacon.[12] However, in 1887, only 167 barrels of flour entered Dayton through the canal. Thanks to Joseph Kratochwill flour started being produced in Dayton in 1854.[13] According to the city directory, by 1840, the city had thirty-four flourmills that produced 70,622 barrels of flour and 261,190 gallons of brew liquor.[14] The city no longer needed to depend on Cincinnati for flour or the canal. The Dayton mill produced “New Process” and “Snow Flake” flour brands.[15] The rivers and canals supplied cheap power to mills and factories allowing Dayton’s commerce to grow.[16] In fact, the Miami Canal was more important for farmers to ship crops out of Dayton than into Dayton.[17]

However, while manufacturing was growing in Dayton, the area around Dayton was dedicated to agricultural production. In 1840, Montgomery County produced 1,651,537 bushels of various grains and 122, 394 pounds of sugar. Dairies in the county made $27, 156 that year, and orchards $1, 062. Some of this went to feed the city, but most was sold to markets elsewhere.[18]

While canals formed an essential part of getting food directly into Dayton, they also functioned within a larger system of transportation that covered thousands of miles. The introduction of railroads in America also helped transform markets in cites by bringing them new food. With the railroads, cattle started travelling thousands of miles from Kansas or Texas to Ohio and the East Coast. Cattle and other livestock started coming into cities on trains and were often abused or starved. People feared the health effects of eating such meat. The USDA tried to solve the problem by fixing refrigerated railcars, so cattle could be killed locally and then shipped to their destination as long as they made it within 40 or 50 hours.[19] Even with railroads, farmers’ wagons still flooded cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.[20] They were still the primary means of bringing fresh produce into Dayton.

With these advances in transportation in farming, larger quantities of food could be made and transported longer distances to feed urban population. This would facilitate the growth of public markets in Dayton. These original markets would be monitored and controlled by the city to make sure Daytonians would have easy access to clean food at a fair price.

The Sears-Webster Market as it appears in the 1887 Sanborn Map.

This went beyond food to all necessary goods. The city was also responsible for making sure clothing was readily available to their citizens.[24] The city created market laws to maintain quality food and keep the city clean from waste. Cities hired clerks to inspect produce and meat. This was essential to the appearance of the street market or market house where the meat was sold. People did not want blood flowing in the streets, so city officials carefully watched the sale of fish and meat.[25] Due to the city’s watchful eye, Dayton citizens enjoyed fresh meat and produce that they were always excited to get.

Throughout the United States in the nineteenth century, market laws applied to when a market could open, what goods could be sold, and also discourage rumors about what was available in the market. Goods could only be sold during market hours, and the city set those hours. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Dayton established its market hours as during the afternoons on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and the mornings on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

 One nineteenth century Dayton resident recalled that the people of Dayton were so eager to get the best slice of meat or the best produce that they would be running out the door at four in the morning in the middle of winter to get to the market before it opened. The markets of Dayton were jokingly called the “midnight markets.” This custom continued for many years in Dayton.[26]

Distribution of food in smaller towns around Dayton was often different. The towns obtained meat and vegetables through informal social networks such as trade or bartering with farmers and neighbors. They could also obtain goods through various street peddlers, general stores, and kitchen gardens.[27] Over time people began to buy most of their food at markets, including people in the countryside.

One of Dayton’s largest street markets was on Fifth and Main. The popularity of street markets came from their ability to sell goods cheaper than wholesale markets because the vendors produced their own goods instead of buying them from the wholesale markets.[28] People of every social class shopped at the open markets in Dayton and brought them into contact with each other, but the poor depended on them for their food. Poor women, African American women, and widows, like Charlotte Culp, depended on street vending to support their families. They mostly sold meals or snacks.[29] Dayton’s Charlotte Culp made homemade baked goods after her husband died. Her kids sold them in an outdoor market downtown. Her baking was so successful that she went on to create Culp’s Café with her kids in the Arcade.[30] City governments tolerated street vendors because it was one way the poor could make an honest living.[31] Street vendors and outdoor markets allowed the poor to work and the poor to eat.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, the emerging middle class became increasingly unhappy with open-air street markets. Much of the middle class in large urban areas shopped at indoor markets. The middle class complained about street markets. According to the middle class, street markets delayed deliveries to merchants, hampered the ability for firemen to get through streets, and endangered public health. However, as the progressive era developed, street markets would disappear because of the disgust they caused due the increasing perceptions about the amount of germs and dirt in food as well as in the street.

