Fulton and Ventura: Home to an immigrant grocer

Published online on Wednesday, Jul. 29, 2009

As the Valley rapidly developed into the nation's richest farming area, Austrian immigrant Spiro Obradovich operated a grocery store in the growing young city of Fresno.

He was born in 1835 and arrived in San Francisco in 1854 during the Gold Rush era. At age 47, he married a fellow Austrian native, Dora, who was 21. Their daughter Sophie was born two years later in Fresno.

Obradovich's store, Cash Grocers, used a common element in frontier towns: a "false front," a vertical extension of the front of the building beyond the roof crestline, giving the modest structures an air of dignity. It made the structure appear more impressive, created a more urban atmosphere and, most importantly, provided a large area for advertising the business.

Small, one-story homes line the street northwest of the store.

Despite the somewhat rural scene around Cash Grocers, Fresno grew rapidly in the 1880s.

In 1885, Fresno covered three square miles and had a population of 3,464. By 1890, the city's population had exploded to nearly 11,000 people. The downtown area in the background along Mariposa Street and surrounding streets was in the midst of a major transformation as a booming city on the plains.

Obradovich was part of the rich cultural diversity that existed in Fresno in the years following its incorporation in 1885. He was among the first wave of immigrants to settle here, largely by word of mouth and letters from family. Among the groups represented in early Fresno were Armenians, English, Volga-Germans, Danes, Irish, Swedes, Portuguese and Chinese.