The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America

by Marc Levinson

  14. Albion, Rise of New York Port, 266; New York Produce Exchange, As It Was and As It Is (New York, 1959), n.p. The ledgers of Brown Brothers & Company, one of New York’s leading financial firms during this period, offer scattered clues as to how the business functioned. On April 9, 1866, Brown Brothers disposed of damaged coffee from the ship Maria for the account of M. G. Crenshaw & Company, a merchant; only $5,845.29 of the total sale price of $8,212.59 ended up in the Crenshaw account. Brown Brothers & Company Records, vol. 74, 495, NYPL. Addresses of Sturges and Scrymser firms are in Shipping and Commercial List, January 21, 1860.

  15. Minute Book, 1–4, 33, and New York Commercial Association Membership List, 1861–63, New York Produce Exchange Papers, N-YHS. Other Produce Exchange records, such as the Complaint Book and the Visitor’s Book, offer no evidence that Gilman or anyone connected with his firm was involved with the exchange in any way through at least 1873. The Produce Exchange dealt only in physical commodities during this period; exchange trading in futures contracts had yet to develop.

  16. “News from Washington,” NYT, December 24, 1861; E. M. Brunn, “The New York Coffee and Sugar Exchange,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 155 (1931), 110; Wakeman, Lower Wall Street, 94; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1878), 129.

  17. Later in the 1860s, Great American’s advertisements stated that the company was “Established 1861.” See, for example, New York Teacher and American Educational Monthly 5 (January 1868), back cover. Without exception, the merchants belonging to the New York Produce Exchange during the 1860s operated under the names of their owners or partners, and even the city’s largest retail merchants, such as A. T. Stewart & Company and R. H. Macy & Company, were called after their owners. The Great American stores operating in May 1863 were at 73 Catherine Street, in the Fourth Ward; 314 Second Street and 372 Grand Street, on the Lower East Side; 545 Eighth Avenue at Thirty-ninth Street; and 45 Vesey Street, a couple of doors down from the new headquarters. New York Herald, May 30, 1863. None of these premises was owned by Gilman; see Record of Assessments, 3rd Ward, various years, NYMA. No descriptions of these shops survive. Gilman’s earliest surviving federal tax assessment, for $10, was paid at the end of 1864.

  18. New York Herald, May 27 and 30, 1863. On retailer advertising in this period, see Laird, Advertising Progress, 23–31.

  19. AG, November 12, 1870, acknowledged that tea “has become the controlling power in the grocery trade,” indicating its importance to retailers. Tedlow, New and Improved, 190; Trenton Daily State Gazette, July 28, 1863; Atlantic Democrat and Cape May (N.J.) Register, August 15, 1863; Columbus (Ohio) Crisis, September 16, 1863.

  20. Many sources tell Barnum’s story, not least Phineas Taylor Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself (New York, 1855). A website prepared by the American Social History Project, www.lostmuseum.cuny.edu/intro.html, provides a good introduction. On Great American’s horses, see Wakeman, Lower Wall Street, 94. NYT, June 16, 1833; New York Sun, October 28, 1863. Bullock, “Early History,” 292, contends that the company used little newspaper advertising during its early years; he apparently was unaware of the many advertisements that appeared starting in May 1863.

  21. Columbus (Ohio) Crisis, September 16, 1863; New York Herald, September 4, 1863. Circulars announcing the move are in HFF. Already in the 1860s it was possible to engage an advertising agent such as George P. Rowell, who would place a one-inch advertisement in one hundred newspapers for a fee of $100; see Laird, Advertising Progress, 73.

  22. National Celebration of Union Victories (New York, 1865), 16; Wakeman, Lower Wall Street, 95.

  23. The prices quoted in the company’s circulars appeared even lower than they were, because they were for New York delivery, leaving customers to pay shipping costs. The economics of Great American’s operation are not fully understood, as no records are extant. See Bullock, “Early History,” 292–95, and Tedlow, New and Improved, 190.

  24. The Brooklyn City Directory for the Year Ending May 1st, 1862 (Brooklyn, 1862) is the first to list Hartford, showing his occupation as “clerk.” The next directory in which he appears, the 1864–65 edition, lists him as “book-keeper.” His title of treasurer is reported in Orange Journal, March 30, 1878. Observations on his personality are from Orange Journal, March 16, 1878; Whittemore, Founders and Builders, 208; Pierson, History of the Oranges to 1921, vol. 4, 270.