Despite the regulations placed by the cities on markets, the middle class expressed growing concerns about their health and how public markets affected them. By the end of the nineteenth century, cities rushed to get rid of public markets, both indoor and outdoor, and replace them with privatized markets like the Arcade. Even though street markets evoked the most disgust in citizens, all public markets would be subject to same criticism come the progressive era. During the nineteenth century, however, the public market houses were the much cleaner and more middle class friendly option. 

In the Midwest, it was common for markets to be built in the middle of major thoroughfares.[33] Dayton followed this trend but placed the markets in the alleyways between busy streets instead of putting them in the middle of large streets like other cities in the Midwest. The Jefferson-Main market and the Sears-Webster market were built in large alleyways downtown.[34] Later, the Arcade would be built in an alleyway. The Arcade even acted as a thoroughfare in the city.[35]

Cities desired indoor markets in the early nineteenth century because they added to the prestige of a city. The first market house in Dayton opened in 1815 on Second Street between Main and Jefferson. A vendor could only sell meat, butter, poultry, fresh vegetables, and fish on market days (Wednesday and Saturday). The farmers sold produce on the outside of the market and butchers sold meat in the interior. Flour sold at five dollars a barrel, and in 1822, whiskey in the market was sold for twelve and half cents per gallon.[36] This original market house catered to around one hundred homes (mostly log cabins) in Dayton at this time.[37] However, the citizens of Dayton built a new market house, which would become the main market in Dayton for the rest of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century only one block away from where the Arcade would eventually be built.

The new market house was erected between Jefferson, Main, Third, and Fourth in 1829. This new location allowed for a bigger and more modern market house. The one on Second Street was abandoned in 1830.[38] Market houses were funded in part by the city and private individuals, but also by public fundraising.[39] The public contributed to the spaces they used. Market houses were like any other public or civic building such as courthouses or city hall. In fact, the city hall of Dayton met on the second floor of the new market house.[40]

Images of the Dayton Public Market Houses of the Nineteenth Century

This is the Jefferson-Main market house as it appears in the 1887 Sanborn Map.

Unlike street markets, market houses were places catered to a more middle-class demographic. However, markets were places where poor and rich alike frequented. Patrons of the nineteenth century were mostly men or servants. Middle and upper class ladies in public markets in the nineteenth century evoked mixed opinions. Some were not comfortable with the chaos.[41] Still, market houses continued to evolve over the century to suit the middle class and not the poor. The privatized market houses built in the 1880s into the early 1900s were designed to satisfy middle class concerns and allow respectable, bourgeois women to feel comfortable in public.[42] Privatized markets were products of the Progressive Era. The Progressive Era would take the idea of the indoor market but condemn it for being public and work to privatize it. However, when the East Coast, who introduced privatized markets before the Midwest, suffered price inflation during a recession in 1873 that led to a revival of public markets in the late 1870s.

By 1859, cities on the East Coast were discussing the take over of markets by private companies, similar to the Arcade Company forty years later. These new enterprises could get the capital needed to build market houses faster than the city government and introduce the newest innovations to them—electric lighting and refrigeration. The new company directors would now be acting for the public good instead of the city government.[43] Private vendors in markets distrusted businessmen and these companies, but the businessman was the hero of the nineteenth century in America, so the public generally had fewer qualms about trusting them.[44]

Local governments also thought privatizing markets would help the city. Developing during the age when liberalism was replacing “paternalistic governments,” people extended liberal economic principles to the food industry. The hope with these new companies was for competition in the free market to create just prices while more efficiently bringing in food in rapidly urbanizing areas.[45] Privatizing food was another step into the progressive era for American cities, but privatization still had its downfalls that led to government taking control again.

