Feraud's Store: Ventura's French Merchant

Jules Feraud arrived in Ventura from France in eighteen seventy-five, bought into a bakery on Main Street, and spent the next three decades building a major general merchandise operation. Around the turn of the century his business had grown large enough that he replaced his original wood-frame building with a substantial brick structure at the corner of Main Street and Ventura Avenue.

The store and its adjacent bakery, stayed in the Feraud family for decades. The brick building is now considered a rare intact example of commercial architecture from the Second Land Boom that followed the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in Ventura. The city designated it a historic landmark, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-six.