While Ward advertised a few Stetsons in the 1890 catalog, there are no illustrations of them - only Ward's own hats. He helped lead efforts to clean up Grant Parkthen known as Lake Park which, since the Great Fire, had become crowded with unsightly wooden shanties, structures, garbage, paving blocks and other refuse piled thereon. Later, when Marshall Field proposed building his new natural history museum on the site, Ward dug in his heels again, defending the open land ideal. 1980 Montgomery Ward Fall Winter Catalog 1348 pages. Here is a park frontage on the lake, comparing favorably with the Bay of Naples, which city officials would crowd with buildings, transforming the breathing spot for the poor into a showground for the educated rich. He wanted to use retail stores as an outlet for surplus goods. Sales Catalog, Fall & Winter, 1894 / page 500, Montgomery Ward & Co. Below is a quick continued history of the iconic Montgomery Ward Company: Business continued to boom for Montgomery Ward throughout the decades. That kind of principle cant be beaten., The difficulties one sees ahead should only encourage him to put his head a little higher in the air and walk more firmly and courageously,, The president [Merseles] and I just didnt get along,, He wanted to use retail stores as an outlet for surplus goods. But that was the final bow. Farm Progress Show annually hosts more than 600 exhibitors displaying new farm equipment, tractors, combines and farm implements; seed and crop protection products; and many additional farm supplies and services. Bed & Bath 2. We started this mail order business and made it such a success that there is scarcely a department store in the land which has not tried it too, read a Montgomery Ward ad in a December 1892 edition of Farmers Voice magazine. Today children all over the world read and hear about the little deer who started out in life as a loser just as I did. 93 (1920), No. . To satisfy the ever-growing needs of the business operation, Ward built an enormous campus on the north branch of the Chicago River at 618 W. Chicago Avenue comprising an eight-story building, a storefront, and executive offices. . Required fields are marked *. Most Americans are familiar with perhaps the most notable creation to come from Montgomery Ward in the 1939 holiday season, with company copywriter Robert Mays creation of a certain red-nosed reindeer named Rudolph. This takes in everybody from the President to the office boy. But while the companys high-profile president Sewell Avery spoke often about patriotism and liberty, he was simultaneously fighting a separate war of his own against Franklin Roosevelt and the National War Labor Board. Considering Ward a threat, they sometimes publicly burned his catalog. The Bureau was her baby. Be the first one to, Catalogue no. Sears was the front runner and the most successful company at this venture, although Montgomery Ward, Gordon-Van Tine, Aladdin and a few others also tried their hand at it as well. Fifty years later, few people remember the Chicago ad man behind a beloved worldwide Christmas tradition, and as time goes on, memories of the enormously successful company he worked for have similarly faded. Of course, it must be a reindeer! But what could a little reindeer teach children?, Outside the fog swirled in from Lake Michigan, dimming the street lights,, Light . Your email address will not be published. He had two partners and used $1,600 they had raised in capital. 1950-1959 Sears Christmas Books ; 1960-1969 Sears Spring/Summer Catalogs ; 1960-1969 Sears Fall/Winter Catalogs ; 1960-1969 Sears Christmas Books ; Get once-a-year deals on customer-favorite linens. She led a team of highly skilled architects, engineers, artists, and designers, all of whom helped streamline and modernize the look of the Ward catalog and many of the products therein. Thats because its a fairly rare, in-tact example of the original 1939 edition of the story, which debuted that year as a free holiday giveaway to visitors of Montgomery Wards retail stores (often handed to kids by Santa himself). Avery, Sewell L. (Sewell Lee), 1873-1960. [Above: Wards 1960 catalog and a store promotional photo from 1963. Collection contains Montgomery Ward catalogs and 194 35 mm microfilm copies (1874-1985); competitors' catalogs including Aldens (1954-1981), J.C. Penney (1963-1982), Sears (1954-1982) and Spiegel (1962-1983); correspondence (1889-1985) including approximately 20,000 letters between the general public and Ward regarding the National War Labor Board and the 1944 government seizures; scrapbooks of newspaper and magazine articles on Ward and competitors (1971-1987) including extensive national press coverage of the 1944 seizures; handwritten musical scores by Nathan Lang Van Cleave for the 1940s radio programs "The Man Behind the Gun" and "This Is Our Enemy"; news releases; organization charts; speeches; photographs; title abstracts for Chicago real estate; advertisements; legal documents; manuals; and financial files. Reviews: 20 Estimated Reading Time: 6 mins See Also: 1941 montgomery ward catalog Show details . In 1872, Montgomery Ward & Company launched America's first general mail order company. Gray writes from Mount Vernon, Ohio. Click the image below to flip though the entire 1939 Rudolph booklet: [Ward catalogues No. City of Chicago, ward 3 200. She created not only its concept of service but its design attitude by her selection of staff.. A nose! As no coincidence perhaps, Aaron Ward himself had become deeply invested in using his considerable influence to change what that view out across Michigan Avenue would look likenot just for Ward customers, but anyone visiting Chicago in the future. For all its associations with holiday cheer, Rudolph really was a shining lightpun intendedduring a dark time both for its author and the country. Wal-Mart and Target pummeled the stumbling old giant in the 1990s, and parent company GE Capital finally put Wards to bed after the Christmas season of 2000, announcing the closure of all 250 of its remaining storesand its Chicago offices. Incorporated: 1889. It can refer either to the defunct mail order and department store retailer, which operated between 1872 and 2000, or to the current catalog and online retailer also known as Wards. It was used on a small Ayrshire Grade B dairy, but it had stood unused for many years. Many people moved through Ohio, but many also stayed. CHM, ICHi-092917. 