The recession of 1873 tarnished the reputation of these new private markets when they failed to keep prices low. People began to critique the private companies more and more for their failures in getting clean food and at low prices to people in cities. They noted that guilds and corporations in the meat industry actually led to greater pollution and meat adulteration, instead of their expressed goals of making meat more widely available. People in big cities like New York City and Mexico City demanded government intervention.[46]

The Midwest and Dayton did not privatize many of their markets until decades after the end of the 1870s recession because they took part in a revival of public markets that occurred because of the recession. At the time of the 1870s recession, public markets were often newer in Midwestern cities, so city governments often felt they had to protect their investments.[47] However, the recession and the failure of the private markets on the East Coast did affect Dayton. Private companies and grocery stores had inflated prices during the recession, which led to the dip in their popularity. As the markets were privatized on the East Coast, the city governments were not there to set price ceilings like the markets in Dayton could because the markets in Dayton were still public. [48] Indeed, Dayton’s city government could oversee the hygiene of public markets, enforce food and market laws, and keep prices lower better than private companies at this time. The public looked to city officials to protect their food interests and this brought about a revival of public markets in the late 1870s.

Terminal, wholesale, and curbside markets made during this time kept prices down by making sure there was a ready available stock to replenish markets.[50] Wholesale markets worked closely with city markets because they promised to keep the prices lower.[51] In 1888, Dayton had five wholesale markets supplying the city. They were John K. McIntire & Co., Weakley, Worman & Co., N. Thacker & Co., W.S. Phelps & Sons, and Crossley and Adamson.[52] Thus, Dayton had means to keep the prices of food low, and outside of the local government, the state government created food laws to protect the quality of food for consumers. However, there was one aspect governments could not do as well as private companies, and that was creating beautiful markets. 

While people lost faith in private food markets during the 1870s, when the economy recovered, so did people’s belief that private markets were better than public ones. By the twentieth century, most people desired to get rid of the dirty public markets and have clean, well-designed streets with clean white buildings instead of old markets houses. Both indoor and outdoor public markets created excess litter and a bad odor. All market buildings needed to be appealing as part of the “City Beautiful movement.”[53] The ability to build such beautiful buildings was trusted to private companies that could accumulate more capital to build the markets.

The Dayton Arcade Food Market

An article on the food show put on by the Arcade Market in the Dayton Daily News Nov. 18, 1932.

The Two Arcades

The first three decades of the twentieth century saw dramatic changes in food distribution. Public markets, both street and indoor, began to disappear and be replaced with chain stores or private markets, such as the Dayton Arcade and its new competitor, the Jefferson-Main Arcade. The 1920s and 1930s sounded the death toll for public markets. In Dayton, all of these changes could be seen in the creation of the new arcade on Jefferson and Main.

In 1904, the completion of the Dayton Arcade represented a significant improvement in both the aesthetic and practical state of food delivery in the city. The grand rotunda of the Arcade sent light down on two hundred different market stalls in 1904. As food was stored in the basement of the Arcade, the market could just be comprised of the beautiful and neatly designed booths.[54] The new Arcade market was not just visually beautiful but it offered exotic foods such as Jamaican bananas and Messina lemon dates.[55] This new market in Dayton could offer all the things the middle class desired that public markets could not, as city governments could not adapt to new consumer culture as quickly as private companies like the Dayton Arcade Company. The Arcade was the new standard of food shopping, and it inspired a new arcade company to buy the biggest of Dayton’s indoor markets and replace it with an arcade. The two competing arcades in Dayton would exist within a block of each other.

The Jefferson-Main Street Arcade Market Company planned on creating an arcade in place of the public market house. The idea plan for updating the building was based on the design of the Dayton Arcade.[56] The new Jefferson-Main Arcade would not be an arcade by definition, as it did not have a completely glass ceiling. However, it originally set out to be and hoped to garner the same success the Dayton Arcade had made. Dr. Breidenbach bought the end of the market house on Jefferson Street, and he began this undertaking. The article was very clear that the erection of the market house “in no way grew out of the agitation for the removal of the curb markets which is now underway.”[57] This article from the Dayton Daily News reveals two things. First, street markets were all but wiped out in Dayton. Second, that the city was moving the control of food distribution over to private companies by the fact that the public market house was being transformed into a new arcade which offered a greater appeal than public markets.

