Aaron Montgomery Ward(1843–1913)

Aaron Montgomery Ward was born at Chatham in Morris County, New Jersey, on the seventeenth of February 1843, son of a cobbler. The family moved to Niles, Michigan, when Aaron was nine, and the boy was schooled at the Niles common school, worked as a stacker at the local Brick and Tile Works at fourteen, and at sixteen took an apprentice clerk's job at the small Niles general store of Cobb and Whitney. By twenty-two he had moved to Chicago and was working as a travelling clerk for the Chicago wholesale-dry-goods firm of Field, Palmer and Leiter (the predecessor firm of Marshall Field & Company, the great Chicago department store), travelling the rural Midwestern country-store circuit for the next five years selling the firm's wholesale dry-goods to the small-town country merchants.

He observed across those five years the central single economic injustice of the post-Civil-War American rural agricultural economy: the local country store, the small-town single retail outlet that ran the credit-extension to the farming families, charged systematic mark-ups of three to six times the wholesale price of the same goods, and used the credit system to lock the local farmers into perpetual indebtedness. The Grange movement (the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, founded 1867 by Oliver Hudson Kelley), which had grown across the rural Midwest through the late 1860s and early 1870s as the central organising body of the Granger farmer protest against the country-store-and-railway pricing system, was the organised constituency Ward judged could absorb a direct-to-farmer mail-order alternative.

He sketched the model in early 1872, raised four hundred dollars of working capital from his savings, took the second-floor loft of a livery stable at 825 North Clark Street in Chicago as his office and warehouse, and in August 1872 issued the first Montgomery Ward and Company price-list: a single 8-by-12-inch sheet printed on both sides, listing one hundred and sixty-three items of dry-goods at wholesale prices plus a small handling charge, with shipping arrangements specified through the post and through the new express-freight companies. The price-list went out to the Grange chapter secretaries across Illinois, Indiana and Iowa, and the orders came back within six weeks. By the end of 1872 the firm was profitable; by 1875 the catalogue had grown to seventy-two pages with two thousand four hundred items, and the company adopted the famous slogan satisfaction guaranteed or your money back (the first explicit money-back guarantee in American retail history).

Montgomery Ward and Company grew across the next thirty years into the largest single retail firm in the United States by mail-order revenue. By 1890 the annual catalogue was over five hundred and forty pages with twenty-five thousand items at almost every price point of the rural American household economy; by 1900 the catalogue ran to over twelve hundred pages and had reached an annual print-run of three million copies. The company was nicknamed by its rural-American customers the Wish Book, the affectionate term that became the popular name for the great mail-order catalogue tradition of the next century.

He retired from the daily management of the firm in 1901 in his fifty-ninth year and committed his last twelve years to the Grant Park litigation, the famous Chicago lakefront-preservation suit by which Ward sued the City of Chicago repeatedly across 1890 to 1911 to enforce the original Lake Park ordinance reserving the entire Lake Michigan shoreline strip of central Chicago for open public park-land. He won the suits four times across the period (the Illinois Supreme Court decisions of 1897, 1900, 1909 and 1911), preserving Grant Park in Chicago as one of the largest single urban-waterfront open parks in any American city. He died at his Highland Park, Illinois, country house on the seventh of December 1913 in his seventy-first year. Montgomery Ward continued as a major American retailer for another eighty-eight years until its 2001 dissolution; the catalogue model Ward founded in 1872 is the foundation of every modern direct-retail business including the entire twenty-first-century e-commerce industry. The Ward name in modern American business carries the weight of the August 1872 single-sheet price list and the Grant Park litigation.