The Price of Progress on the Prairie ~ D. K. Deters

Have you ever wondered how or why something happened when it might have been easier to call it quits?

I recently read an article about Montgomery Ward and Company that got me thinking about that question.

Aaron Montgomery Ward began his business training in a general store in St. Joseph, Michigan. Within three years, he rose to general manager. During the Civil War, Ward stayed at his job and sent money home to help his family.

Later, while working for other wholesale houses, he learned about the difficulties farmers faced in the marketplace. He realized rural customers wanted many of the same comforts and goods available to city residents and envisioned a mail-order business.

Aaron Montgomery Ward

In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed the inventory he had put into the venture. Yet Ward didn't give up. He started over.

Ward launched Montgomery Ward and Company in 1872. After his original partners left, his brother-in-law, George R. Thorne, became an equal partner in late 1873.

In 1875, Ward introduced an innovation that helped build trust with rural customers: “Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.” Although similar guarantees existed, Ward is widely credited with pioneering the policy in the national mail-order business. It addressed a major concern: How could a farmer trust a merchant whose merchandise he couldn’t see or touch before paying for it?

Montgomery Ward’s catalogs let farm families buy goods from distant cities, revealing the commercial potential of rural America. But customers still had to travel to the local post office to collect their mail.

Ward’s mail-order business helped highlight the need for better access to rural customers, but he did not cause the Post Office to establish Rural Free Delivery (RFD).

The federal government was already considering rural delivery. By 1890, nearly 41 million Americans lived in rural areas. When RFD began experimentally in 1896, farmers could receive mail at home instead of traveling to town. The service expanded rapidly and became permanent in 1902.

Parcel Post, introduced in 1913, further boosted mail-order businesses such as Montgomery Ward and Sears by making it easier to ship merchandise through the mail.

There’s a bit of irony here. RFD improved life for rural Americans, but it also contributed to undermining some local businesses. Before mail-order houses became popular, a country merchant might have been the only source for certain goods. Now rural Americans could compare the local merchant’s price with a price printed in a Montgomery Ward or Sears catalog.

The same postal system that connected isolated Western homesteads to the national marketplace also weakened the isolation that had defined rural life.

And perhaps that’s the part of the story that stayed with me. Ward could have given up after the Great Chicago Fire destroyed his first inventory. Instead, he started over—and ultimately helped change American commerce.

Soures:

Smithsonian National Postal Museum - The Growth of the Mail

Chicago History Museum - Montgomery Ward's First Catalog