According to another article in the Dayton Daily News, the Jefferson-Main arcade was to be a “thoroughly modern and beautifully constructed building” to render more effective service and provide the city with a new architectural asset. By April 1921, two years after the new company was founded, three hundred Dayton citizens had already invested in the building, and the building was finished in November that year.[58] These two new arcade companies would have greater success than independent grocery stores during the first half of the twentieth century, but eventually chain stores would replace independent grocery stores and private markets alike.

Images of the Jefferson-Main Arcade

The Jefferson-Main Arcade Market. This image was in the Dayton Herlad Nov. 28, 1921.

Grocery and Chain Stores

By the 1920s, the Arcade established itself as the most efficient and modern way to sell food in the city and its success inspired the creation of the Jefferson-Main Arcade. However, a new competitor emerged in the 1920s that would eventually dominate food distribution not only in Dayton but across the nation. Chain stores had the ability to efficiently bring food into the city and restock quickly by using their own warehouses and taking advantage of the rising truck industry. The chain stores also adopted new innovations such as the cash-to-carry method of purchasing and selling a large variety of products in their stores. This would allow them to outsell independent grocery stores that could not adapt as quickly to these new methods of shopping.

Grocers originally only specialized in non-perishable goods such as coffee, tea, flour, and liquor. They also began to sell canned goods, which emerged on grocery store shelves after the Civil War. By 1920, virtually every American household purchased some sort of processed food, and the American diet began to depend on them.[59] Early grocers were often accused of buying goods cheap at wholesale and then selling them at high prices. This perception is why some people avoided the convenience of the neighborhood grocery store and went to the public market.[60] This attitude changed over the nineteenth century.

During the 1880s, it was common for grocery stores to send employees out to various houses and take orders, which they would deliver the next day.[63] This trend continued into the twentieth century. This meant that instead of being able to receive food right away like a person could at markets, a person would have to wait for their goods to be delivered to them from the grocer. Chain stores would use the more efficient cash-and-carry method, which meant that people could buy the food they wanted at the store and then bring it home immediately instead of having to wait for deliveries.[64]

While independent stores struggled to adapt to this new method of shopping, they adapted to the new trend of offering goods beyond food. One of the reason food stores had an increase in sales during the late 1930s was due to the fact that food stores also had other goods like paper goods and appliances available.[65] Independent grocery stores could adapt to some of the new advancements in food distribution but not to all. Chain stores, developing in the 1920s, adapted faster to changes in food distribution and even contributed to changing food distribution. Chain stores’ ability to do this led to the eventual downfall of the independent grocery stores.

Advertisement for A&P in Dayton Daily News Jan. 15, 1959.

Once again, the shift in technology facilitated the shift in business structure. Trucks would allow the rapid transportation of food from farm or factory to grocery store shelf. This would benefit chain stores and allow them to rapidly restock products. Truck farming allowed out of season or tropical fruits to be brought to northern markets, like the Jamaican bananas in the Arcade.[70] The majority of produce was no coming out of California and Texas.[71] However, truck farming grew and thrived in America as roads replaced railroads. In 1929, the Miami Canal was filled in to create Patterson Boulevard. Canal boats needed to make way for the new king of transportation, the automobile.[72] Canals and railroads were no longer depended upon for food transportation. Roads across America facilitated the fast movement of goods across the country in trucks.

Another innovation that benefited the rise of chain stores was the wholesale markets, which they could eventually by-pass by creating their own warehouses. By the 1940s, wholesale institutions became crucial to the structure of food distribution and transportation.[73] They were needed to have ready stocked goods, so stores could restock immediately and not wait for new goods to be brought into the city. Some chain stores developed their own warehouses, so they could cut out the middleman. In the 1920s, the supply warehouses for Kroger in existed several cities throughout the Midwest including Dayton, even though Dayton did not yet have a Kroger.[74] The Kroger Company decided on what would be stocked in the warehouses and thus sold in the stores. Location managers would go to the warehouses and choose which items would actually be on store shelves.[75] This increased the speed and efficiency of chain stores in ways that independent grocery stores could not compete with. The Dayton Arcade did not follow these trends because its primary purpose was no longer food distribution as it was in the first few decades of the twentieth century.