1. She died in July at just 33 years of age, leaving May a widower and single father. . By 1904, the company had grown such that three million catalogs, weighing 4 . From this overabundance of timber, farmers could pick and choose the best trees for log homes, log barns, and timber-frame structures. Our new Chicago Avenue Building is said to be the largest structure in the worldfifty acres under one roof, read one 1909 ad, which also promoted the companys first walk-in retail outlet, visitable within the same complex. . . April 8, 2019 For Robert May, the concerns were more personal. 1864), whod started working in the catalog department way back in the 1880s, was now company president; Charles H. Thorne (b. His tenure was marked by labor troubles in the 1940s which culminated in two government seizures of the company in 1944. Within a few months, it was officially announced that Montgomery Ward & Co. had been acquired by a new corporate conglomerate, led by retail magnate George Whelan of the United Retail Stores Corporation with financial backing from J. P. Morgan and James B. Duke of the American Tobacco Co. 84 (1916), No. So why was plank framing developed? It just happens to be the case. , flagrant discrimination against minority groups, The only jobs open to Negroes in the Chicago properties of Montgomery Ward,, are those of porter, bus boy, bus girl, elevator operator and matron. Every season Montgomery Ward features a variety of new and exciting products in our online catalog. It was a single page long, basically a price list with ordering info. But I doubt it., The Montgomery Ward & Co. plan of retailing all kinds of goods around the world has extended the name of Chicago into every civilized land. Wards catalog would quickly prove to be a success, with the catalog growing to 32 pages by 1874 and to 152, with 3,000 items, in 1876. The little Christmas story was conceived, written and illustrated by members of the retail sales department of Montgomery-Ward in Chicago for a Christmas gift to customers in Ward stores. Headquarters are in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. . . You can select the language displayed on our website. The first catalog in August 1872 consisted of an 8 by 12 in. Upon its completion, it was declared one of the largest man-made structures in the world, with its miles of chutes, conveyor paths, and hallways. What Ward DID do, however, was generate IDEAS, and at least one of them resulted in a pop cultural phenomenon that has long outlasted the company itself. 20900 Oakwood Boulevard, Dearborn, MI 481245029, Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation Overview, Teacher's Choice @ Giant Screen Experience, Henry Austin Clark, Jr. Graduate Internship, Clark Travel-to-Collections Research Fellowship, Diversity and Inclusion Internship Program, Simmons Graduate Internship: Organization and Processing of the Stumpf Office and Home Library, Simmons Graduate Internship: The Lillian F. Schwartz Archives: Curatorial Content Development & Research Internship, Simmons Graduate Internship: The Lillian F. Schwartz Archives: Collections Processing Internship, Teacher's Choice @ Giant Screen Experience, Educator Professional Development Overview. Blog, Montgomery Ward & Co. "Ward had conceived of the idea of adry goodsmail-orderbusiness inChicago, Illinois, after several years of working as a traveling salesman among rural customers. That would be fantastic to see! The building even had a dedicated building courier system, which relied on roller-skating routes across the building for delivering interdepartmental packages and communications. . . Two years later, in 1941, Robert married a Montgomery Ward secretary and aspiring artist named Virginia Newton, and the couple had five more children. As a traveling frontier salesman of the Great Plains, young Aaron Ward was usually far from the battlefields of the Civil War, despite being of the right fighting age. Personalized Women's Apparel & Accessories, Shop all Clothing, Shoes & Accessories Sale. Here I was heavily in debt at age 35 still grinding out catalogue copy instead of writing the great American novel as I had once hoped, May recalled in a 1975 article about the creation of Rudolph. Considering that the whole country fell into an economic depression a year later, one could start to imagine that Aaron Wards dream was cursed. These are a few contributions toward a better looking Chicago found in the new office and retail store building of Montgomery Ward & Co. . There are no access restrictions on the materials for research purposes, 408 (N.D. Ill. 1945) Despite the opposition, however, the business grew at a fast pace over the next several decades, fueled by demand primarily from rural customers who were attracted by the wide selection of items unavailable to them locally. We agreed to separate., an organization devoted completely to studying the prevalent styles of New York and those reflected from Paris. Perhaps I may yet see the public appreciate my efforts. Courier Corporation, Aug 1, 1969 - Antiques & Collectibles - 648 pages. Back in 1905, while still a young executive fresh out of Cornell, he was accused of bribing Chicago transport companies to lock out local Teamsters during a season of intense and violent labor strikes in the city. Through their catalogs, the company offered a broad selection of goods at affordable prices. His boss requested that it be an animal-centric story, along the lines of Ferdinand the Bull, which had been published to great success a few years earlier. But as this 1894-1895 catalog proudly states, Montgomery Ward & Company were the "Originators of the Mail Order Business. Low in stock. We have no retail trade to bother us and delay us. In addition, Montgomery Wards charitable foundation provided millions of dollars over the years to Chicago-area charities. We carry the goods in stock and are the only firm who can honestly say so. Sales Catalog, Fall & Winter, 1894 / page 556, Montgomery Ward & Co. 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