  3: THE BIRTH OF THE GREAT A&P

  1. Internal Revenue Assessment Lists for New York, Records of the Internal Revenue Service, RG 58, ser. M603, roll 53, frame 643, and roll 58, frame 209, NARA-NY. Great American used 31–33 and 35–37 Vesey as warehouses and offices, and 45 Vesey for both warehouse space and grinding.

  2. “Light-Weight Dealers,” New York World, December 17, 1868.

  3. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 8, 1865; Shipping and Commercial List, May 15, 1867; “The Commercial Enterprise,” file 430, HFF.

  4. On the marriage, see Avis H. Anderson, A&P, 47. Marie Josephine Ludlum Hartford, twenty-four at the time of their marriage, was said to be from a well-established family in Goshen, New York, but her name does not appear in the 1860 census reports. The Brooklyn City Directory for the Year Ending May 1st, 1865 lists George H. Hartford as a “book-keeper” living at 67 Powers Street, a few doors down from his initial residence. The edition published in May 1867 has him living at 286 Franklin Avenue in the leafier environs of Bedford-Stuyvesant, but the family apparently had relocated to Orange by the time this was published. Record of Hartford’s draft status is in “Registry of Drafted Men, 2d Cong Dst,” line 7477, RG 110, entry 1531, NARA-NY; Peter Bruin’s enlistment as Hartford’s substitute is in “Navy and Marine Enlistment for 2nd Congressional District of New York,” RG 110, entry 1535, and personal information about Bruin is in “Medical Register,” RG 110, entry 1534. For background on the draft, see Peter Levine, “Draft Evasion in the North During the Civil War, 1863–1865,” Journal of American History 67 (1981), 816–34; Eugene C. Murdock, “New York’s Civil War Bounty Brokers,” Journal of American History 53 (1966), 259–78; and McKay, Civil War and New York City, 215. Hartford’s reported income is derived from Internal Revenue Assessment Lists for New York, District 2, ser. M603_44 (1864) and M603_45 (1865). According to McKay, Civil War and New York City, 219, a well-paid clerk at the A. T. Stewart department store earned $500 a year in 1863, but $300 was more typical.

  5. On Lucy Stone, see Clark, Orange, New Jersey, 25–26, 42.

  6. An 1870 city directory, the earliest extant, lists a George H. Hartford, whose business was “teas,” as a boarder at 4 Centre Street. Orange Directory for 1870 (Orange, N.J., 1870), 56. This was likely a temporary residence. The location of the Ridge Street house, at the corner of White Street, is now an apartment complex. Information on the occupants is from U.S. Census Bureau, Ninth Census of the United States, 1870, Orange Ward 1, Essex, New Jersey, ser. M593_861, roll 324, image 126, RG 29, NARA. On the conversion, see “O.W.S. Biography—Initial Notes (1700 through 1874),” HFF.

  7. New York had a hundred tea dealers in 1870. Bullock, “History of the Chain Grocery Store” (Ph.D. diss.), 15. Store count is from Roy J. Bullock, “The Early History of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company,” 291. The description of the new store appeared in The Brooklyn Daily Times and was reported in Peterson’s Magazine 53 (May 1868), 394; the employee count was in Peterson’s Magazine 54 (July 1868), 76. Both of these articles emphasized how big and busy Great American’s stores were. The company may have sought to emphasize its size and solidity to make mail-order customers confident enough to send in their money.

  8. Tradition has the railroad completed with the driving of a golden spike with a silver maul, but this may well be apocryphal; see J. N. Bowman, “Driving the Last Spike at Promontory, 1869,” California Historical Quarterly 36 (1957), 263–74.

  9. Trenton Daily State Gazette, October 15, 1869; Bullock, “Early History,” 296. The c
laim that George H. Hartford’s association with A&P dated to 1869 was repeated in Pierson, History of the Oranges to 1921, vol. 4, 270–71. Hartford’s census declaration is in the 1870 census records, ser. M593_861, roll 324, image 126, RG 29, NARA. The story of the name change was posted for many years on the company’s website, www.aptea.com/history_timeline.asp, accessed February 7, 2009. Great American Tea Company was sold to its employees in 1965; see Progressive Grocer, A&P: Past, Present, and Future (New York, 1971), 11.