By the 1930s, the Dayton Arcade food market began to transform into a novelty food market. It was not depended upon for all groceries, but rather to get specialty ingredients for one or two dinners. The Arcade had a seafood shop for those wanting a seafood dinner and Ruth Disher’s cheese stall for cheeses not found in grocery stores. Stalls began to cater to lunch crowds and offered small meals rather than ingredients. Culp’s Café added Culp’s Cafeteria. Pauline Clauss remembered going to the Arcade to get lunch at Noll’s, not to shop. Thus, the Arcade was not adapting to the new developments in food distribution that grocery stores were going through because it did not need to. To the people of Dayton, food distribution was no longer its primary function.[76] The Arcade did attempt to bring back customers looking for groceries briefly in the 1950s, however.

The Arcade did not have the benefit of wholesale warehouses because its market was made up of individual vendors. In an attempt to compete with chain stores, the Arcade created its own grocery store. By 1951, the Dayton Arcade saw the use of these new methods and charged Leo McGarry with operating a new grocery store in the food market.[77] Instead of going to individual vendors, people could pick up what they needed off of shelves.

The image to the left is of the Rotunda Floor with the grocery store in the enclosed area next to the traditional Arcade market. This image comes from the Dayton Metro Library.

Unlike the recession of the 1870s where food prices rose in privatized markets, the majority of the people who shopped at Kroger’s during the Great Depression did so for the appeal of low prices.[78] Large chain stores could offer these low prices because of they stocked their own warehouses and could pool the profits of all the stores and did not depend on the success of one or two stores like independent owners did. Thus, by 1939 the food distribution process was falling into the hands of a dozen corporate chains.[79] The fear of these few chains dominating food distribution motivated independent food retailers into action, but the results were not in their favor.

Food retailers flooded congress with petitions to add an amendment to the Clayton Act to put a curb on food monopolies. However, many housewives sent in petitions to make sure the legislation could not go through because chain stores were beneficial to them.[80] The cash-and-carry and large range of options at supermarkets was a more efficient way for housewives to shop. The American public wanted chain stores, and chain stores began to dominate American communities at the expense of independent grocery stores. Similar legislation caused the A&P to publish an article in The Dayton Herald about the benefits of the chain store for all people in food distribution from farmers to consumers.[81]

Within twenty years of its creation, the Jefferson-Main Arcade Company sold the arcade to a popular chain store in Dayton. The A&P bought the east half of the Jefferson-Main Arcade and would install one of its supermarkets. The west side owned by Lantz’s Merry-Go-Round would not be affected.[82] In 1942, A&P finished its renovation and the old Jefferson-Main Arcade became its largest store. The new store would have fluorescent lighting, “modern dairy center with two twelve foot cases and a bakery department.”[83] It was once companies like the arcade company that promised such innovation, but now chain stores had the ability to promise the newest technology in grocery shopping. However, as suburbs grew, chain stores would move out of the city leaving places like Dayton food deserts.

The Jefferson-Main Thoroughfare Over Time

The Present Day Bus Hub. Photo taken by Sarah Eyer. 

Suburbanization to Present Food Desert

By 1958, A&P was the biggest supermarket chain in America.[84] However, the number of A&P stores in Dayton was declining. By this time, Dayton’s residents were largely poor minorities. In order to maximize profits, chain stores moved to the suburbs. A&P vacated the Jefferson-Main building and twelve years later so did Lantz’s Merry-Go-Round. A newspaper article commented that a nameless company once built the building to house a food market but that market failed. There was no memory of the Jefferson Main Arcade Market Company.[85] The building was torn down, and after several attempted renovation projects, the lot became the bus hub that is there today.

