Marshall Field & Company (colloquially Marshall Field's) was an American department store chain founded in 1852 by Potter Palmer. After joining the partnership in 1865, Marshall Field rose in Palmer's initial retail establishment and then developed it into a grand and innovative shopping destination in the late 1800s. It was based in Chicago, Illinois, and grew to become a large chain in the United States before Macy's, Inc. acquired it in 2005.
The company's flagship Marshall Field and Company Building on State Street in the Chicago Loop is a National Landmark for its importance in the history of retail. It became a Macy's flagship store in 2006, however, retains its historic Marshall Field's nameplates and fixtures.
History
Early years
Marshall Field & Company traces its antecedents to the P. Palmer & Company, a dry goods store opened at 137 Lake StreetPDX History of Marshall Field's. Retrieved August 20, 2006. in 1852 by Potter Palmer. In 1856, 21-year-old Marshall Field, from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, moved to Chicago on the southwest shores of Lake Michigan, and found work at Cooley, Wadsworth & Company, then the city's largest dry goods firm. In 1860, just before the American Civil War, Field and bookkeeper Levi Z. Leiter became junior partners in the firm, then known as Cooley, Farwell & Company. In 1864, the firm, then led by senior partner John V. Farwell, Sr., was renamed Farwell, Field & Company.Encyclopedia of Chicago History – John V. Farwell & Co.. Retrieved August 19, 2006. only for Field and Leiter to soon withdraw from the partnership with Farwell when presented with the opportunity of a lifetime.Encyclopedia of Chicago History – Marshall Field & Co.. Retrieved August 20, 2006.
Potter Palmer, plagued by ailing health, was looking to dispose of his thriving business; thus, on January 4, 1865, Field and Leiter entered into partnership with Palmer and his brother Milton. The firm of P. Palmer & Company became known as Field, Palmer, Leiter & Company, with Palmer financing much of their initial capital, as well as his own contribution. After Field and Leiter's immediate success enabled them to pay him back, Palmer withdrew from the partnership in 1867 to focus on his own growing real-estate interests on one of the burgeoning city's important thoroughfares, State Street; Milton Palmer left at this time as well. The store was renamed Field, Leiter & Company, sometimes referred to as "Field & Leiter".
The buyout, however, did not bring an end to Potter Palmer's association with the firm. In 1868, he convinced Field and Leiter to lease a new, six-story edificeJazz Age Chicago . Retrieved August 20, 2006. he had just built at the northeast corner of State and Washington Streets. The store was soon referred to as the "Marble Palace", owing to its costly marble stone face.
The Chicago Fire When the Chicago Fire broke out on October 8, 1871, news reached company officials Henry Willing and Levi Leiter, who decided to load as much of their expensive merchandise as possible onto wagons and take it to Leiter's home, which was out of the path of the fire. The company's drivers and teams were ordered out of the barns. Horace B. Parker, a young salesman, rushed to the store's basement, broke up boxes, and built a fire in the furnace boiler so the steam-powered elevators could be operated. These employees worked feverishly through the night to move vital records and valuable goods to safety.
At one point, the gas tank exploded, which put out the store's gaslights. The men worked on by candlelight and the glow from the approaching flames. The employees got enough steam up to operate the store's powerful pumps in the basement, and volunteers went to the roof and used the store's fire hoses to wet down the roof and the wall on the side of the oncoming fire. Early the following morning, however, the city's waterworks burned, thus ending the water supply and making further efforts useless. The last employee had scarcely exited the building when it burst into flames, shooting fire from every window.Twyman, Robert W., "History of Marshall Field & Co. 1852–1906," pp. 38–42, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1954.
The store burned to the ground, but so much merchandise was saved that the store was able to reopen in only a few weeks (first the wholesale department on October 28, then the retail department on November 6), albeit temporarily relocated to a horse-streetcar barn of the Chicago City Railway Co. at State & 20th Streets. In April 1872, Field & Leiter reopened at a building at Madison and Market Streets (the location of present-day West Wacker Drive). Salesman Parker stayed with the company for 45 more years, rising to the level of General Sales Manager.Brewer, Wilmon, "A Life of Maurice Parker," pp. 11–12, Marshall Jones Company, Francestown, New Hampshire, 1954.
After the Great Fire In October 1873, Field and Leiter returned to State Street at Washington, opening a new five-story store at their old location, which they now leased from the Singer Sewing Machine Company; Palmer had sold the land site to finance his own rebuilding activities. This store was expanded in 1876, only to be destroyed by fire again in November 1877. Ever tenacious, Field and Leiter had a new temporary store opened by the end of the month, this time at a lakefront exposition hall which they temporarily leased from the city, located at what is now the site of the Art Institute of Chicago. Meanwhile, the Singer company had speculatively built an even larger, six-story building on the ruins of their old 1873 store, which, after some contention, was personally bought by Field and Leiter. Field, Leiter & Company then reclaimed their traditional location at the northeast corner of State and Washington for the last time in April 1879.