  10. Wakeman, Lower Wall Street, 94; Harper’s Weekly, February 8, 1868, 1; AG, December 10, 1870, 581.

  11. AG, November 15, 1869. Assuming that the average chest weighed 100 pounds, 36,000 chests would have equated to 3.6 million pounds of tea. Net U.S. tea imports in 1869 were 40.8 million pounds. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract, 1878, 129.

  12. The Great American name was attached to a tea shop as late as the end of 1898, when a newspaper article described its store, still at the corner of Vesey and Church streets, as containing “a miniature Chinese pagoda, resplendent with gilt and brilliant carmine.” Evangelist, December 6, 1898. On Thea-Nectar, see Bullock, “Early History,” 297; Atlanta Daily Constitution, May 23, 1872; “A New Business,” Daily Constitution, October 31, 1880. Thea was the name formerly used for the tea-plant genus, now referred to as Camellia.

  13. On the growth of brands, see Mira Wilkins, “When and Why Brand Names in Food and Drink?” in Jones and Morgan, eds., Adding Value, 15–40; Koehn, “Henry Heinz and Brand Creation in the Late Nineteenth Century”; “New Business.”

  14. “The Tea Trade and Certain Monopolies,” AG, November 12, 19, and 26 and December 3, 1870.

  15. Bullock, “Early History,” 294; “Tea Trade and Certain Monopolies,” AG, November 19, 1870, 491.

  16. Avis H. Anderson, A&P, 30–31. On chromos, see Laird, Advertising Progress, 76–91. On premiums, see Bullock, “History of the Chain Grocery Store,” 42; and Roy J. Bullock, “A History of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company Since 1878,” Harvard Business Review 12 (1933), 60. Essay by Louise Slater, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, May 22, 1877, binder 8B, HFF.

  17. The story about Hartford’s actions cannot be verified, but it appeared in a hometown newspaper, Orange Chronicle, March 16, 1878, six and a half years after the event; see also J. C. Furnas, “Mr. George & Mr. John,” Saturday Evening Post, December 31, 1938, 53. A&P’s official history states that the company shipped large donations of food to Chicago. The advertisements using Grand Duke Alexis appeared in the Chicago Tribune on December 3 and 24, 1871, and on other dates.

  18. On store locations, see Bullock, “History of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company Since 1878,” 59; Boston Daily Globe, January 9, 1875; Hartford Courant, May 6, 1875.

  19. Orange Journal, July 8 and November 4, 1876. A quiet Election Day was so unusual that when the 1879 municipal election transpired without incident, The Orange Chronicle, March 15, 1879, found the lack of disorder worthy of comment.

  20. Orange Journal, November 27, 1876, February 8 and 15, 1879; Orange Chronicle, February 9 and 16, 1878, February 15, 1879. Estimate of number of hat workers is from Orange Chronicle, September 14, 1878, in an article reprinted from New York Daily Graphic, September 6, 1878.

  21. This strange sequence of events is recounted in Orange Journal, March 16, 1878, Orange Chronicle, March 16, 1878, and Whittemore, Founders and Builders, 208.

  22. Orange Journal, March 16, 1878; Orange Chronicle, March 16, 1878. The number of newspapers, two in English and two in German, is taken from Quarter-Century’s Progress of New Jersey’s Leading Manufacturing Centres (New York, 1887), 176.

  23. Orange Journal, March 30, 1878.

  24. Sales and the date of the partnership agreement are recounted in “Gilman’s Tea Business,” Hartford Daily Courant, October 25, 1901. See also Bullock, “History of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company Since 1878,” 60. For details of the altercation, see “Long Fight Presaged over Gilman Millions,” NYT, March 24, 1901. The store count appears in Orange Chronicle, March 16, 1878. Hartford v. Bridgeport Trust Company, 143 F. 558 (U.S. Cir. C., D. Ct., February 12, 1906); Matter of Estate of George F. Gilman, Deceased, 80 N.Y.S. 1122, February 1903.