A Dayton resident, Walter Locke, in 1956 noted Walter Locke noted that there was less fresh food in Dayton due to Surburbia. People had become dependent on cars to carry them from place to place.[86] M. Nathaniel Mead wrote, “Privatized mobility
 allowed wealthier people to
move outward from city centers
toward the suburbs, and with
them went many of the super-markets that used to pervade
urban areas.”[87] Suburbanization was pulling food stores out of Dayton and hurting businesses like the Arcade.

In the 1980s, the Arcade was still thought to be a thriving business after its renovations even though it was losing money.[88] It stilled offered vendors like Cheese Villa and the Arcade Seafoods.[89] These vendors were not as prominent as the many restaurants and boutique shops. The Arcade was no longer the food market it once was, but looked like a suburban mall. The floor, where the market had once been, was now removed to make space for a lower level food court.[90] Eventually, the Arcade closed because it did not generate enough money to operate.

The 1990s and 2000s revealed a new landscape in Dayton. The Arcade was gone and the city was food desert. Pat Wood in the 1930s was able to go to multiple vendors at the Arcade and Jefferson Market to get fresh foods, bread, and meat. Today, children in Dayton may have never even seen a tomato. There is a direct relationship between the amount of grocery stores in an area and childhood obesity. Areas with fewer grocery stores have higher childhood obesity rates because people only have access to convenience stores.[91] The majority of food deserts exist in lower income areas within cities and particularly affect areas of racial or ethnic minorities like West Dayton.[92] Dayton elementary school teachers added courses on urban food deserts to their classrooms because most students had never tasted fresh produce beyond ice burg lettuce. The students had never seen corn or tomatoes. That shocked the teachers. They developed class greenhouses or gardens, so students could try food like blackberries and radishes. Students’ parents could only get food at convenience stores where there was little fresh produce.[93] Dayton’s biggest challenge with food distribution today is bringing food back into the city. 

Conclusion

The nineteenth century public markets offer useful lessons to today’s urban food deserts. Communities should have an active role in food distribution. Research suggests that city governments should take an active part in bringing grocery stores back into cities in order to get rid of food deserts.[94] A grassroots movement in Dayton sought to combat the urban food dessert and create the Gem City Market. This market, which is underway but has yet to be finished, will cater to an area of 22,000 people who do not have access to fresh produce and meat. The market will be built on Salem Ave. Gem City Market plans on catering to those who are on a limited budget while offering a few higher priced goods.[95] Like the markets of the nineteenth century, this store would be community owned and is financed by donations from the local population. The Gem City Market is designed for those who cannot travel long distances to get to grocery stores.[96]

Dayton was once a thriving city with multiple food markets, and when the city government could no longer cater to the desires of the middle class, privatized institutions like the Arcade food market arose to replace them. The Arcade stood as a transition point between the public markets of the nineteenth century and the supermarkets of the twentieth. It was on one hand the market of the nineteenth century with multiple vendors specializing in different types of goods. On the other, it was the privatized institution that could adapt to the desires of consumers.

However, as early as the 1920s, the preferred food delivery system was changing yet again. By then, the model of the grocery store had evolved into a corporatized system with a centralized supply chain and management. In the coming decades, these would prove to have competitive advantage over private market houses like the Arcade. That combined with suburbanization meant the end of the Dayton Arcade as the preferred supplier of food.

By the 1980s, the Arcade was less a food market than a food court. The Arcade adapted to the consumers of the 1980s who did not want a food market. At this time, Dayton was seeing the loss of food suppliers across the city. Suburbanization would also take its toll on the Arcade. It no longer had enough revenue to continue operating as an establishment in the 1990s. This was the same time when Dayton became a food desert. However, the people of Dayton work to get food back into the city. Not through food retailers like Krogers, but through initiatives within the city like Gem City Market. Just like the community funded the nineteenth century public markets, the community members too will fund this grocery store.

Endnotes

[1] Curt Dalton, The Dayton Arcade: Crown Jewel of the Gem City (Dayton, OH: The Friends of the Arcade, 2008), 30. 

[2] Andrew Coleman, “Storage, Slow Transport, and the Law of One Price: Theory with Evidence from Nineteenth Century U.S. Corn Markets,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 91, no. 2 (2009): 332-350, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25651341, 347-48.

