The Imperial Meat Market specialized in fresh meat, sausage, game, fish, and oysters when D. D. Walker and Israel Gibbs opened it in a wood-frame building on this lot in 1889. Shop foreman Albert Bourbonniere, in partnership with Big Hole Valley rancher John Wenger, bought the business by 1905. Wenger left the partnership in 1910 and Bourbonniere died in 1912, bequeathing the building to Croatian butcher Rudolph Sokolich. In 1916, Sokolich and his partner Barney McTigue had the original building demolished and hired contractors to build this brick commercial building. The Imperial reopened in December 1916 with architect James Calloway Teague renting the rooms on the second floor. After 1918, Thomas Robinson operated the upstairs as a boardinghouse. Boarders paid three dollars a week for rent. When Sokolich closed the meat market in the 1930s, he moved into the building and rented out rooms until his death in 1952. Later owners remodeled the building to house a saloon on the first floor, but the meat market’s name plate, original side entry, and prismatic glass panels remain.
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