Downtown Ceres was radically altered in 1967 when the southern end was razed by wrecking balls when Highway 99 was turned from a surface street to a freeway. The Collins & Warner building was one of those erased.
With its round-topped façade, the building was the epitome of small-town merchandising. In its last stretch it was the Ceres Hardware Store.
The building was erected a short time after 1908 when the Gillette Hotel which was cut in half and moved to Hughson where it was given a new perch – and made a floor taller – on Hughson Avenue. The empty space allowed Collins & Warner to build their store.
The first floor was split into two halves and housed a succession of stores and other uses. In its inception the first floor sold groceries, sundries and dry goods and the Ceres post office operated inside. The northwest corner of the building once housed the Ceres jail.
In its heyday, the entrance to the second floor was from the alley, up an outside staircase. The upper floor was used as a social hall, town dances, drama productions, church revivals and music recitals. In fact, the upper floor was the site of the first Ceres High School graduation in 1912. The old dance floor was condemned for further public use and closed off to become an unused attic when the last dance held there caused the walls to literally bulge out.
The basement was used to serve dinners on Election Day.
The history of the building involves Frank Lander, a Ceres hog breeder who originally farmed in Atwater. He purchased the building in 1918 where he opened his Ceres Hardware Implement Company.
Lander served as a trustee on the old “Grammar School” board when Whitmore School was built in 1931.
Meanwhile, Walter “Guy” Aspinall and his wife Flora were living in Selma with their young son Wendell in 1912 when a travelling hardware merchant named Donnelly induced him to come to Modesto to manage the Donnelly Hardware Store.
In 1925, Guy Aspinall was looking for a business of his own and made a trip to San Francisco to inquire about wholesale houses for sale. He was told that there was one for sale in Ceres, just four miles from where he lived in Modesto. He purchased the store from Lander that year and moved his family to Ceres.
Business was good in the agricultural town and Aspinall enlarged and modernized his building in 1936.
Before Carl Miner built his store building on the north side of the building, the vacant lot next to the hardware store was used as a makeshift outdoor theater. At the back of the lot near the alley a screen was set up facing Fourth Street while a projector was placed on the sidewalk to beam motion pictures for the enjoyment of the town folks. It technically was Ceres’ first drive-in movie theater as some folks sat in their car to watch flicks.
Built against the side of the hardware was a tiny building about six to eight feet in width. It served as a small snack counter and sold popcorn during the movies. Earlier, Jack Haltz had operated Jack’s Squeeze Inn there.
Wendell Aspinall joined his father in the business after graduation from Ceres High and Modesto Junior College, and continued operating the store until November 1966 when he liquidated the business. It had been in the family for 41 years.
In the 1950’s the former Collins & Warner building was the first home of Ed Litchfield’s Insurance Agency.
Wendell Aspinall operated the hardware store until he had to vacate for the demolition.
Cedruco Building
The wrecking ball wasn’t finished with its destruction to Ceres history. Around the corner from the Collins & Warner building was the Cedruco Building which was leveled about the same time. Just before the brick building was reduced to rubble – remembered only in photos and memories of some still living – it housed L&P Furniture, a hotel and the Ceres Cigar Store operated by Everett “Red” and Ralph Melvin.
That building was the second home of Ceres Drugs before it found a home in 1930 at the building at the northwest corner of Fourth and Lawrence streets. The Cedruco building was named in a contest by Florence Smith Remington who merely took the first two letters of the words Ceres Drug Company.
The very Ceres Drug Store was founded in 1907 by Dr. S. W. Cartwright, a local doctor and briefly the first mayor who took as his working partner a pharmacist in a Mr. Hartsel. The building was located approximately where the Pine Street overpass now crosses the freeway.
Hartsel soon purchased Dr. Cartwright’s interest in the business but sold it in 1918 to Loren E. McGee. He named it the McGee Drug Store and moved it to a 1928 building located on the corner of Fourth and Lawrence streets.
On the second floor of the Cedruco building J. Perow opened a photo studio in 1913. There he photographed the seniors of the graduating class for the first-ever publication of the Cereal, the Ceres High School yearbook. The upper floor was also utilized by doctors for offices. Later on the Zenardi family operated a bakery out of the first floor. In the 1960s before its demise, the second floor was used for tenant housing.
