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A 150-year-old mahogany bar may not seem like your typical adventurer, but the centerpiece of a downtown Sonora shop has survived more than its share of calamities over the years.
The story of how a massive back bar, hand-carved in Italy in the mid-19th century, wound up in Legends Books and Antiques includes the Great Chicago Fire, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Panama Canal and thousands of miles over land and sea.
"It's nice because people just walk in here and it's always one of the first things they like to talk about," said Margie Paxton-Fromm, Legends owner.
With wooden Corinthian columns and delicate embellishments, the 24-foot long mahogany structure outlines a large mirror on the northern wall of the establishment. It was crafted in Italy in the mid-1800s and sold to a bar in Chicago after being shipped across the Atlantic and painstakingly hauled overland.
The wooden structure survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which burned four square miles of the city to the ground.
The bar was subsequently shipped by boat around the Panama Canal to reach San Francisco. The bar escaped unscathed by the 1906 quake, but the building that housed it was completely destroyed. It was subsequently put in storage, where it remained for the next 30 years.
The wooden bar was rediscovered by former Sonora mayor Jack Rucker, who in 1962 opened The Gay 90's Bar downtown. The name was in reference to irreverent art and culture that was associated with the 1890s.
Rucker purchased the bar in San Francisco and had it shipped to Sonora in pieces to be reassembled, according to Mel Querio, the longtime Sonora resident who bought the bar in 1962.
Querio sold the building and its one-of-a-kind bar in 1975, but he still remembers how people would come to marvel at the historic piece of wooden architecture.
"It was a masterpiece," he said. "Even the Governor of New Mexico at the time came up just to see it."
The building went through several owners over the next several decades and for years had a bad reputation when it was known as Dillon's Bar, Paxton-Fromm said.
"It didn't have just an old bar smell, it was worse," she said.
Paxton-Fromm moved to Sonora in 1970 and ran a bookstore on Washington Street before going into social work. She visited the building and saw its historic bar on a few occasions, but never took much note of it until Levine offered to sell it to her.
"I would have never considered buying the building had it not been for that back bar," she said. "It was serendipity the moment I saw it. I could see the place's potential."
Paxton-Fromm purchased the building seven years ago and moved her Legends Book and Antiques business from across the street. She installed an old-fashioned soda fountain to preserve a sense of the bar-like atmosphere.
The back bar structure needed several improvements to fix many broken pieces and a slope that had been created over the years due to lack of maintenance, Paxton-Fromm said.
Using a $50,000 start-up loan from the city, Paxton-Fromm renovated the building and refinished the bar. When she had the decorative structure appraised during the loan process, it was valued at $90,000.
"People from all over the world will contact me and send old pictures of it," she said. "I think of it as a treasure of Sonora."
Contact Alexander MacLean at 588-4530 or amaclean@uniondemocrat.
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