[3] Helen Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), 51-52.

[4] Gilles Postel-Vinay and Jean-Marc Robin, “Eating, Working, and Saving in an Unstable World: Consumers in Nineteenth- Century France,” The Economic History Review 45, no. 3 (1992), doi: 10.2307/2598050, 494. 

[5] Bruce W. Ronald and Virginia Ronald. Dayton: The Gem City (Tulsa, OK: Continental Heritage Press, 1981), 26.

[6] Odell’s Dayton Directory and Business Advertiser, 1850, 10-11.

[7] Allan Kulikoff, “Households and Markets: Toward a New Synthesis of American Agrarian History,” The William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 2 (1993), doi: 10.2307/2947079, 347.

[8] Kulikoff, “Households and Markets,” 348.

[9] Ibid., 355.

[10] Postel-Vinay, “Eating, Working, and Saving in an Unstable World,” 495-96.

[11] Harvey W. Crew, History of Dayton, Ohio with Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Some of its Pioneer Citizens (Dayton, OH: United Brethren Publishing House, 1889), https://archive.org/details/historyofdaytono01crew/page/n6/mode/2up, 153-54.

[12] Odell’s Dayton Directory and Business Advertiser, 1850, 12.

[13] Crew, History of Dayton, 650.

[14] Odell’s Dayton Directory and Business Advertiser, 1850, 49-50.

[15] Crew, History of Dayton, 401-02.

[16] Ronald, Dayton: The Gem City, 32.

[17] Ibid., 30.

[18] Crew, History of Dayton, 650.

[19] Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture, 156-57.

[20] Ibid., 202.

[21] Kulikoff, “Households and Markets,” 351.

[22] Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture, 3.

[23] Ibid, 7.

[24] Ian Mitchell, “Supplying the Masses: Retailing and Town Governance in the Macclesfield, Stockport and Birkenhead, 1780-1860, Urban History 38, no. 2 (2011), https://www.jstor.org/stable/44614591, 259-60.

[25] Tangire, Public Markets and Civic Culture, 17.

[26] Crew, History of Dayton, 182.

[27] Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture, 5.

[28] Daniel Burnstein, “The Vegetable Man Cometh: Political and Moral Choices in Pushcart Policy in Progressive Era New York City,” New York History 77. No. 1 (1996), www.jstor.org/stable/23182059, 52-54.

[29] Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture, 18-26.

[30] Dalton, The Dayton Arcade.

[31] Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture, 18-26.

[32] Burnstein, “The Vegetable Man Cometh,” 60-67.

[33] Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture, 31.

[34] Sanborn maps, 1876, 1918.

[35] Dalton, The Dayton Arcade, 7.

[36] Crew, History of Dayton, 131.

[37] Ibid., 132.

[38] Ibid., 159. 

[39] Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture, 31.

[40] Crew, History of Dayton, 196.

[41] Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture, 54.

[42] Ibid., 180-81.

[43] Ibid., 108-09.

[44] Ibid, 110-12.

[45] Roger Horowitz, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, and Sidney Watts, “Meat for the multitudes: Market Culture in Paris, New York City, and Mexico City over the Long Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 109, no. 4 (2004), doi. 10.1086/530749, 1058-61.

[46] Horowitz, et al, “Meat for the multitudes,” 1055-56.

[47] Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture, 168.

[48] Meghan Elias, “Summoning the Food Ghosts: Food History as Public History,” The Public Historian 34, no. 2 (2012), doi: 10.1525/tph.2012.34.2.13.

[49] Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture, 173-74.

[50] Ibid., 200.

[51] Ibid., 187.

[52] Crew, History of Dayton, 354. 

[53] Gregory Alexander Donofrio, “Feeding the City,” Gastronomica 7, no. 4 (2007), doi.10.1525/gfc.2007.7.4.30, 30-32.

[54] Dalton, The Dayton Arcade, 10.

[55] Ibid., 19.

[56] “Company will Erect Modern Market House,” Dayton Daily News, 29 November 1919.

[57] Ibid.

[58] Jefferson-Main Arcade Market Company, “Civic Pride,” Dayton Daily News, 11 April 1921.