  4: THE GROCER

  1. Joshua Hartford, George L. and John A. Hartford’s paternal grandfather, died in 1877. Louis Ludlum, suffering from consumption and Bright’s disease, died in the house on May 25, 1878, a few weeks after George H. became mayor. Orange Journal, June 1, 1878. Martha Hartford passed away the following November 2 at age seventy-nine. “On Saturday she was unusually bright and cheerful, and was about the House” before suddenly dying, the Orange Journal reported, November 9, 1878. Information on domestic servants and on John Clews is from U.S. Census Bureau, 1880 Census, Orange, Essex, New Jersey, roll T9_780, image 104.3000. Anderson gives Clews’s birth year as 1857, in which case his age in 1880 would have been twenty-two or twenty-three.

  2. The story about George L. stoking the boiler appears in Merle Crowell, “You Don’t Have to Be Brilliant,” American Magazine, February 1931, 21; this version, however, has George L. beginning his career at the company in 1877, when he would have been only eleven or twelve years old. The story about his work at the Newark store is in Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., You … and Your Company, 9. According to that source, the Newark job was George L.’s first position with A&P, but it seems unlikely that a fourteen-year-old would have been charged with handling significant sums of money. Yet another tale of the start of George L. Hartford’s career, reported in J. C. Furnas, “Mr. George & Mr. John,” Saturday Evening Post, December 31, 1938, has the fourteen-year-old “counting and checking cash receipts from all stores”; Furnas does not consider the implausibility of such a young man counting receipts from nearly a hundred stores. George L.’s record at St. Benedict’s was confirmed in personal communication from Father Augustine Curley, August 19, 2009.

  3. Avis H. Anderson, A&P, 10; “A Fine Store Room,” Summit County (Ohio) Beacon, April 7, 1880. The paper termed the interior of Great Atlantic & Pacific’s new store in Akron as “the finest in the city so far as ceiling and wall decorations are concerned.”

  4. The 1882–84 ledger for the store in Port Chester, New York, is item 291, HFF.

  5. A&P stores could be found in such out-of-the-way locations as Jeffersonville, Indiana, and Oswego, New York. A full listing of locations, including street addresses, appears on the back of the trade card. On George L.’s role, see Avis H. Anderson, A&P, 31.

  6. The company may also have had modest sales of spices in its first two decades. Spices were never mentioned in advertisements; the only reference to a spice business is in an August 1866 tax record showing George F. Gilman as a “Grinder of Coffee and Spices” at 45 Vesey Street. Records of the Internal Revenue Service, RG 58, ser. M603, roll 58, frame 6209, NARA-NY. In 1870, the duty on tea was cut from twenty-five cents per pound to fifteen cents, on coffee from five cents a pound to three cents. Two years later, customs duties on coffee and tea were cut to zero; see Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies, 173, 183, and Taussig, Tariff History, 185–88. The value of tea imports in 1870 averaged twenty-nine cents per pound, and the twenty-five-cent tariff brought the import price to fifty-four cents; the 1870 tariff reduction effectively reduced the price at dockside to forty-four cents, and the 1872 import price, tariff free, was thirty-seven cents. The import value of coffee was ten cents per pound in 1870, so the dockside price including the tariff fell from fifteen cents to thirteen cents. Coffee imports in 1871, just after the first round of tariff cuts, were 27 percent higher than in any previous year; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract 1878 (Washington, D.C., 1878), 129; Statistical Abstract, 1891 (Washington, D.C., 1891), 202–203. Gross import figures in U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, 901–902, are different, but demand and price trends are similar. Company sales figure is from Bullock, “History of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company Since 1878,” 61
. On the new roasting process, see Boston Daily Globe, February 9, 1885.

  7. Other tea companies also added new products around this time; see Hall, “Barney Builds a Business.”

  8. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 32–33. The wartime sugar tariff, enacted in 1864, was five cents per pound, nearly 50 percent of the average import price; it fell to two cents in the 1880s; Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies, 129; Taussig, Tariff History, 285; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, 331, 901–902. U.S. government policy in this period focused on extracting more value from sorghum, a drought-tolerant grass, rich in sucrose, which was grown across the Midwest. Sorghum was used mainly for animal feed, but the government supported a major effort to make white sugar from it. The leader of this effort was Harvey W. Wiley, chief chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who was later known for his role in winning enactment of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. See Oscar E. Anderson, Health of a Nation, 27–29, 32–66.

  9. Port Chester ledger, HFF.

  10. Avis H. Anderson, A&P, 29, 38. Bullock, “History of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company Since 1878,” 62, dates the sale of baking powder to 1890, but advertisements and trade cards show it was sold much earlier.