Martin Coffee Company
1633 Marshall Street
The Martin Coffee Company is one of Jacksonville’s oldest continuously operating coffee roasters. It was founded in 1957 by Fred and Amy Martin, following their purchase of the Bartley Coffee Company, which was then located at 327 East Bay Street.
At the time, East Bay Street was a bustling industrial waterfront district. The company’s specialty coffees were roasted in a two-story facility and distributed to a growing clientele of restaurants and hotels across the region.
By the 1980s, however, operating a roasting plant in that location had become increasingly challenging. The space was cramped, and the logistics of shipping and receiving goods by truck required moving items manually from the street through the back of the building. In response to these constraints, the company relocated in 1987 to a larger and more efficient facility at 1633 Marshall Street, near Talleyrand Avenue.
Today, Martin Coffee Company serves many of the region’s finest restaurants and hotels. It has grown into one of the largest and oldest independent coffee roasters in the Southeastern United States.
Maxwell House Division & General Foods Corporation
735 East Bay Street
Shortly after the Great Fire of 1901, Norman Merry established one of Jacksonville’s earliest coffee roasting operations. His company, Merry & Company, operated a coffee roasting plant in LaVilla from 1902 to 1912.
Two years before Merry’s business closed, the Cheek-Neal Coffee Company opened a new roasting facility on East Bay Street, marking a significant expansion of Jacksonville’s coffee industry.
Founded in Nashville in 1892 by Joel Owsley Cheek, Cheek-Neal was drawn to Jacksonville for its strategic location and barge-accessible waterfront. In 1910, the company opened its East Bay Street plant specifically for its capacity to receive large shipments of coffee beans by barge. The facility initially employed 30 workers and produced approximately 40,000 pounds of coffee per day.
In 1928, Cheek-Neal was acquired by the Postum Company, which rebranded as General Foods in 1929. Shortly afterward, the company adopted the name of its most successful product—Maxwell House—named after the famed Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, where the blend was first served.
The plant’s iconic neon sign, erected in 1955, has remained a cherished Jacksonville landmark ever since.
Over the years, the facility has expanded to cover nearly 10 acres and 400,000 square feet of manufacturing space. Today, it stands as a major downtown fixture and holds the distinction of being the last remaining Maxwell House coffee roasting plant in the United States.
From this historic site, the plant continues to roast and ship a variety of well-known brands nationwide, including Maxwell House, Gevalia, McCafé, Maxwell House International Coffee, and Yuban.
Old South Coffee Co Inc.
2379 West Beaver Street
Wayne M. Hodgdon was born in Clinton, Maine, in 1890 and raised in Middlesex, Massachusetts. By 1918, he had relocated to Greenfield, Massachusetts, where he worked as a coffee salesman for the W.S. Quinby Company, a major coffee roasting business established in Boston during the late 1880s.
In 1929, W.S. Quinby expanded to Jacksonville, opening a coffee roasting plant in the Union Terminal Company Warehouse on the Eastside. Hodgdon moved to Jacksonville that same year to support the company’s new Southern operations.
Following the eventual closure of W.S. Quinby, Hodgdon launched his own enterprise, the Old South Coffee Company. The company’s first roasting plant was located at 624 West Bay Street in LaVilla, just west of Broad Street in an area known as Railroad Row, a corridor characterized by its concentration of wholesale businesses, hotels, and restaurants.
During World War II, the Old South Coffee Company moved its operations to a new facility at 2379 West Beaver Street. The business remained at this location until it ceased operations in 1951.
Wayne M. Hodgdon passed away in Jacksonville on Valentine’s Day, 1972. His former coffee roasting facility on West Beaver Street was demolished in 2008.
W.S. Quinby Company, Inc.
700 East Union Street
The W.S. Quinby Company was founded in Boston, Massachusetts by Winfield S. Quinby in the late 1880s. Born in 1862 in Vermont, Quinby became a pioneering figure in the coffee roasting industry.
Quinby was known for his emphasis on craftsmanship and knowledge in coffee preparation. He once stated:
“The fundamental necessary to making good coffee is to know the physical nature of coffee, and the action of coffee properties in contact with hot water. So you should not have coffee made by an employee who is ignorant of the properties of the coffee bean.”
Under his leadership, the company flourished, eventually expanding to include roasting plants in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, and Jacksonville by 1930. While W.S. Quinby roasted and wholesaled both coffee and tea, its most recognized product was its flagship La Touraine Coffee brand.
Following Quinby’s death in 1928, the company continued operations for several years. Its Jacksonville roasting facility was located in the Union Terminal Warehouse Company building at 700 East Union Street. By 1930, Sidney Lanier served as vice president and general manager, while Francis A. Bartley was employed as the Jacksonville plant’s last general manager.
After the Jacksonville plant closed in 1935, Bartley went on to found his own coffee roasting business—the Bartley Coffee Company. In 1957, the company was acquired by Fred and Amy Martin and rebranded as the Martin Coffee Company, which remains in operation in Jacksonville to this day.