Marshall Field & Company

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Marshall Field was born on a farm in the foothills of the Connecticuit River valley on 18 August 1834. Almost exactly a year earlier, Chicago was incorporated as a town of 350. As a boy, he had dreamed of owning a great store in the West that would have doors worth more than than the whole building of the little store owned by Deacon Davis of Pittsfield, Massachusettes, or of the the other little store in Conway, in both of which he has worked.

With this experience under his belt, he arrived in Chicago in 1858 and made a study of the best stores in the city and allied himself with them. The best at that time were, on the wholesale side, Cooley, Wadsworth & Company, and on the retail side, Potter Palmer’s Dry Goods Store which just opened in 1857.

Prior to Potter Palmer’s store, retail shopping had a “caveat emptor” (purchaser beware) tone. Mr. Palmer introduced an era of square-dealing by inaugurating business ethnics that were at least a generation before his time. Mr. Richard Sears did not guarantee watches falling out of pockets until 1886. The idea of treating customers fairly was often ridiculed and ruin was inevitable. Instead his business thrived.

In 1856, Cooley, Wadsworth & Company was located on South Water Street. A year later the firm moved to Wabash Avenue and began doing an exclusive wholesale trade and changed their name to Cooley, Farwell & Company. In January, 1860, Mr. Field was admitted and upon Mr. Cooley’s retirement in 1864, the firm became Farwell, Field & Company. It was at this time that Levi Leiter became a partner. In January, 1865 Messrs. Field and Leitner retired, and, forming the firm of Field, Palmer & Leitr, bought out Mr. Palmer’s interest of his store that was located at 110-112 Lake Street. In January, 1867, Mr. Palmer retired and the fir’s name changed again. This time to Field, Leiter & Co. The autumn of 1868 saw the first building to be occupied by a Field’s store at the NE corner of State and Washington streets.

After the Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed their building, they resumed business in an old horse-railway barn at the corner of Twentieth and State streets. As soon as conditions allowed, they began construction on the second store.

In 1881 Field bought out his remaining business partner and changed the store’s name to Marshall Field and Company. In 1884, the store was considered the largest and most complete retail store to be found west of New York. (Leiter opened his own department store further south along State Street.) The architect of the store, Daniel Burnham (of his 1909 “Make No Small Plans” blueprint) was the planner of the Beaux-Arts rebuilding of Chicago and a leading figure in the planning of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and Field’s store first reached national prominence at this time. In 1907 a new 12-story building replaced the older store, and in 1914 another new 20-story Store for Men was built across Washington Street. It was the largest department store in the world.

In recent news, Federated Department Stores is planning to change the famous State and Washington Street store to Macy’s. An on-line petition, KeepItFields.org, was created to keep the Field’s name and has received over 59,000 signatures thus far.

During the transformation, which becomes official on 9 Sept 2006, the New York department store chain mistakenly labeled Wabash Avenue as “Wabash Street,” Randolph Street as “Randolph Avenue” and Washington Street as “Washington Avenue.”