Behrman Market

In 1908 the city engineer submitted a plan for a market which would be located at St. Maurice & Douglas streets. Some time before 1909 Captain M.P. Doullut paid for the construction of this public market whose plans were drawn by the city engineer in return for management of the operation of the market and its profits for an undisclosed number of years (acording to the Municipal Journal of Engineering, Volume 26) -- making it a quasi-public market.

It was later named for Mayor Martin C. Behrman whose widowed mother had supported him and herself by running a dry goods and notions stand in the bazaar section of the French Market. After Mrs. Behrman died when Martin was twelve years old he found a $15 per month job as a cashier at Samuel’s Dollar Store on Canal Street and then (in 1878) worked as a grocery clerk at Micheal Gallagher's Algiers store. Behrman continued in the grocery business when he began working for James Lawton in a mercantile establishment which included a grocery, a bakery. His next venture was a partnership with Peter Lawton (son of James) in the retail grocery business, then a salesman for Nathaniel D. Wallace and Napoleon Bonaparte Van Horn -- wholesale dealers in produce.