[59] Nancy F. Koehn, “Henry Heinz and Brand Creation in the Late Nineteenth Century: Making Markets for Processed Food,” The Business History Review 73, no. 3 (1999), doi: 10.2307/3116181, 350.

[60] Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture, 63.

[61] Crew, History of Dayton, 354.

[62] Ibid.

[63] Charles F. Phillips, “A History of the Kroger Grocery & Baking Company,” National Marketing Review 1, no. 3 (1936), https://www.jstor.org/stable/4291319, 204-05.

[64] Ralph, Jr. Cassady and Wylie L. Jones, “The Los Angeles Wholesale Grocery Structure: 1920-1946: A Case Study,” Journal of Marketing 14, no. 2 (1949), doi: 10.2307/1247890, 177.

[65] Dipman, “Changes in Food Distribution,” 48.

[66] Phillips, “A History of the Kroger Grocery & Baking Company,” 204.

[67] “Today’s Wants,” The Dayton Herald, 16 August 1897.

[68] Phillips, “A History of the Kroger Grocery & Baking Company,” 205, 214.

[69] Ibid., 206-08.

[70] James L., Jr. McCorkle, “Truck Farming in Arkansas: A Half-Century of Feeding Urban America,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 58, no. 2 (June 1999), 180–95.

[71] McCorkle, “Truck Farming in Arkansas.”

[72] Steven Avdakov, et al. Ohio Modern: Preserving our Recent Past: Dayton and Surrounding Area Survey Report (Columbus, OH: Ohio Historic Preservation Office of the Ohio Historical Society, 2010), 29.

[73] Cassady, “Los Angeles Wholesale Grocery Structure,” 177.

[74] Phillips, “A History of the Kroger Grocery & Baking Company,” 205.

[75] Ibid., 211.

[76] Dalton, The Dayton Arcade; Pauline Clauss, interviewed by Sarah Eyer, 29 February 2020.

[77] Dalton, The Dayton Arcade, 37.

[78] Phillips, “A History of the Kroger Grocery & Baking Company,” 210.

[79] Dipman, “Changes in Food Distribution,” 49-50.

[80] Carl H. Fulda, “Food Distribution in the United States, the Struggle between Independent and Chains,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 99, no. 8 (1951), doi: 10.2307/3309837, 1051-52.

[81] “A Statement of Public Policy by the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company,” The Dayton Herald, 6 October 1938.

[82] “A&P Leases Arcade for New Store,” The Dayton Herald, 27 October 1937.

[83] “New Food Store is Opened Here,” The Dayton Herald, 6, August 1942.

[84] “A&P Net Sales near 5 Billion,” Dayton Daily News, 24 June 1958.

[85] “Lantz Night Club Closes Business After 12 Years,” Dayton Daily News, 11 July 1947.

[86] Walter Locke “United We Stand: Divided We Fall,” Dayton Daily News, 27 December 1956.

[87] M. Nathaniel Mead, “The Sprawl of Food Deserts,” Environmental Health Perspectives 116, no. 8 (2008), doi. 10.1289/ehp.116-a335a. America: History and Life (45924250.) A335.

[88] Dalton, The Dayton Arcade, 58.

[89] Ibid., 62-71.

[90] Ibid., 80.

[91] Elizabeth Howlett, Cassandra Davis, and Scot Burton, “From Food Desert to Food Oasis: The Potential Influence of Food Retailers on Childhood Obesity Rates,” Journal of Business Ethics 139, no. 2 (2016), https://www.jstor.org/stable/44164220, 215.

[92] Howlett, “From Food Desert to Food Oasis,” 216.

[93] Beth Anspach, “Students’ limited food experience plants seed for curriculum,” Dayton Daily News, 10 July 2014.

[94] Mead, “The Sprawl of Food Deserts,” A335.

[95] Cornelius Frolik, “Site Chosen for Grocery Store in Northwest Dayton,” Dayton Daily News, 18 March 2017.

[96] Kaitlin Schroeder, “Dayton co-op grocery store gets $220K donation,” Dayton Daily News, 25 September 2017.

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