A snapshot history of 230-242 Petaluma Blvd. North
Few sites are etched into Petaluma history deeper than the Petaluma Incubator Company, the engine behind the city’s reign as the World’s Egg Basket. Yet, thanks to urban renewal efforts in the 1960s, nothing remains of the building today other than a rock wall lining Brewster’s Beer Garden.
The incubator company had its genesis in 1881, when Isaac Dias, a young Jewish dentist originally from New Orleans, and T.R. Jacobs, a Wells Fargo agent, invented an incubator capable of maintaining a steady temperature of 103 degrees, the same as a brooding hen’s body. By accelerating the hatching of newly laid eggs, the incubator freed the hen from her maternal nesting duties, allowing her to lay more.[1]
Dias and Jacobs first exhibited their invention at the 1881 Sonoma and Marin Agricultural District Fair, where they were awarded a ribbon. Following the fair Jacobs left their partnership. Dias filed for a patent, and launched I.L. Dias & Co. to manufacture the incubator.[2]
In 1882, he hired one of dental patients, Lyman Byce, as a sales agent. Byce operated a local poultry yard and served as a sales agent for a competing incubator company based in Chicago. He originally came to Petaluma in 1878 to visit a sister living there. Burned out from medical student in Canada, he was seeking the health benefits of the area’s Mediterranean sea breezes.[3]
That same mild climate, along with the valley’s rich, alluvial soil, would set the stage for the chicken mania that followed.
In 1883, Byce—the Steve Jobs to Dias’ Steve Wozniak—became a full partner in the company, which Dias renamed the Petaluma Incubator Company, setting up a factory in a former armory near the Washington Street Bridge.[4]
After Dias’s mysterious death in an 1884 duck hunting accident, Byce employed his marketing talents in taking the Petaluma Incubator Company to new heights. Positioning himself as the “father of chickendom,” he wrote Dias out of the story.[5]
In 1889, Byce moved the incubator factory to the Hopper Building at 230-236 Main Street, beside George P. McNear’s Oriental Mills & Feed Store. After a fire burned down McNear’s building in 1902, Byce purchased the lot at 238-242 Main, and constructed a modern new factory in its place.[6]
Overexpansion and distressed sales during World War I forced Byce to declare bankruptcy in 1919, and move to a smaller factory on East Washington Street. His former building was converted into a poultry packing plant by the Petaluma Poultry Company.[7]
In 1938, the poultry company sold the building to Petaluma Milling Company, a feed and mill store. It operated until 1967, when the city, championing urban renewal, condemned both buildings that had once housed the Petaluma Incubator Company, 230-236 and 238-242, giving the owners the choice of either rehabilitating them or tearing them down. They buildings were demolished in 1968.[8]
The lots remained vacant until 2016, when Brewster’s Beer Garden created an open air facility on their ground floor facing Water Street, leaving a hole in the street landscape of Petaluma Boulevard North, a reminder of good intentions gone bad.[9]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, July 13, 1881; “New Incubator,” Petaluma Argus, September 2, 1881; “Pavilion Notes,” Petaluma Argus, September 9, 1881; “The Incubator,” Petaluma Argus, September 16, 1881.
[2] “Jacobs & Dias’s Incubator,” Petaluma Argus, September 21, 1881.Note: Prior to becoming a contractor and architect, in 1883, Jacobs left Wells Fargo to purchase a grocery in town. He designed, among other things, the Pepper Free Kindergarten Building at Liberty and Washington streets, and his own stylish home at 419 D Street. “Petaluma Pickings,” Petaluma Argus, May 5, 1883; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, December 8, 1883; Ad, Petaluma Courier, December 12, 1883; “About Completed: The William Pepper Kinder-School Building,” Petaluma Courier, August 23, 1894; “County Hospital Suicide Was a Well-known Former Local Man,” Petaluma Argus, December 26 1917; https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/242042606/thomas-robert-jacobs.
[3] Lowry, pp. 33-34; Ads for “I.L. Dias & Co.” began appearing in the spring of 1882 (Petaluma Courier, March 1, 1882); Ad for L.C. Byce, Petaluma Argus, November 4, 1881; “Byce’s Poultry Yards,” Petaluma Courier, March 8, 1882. Note: by March 1882, Byce had moved his poultry yard to Hopper Street in East Petaluma, “Byce’s Poultry Yards,” Petaluma Courier, March 8, 1882.
[4] Lowry, p. 33; First ad for Petaluma Incubator Company, Pacific Rural Press, August 30, 1884; “A Gold Medal,” Petaluma Argus, November 22, 1884; McKenney’s Sonoma, Napa, Lake, Mendocino, Humboldt, Yolo, Solano, and Marin Counties, 1884-1885, p. 265, Sonoma County Library: I.L. Dias & Company lists Isaac L. Dias and Lyman C. Byce as manufacturers at the corner of Main and Washington streets. “Jacobs & Dias’ Incubator,” Petaluma Argus, July 13, 1881; “Poultry and Incubators,” Petaluma Courier, February 7, 1883; “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, April 25, 1883; “Petaluma Incubator,” Petaluma Argus, October 3, 1883; A Gold Medal,” Petaluma Argus, November 22, 1884.
[5] Lowry, pp. 33-37; “Another Contest,” Petaluma Courier, September 2, 1896; “Petaluma Incubator Banquets,” Petaluma Courier, November 22, 1904; “How It All Came About,” Petaluma Incubator Company brochure, 1909, Lorraine Skoog Collection, Petaluma Historical Library & Museum
[6] Ad, Petaluma Courier, August 25, 1888; “A Happy New Year,” Petaluma Argus, December 28, 1888; “Petaluma Industries,” Petaluma Courier, May 29, 1889; “A Midnight Blaze,” Petaluma Courier, June 11, 1902; “A Business Deal,” Petaluma Courier, August 29, 1902
[7] “Petition in Solvency,” Petaluma Argus, September 23, 1919; “Big Auction Sale Today,” Petaluma Argus, February 3, 1920; “Will Open a Monster Plant,” Petaluma Argus, March 25, 1920.
[8] “Milani Bldg. Bought by L. Hozz,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 20, 1938; “Petaluma Milling Company Closes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 2, 1967; “Council Orders Action,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 2, 1967; “City Budget,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 7, 1968.
[9] “Water Street Rising,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 5, 2016.Few sites are etched into Petaluma history deeper than the Petaluma Incubator Company, the engine behind the city’s reign as the World’s Egg Basket. Yet, thanks to urban renewal efforts in the 1960s, nothing remains of the building today other than a rock wall lining Brewster’s Beer Garden.