In January 1881, Field, with the support of his junior partners, bought out Levi Leiter, renaming the business Marshall Field & Company. As Palmer had before, Leiter retired to tend his significant real estate investments, which included commissioning the Second Leiter Building at State Street and Van Buren in 1891 to house Siegel, Cooper & Company. In 1932, this building (known as one of the earliest steel-framed commercial buildings built and still standing in the U.S., along with the Equitable Building in Baltimore) was leased to the later famous nationwide mail-order firm Sears, Roebuck & Company.
In 1887, the seven-story, Romanesque-styled Marshall Field's Wholesale Store, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, opened on Franklin Street between Quincy and Adams. The wholesale division sold merchandise in bulk to smaller merchants throughout the central and western United States, and did six times the sales volume of the local retail store. Chicago's location at the nexus of the country's railroads and Great Lakes shipping made it the center of the dry goods wholesaling business by the 1870s, with Field's largest rival being John V. Farwell, Sr., his former partner from before the war. It was the scale of the profits generated by the John G. Shedd-led wholesale division that made Marshall Field the richest man in Chicago, as well as one of the richest in the country.
State Street store Following the departure of Leiter, the retail store grew in importance. Although it remained a fraction of the size of the wholesale division, its opulent building and luxurious merchandise differentiated it from the other wholesale dry goods merchants in town. In 1887, Harry Gordon Selfridge was appointed to lead the retail store and headed it as it evolved into a modern department store. That same year, Field personally obtained Leiter's remaining interest in the 1879 Singer building and in 1888 started buying the buildings adjoining his for additional floor space.
In 1892, the structures between the building on State Street and Wabash Avenue to the east were demolished, and architect Daniel H. Burnham and his firm D.H. Burnham & Company were commissioned to erect a new building in anticipation of the influx of visitors from the World's Columbian Exposition scheduled for 1893. The nine-story "Annex" at the northwest corner of Wabash and Washington Streets opened under the direction of Burnham associate Charles B. AtwoodChicago Architecture Info . Retrieved August 20, 2006. in August 1893, towards the end of the Exposition. In 1897, the old 1879 store was rebuilt and had two additional floors added, while the first of Marshall Field's iconic Great Clocks was installed at the corner of State and Washington Streets on November 26.MeetinChicago.com . Retrieved August 20, 2006.
In 1901, Marshall Field & Company, previously a private partnership, was incorporated. Spurred on by Selfridge, Marshall Field razed the three buildings north of it that had been occupied since 1888, as well as the Central Music Hall at the southeast corner of State and Randolph Streets.A massive, twelve-story building fronting State Street opened in their place a year later, including a grand new entrance. In 1906, a third new building opened on Wabash Avenue north of the 1893 structure, then the oldest part of the store.
In the midst of the construction, Selfridge abruptly resigned from the company in 1904, buying rival store Schlesinger & Mayer, only to sell it three months later to Carson Pirie Scott. Schlesinger & Mayer had commissioned the Louis Sullivan-designed Carson Pirie Scott Company Building (now known as the Sullivan Center) in 1899. After trying retirement, Selfridge went on to establish Selfridges in London.
Shedd era Marshall Field died on January 16, 1906, in New York City. On the day of his funeral, all the stores along State Street, big and small, closed and the Chicago Board of Trade suspended afternoon trading in his honor. The board of Marshall Field and Company appointed John G. Shedd, whom Field had once called "the greatest merchant in the United States", to serve as the company's new president. Shedd became head of a company that employed 12,000 people in Chicago (two-thirds of them in retail) and was doing about $25 million in yearly retail sales in addition to nearly $50 million in wholesale.
Under Shedd's leadership for the next 16 years, Marshall Field & Co. continued to rebuild its store, fulfilling plans approved by Field himself to pull down the 1879 structure later in 1906. In its stead rose a new south State Street building with a continuation of the 1902 street façade. Opened in September 1907, it included a Louis Comfort Tiffany-decorated ceiling that is both the first and largest ceiling ever built in favrile glass, containing over 1.6 million pieces. With completion of the building, Marshall Field's momentarily possessed the title of "world's largest department store" over John Wanamaker & Co. in Philadelphia and R.H. Macy & Co. in New York.
In 1912, the 16-story Trude Building at the southwest corner of Wabash and Randolph was acquired and demolished, an act that was considered to be one of the first demolitions, if not the first, of a high-rise skyscraper of those just recently being built.. Retrieved August 20, 2006. In its place rose the 1914 building designed by Graham, Burnham & Company, completing the modern-day Marshall Field's store and now encompassing the entire square city block, bounded by Washington, State, Wabash, and Randolph Streets.
Also in 1914, Graham, Burnham & Company supervised the opening of a new twenty-story Marshall Field Annex across the street at 25 East Washington, which housed "Marshall Field's Store for Men" on its first six floors. These buildings recaptured its status as the world's largest department store, with its many restaurants and separate men's and women's lounges making it a popular social destination in upscale Chicago.