Rich's: A Southern Institution

By Jeff Clemmons

In 1867, less than three years after the Civil War left the city in ruins, Hungarian Jewish immigrant Morris Rich opened a small dry goods store on what is now Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta.

Over time, his brothers Emanuel and Daniel joined the business; within a century, it became a retailing dynasty. Join historian Jeff Clemmons as he traces Rich's 137-year history. For the first time, learn the true stories behind Penelope Penn, Fashionata, The Great Tree, the Pink Pig, Rich's famous coconut cake and much more, including how events at the downtown Atlanta store helped John F. Kennedy become America's thirty-fifth president. With an eye for accuracy and exacting detail, Clemmons recounts the complete history of this treasured southern institution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Aug 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781614236207

Jeff Clemmons

Jeff Clemmons has lived in Atlanta for more than a quarter century. He created and leads walking tours of the Midtown and SoNo districts for the Atlanta Preservation Center, and he serves on the board of the APC's auxiliary group CIRCA, which offers its members private tours of some of metropolitan Atlanta's most interesting historical structures.

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institution.

Introduction

MIGRATION

HUNGARY FOR AMERICA

Mauritius Morris Reich, the founder of what would become Rich’s, was born on January 13, 1847, in the centuries-old city of Kaschau, Hungary, modern-day Košice, Slovakia, to Jewish parents Joseph and Rose Reich. He was the fifth of eventually seven children in the Reich household. Morris’s parents had spent their whole lives witnessing war. As children, they had grown up through the political fallout of the Napoleonic Wars. Married and with five children, eventually six, they lived through the 1848 Hungarian Revolution and succeeding civil war. By the time Morris was twelve years old, the Reiches had a toddler, their seventh child, and were facing the possibility of their family living through impending war between Sardinia and Austria-Hungary. They feared for their children’s futures, whether it was military conscription for their sons or the possibility of all their children living in European-city ghettoes with limited opportunities for a career or owning property, so they set out to get them to America, a country they had heard offered unlimited possibilities for freedom and prosperity.¹

In 1859, Morris’s parents gave him and his older brother, William, sixteen, the majority of their savings and prepared them for their journey abroad. The elder Reiches’ plan was to get Morris and William to the Black family in Cleveland, Ohio. Their other children would follow as time and money allowed. The Black family—who had Anglicized their German surname Schwartz, which in Yiddish is shvartz and denotes the color black—had known the Reiches in Kaschau but had immigrated to Ohio a few years earlier. Aware of Joseph and Rose’s plan to get their children out of Hungary, the Blacks offered to help the boys get set up and established in Cleveland.

A mid-1880s formal portrait of Morris Rich. Courtesy of the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center.

With plans in order and finalized, Morris and his brother left Kaschau via stagecoach and traveled to Vienna, Austria. From Vienna, the boys traveled by train to Berlin and then on to Hamburg, Germany. In Hamburg, over the course of a few days, the two arranged passage on a large, wooden steamer ship for a three-week voyage to New York City. The trip at sea would not be an easy, comfortable one for Morris and his brother. They were alone for the first time in their lives, hungry at times, possibly homesick and seasick and traveling in steerage class, cramped with livestock, cargo and other passengers. Additionally, the journey to America was a long one, stretching almost four thousand miles across the North Sea, through the English Channel and over the northern Atlantic Ocean.

When Morris’s ship finally did dock in New York Harbor, Lady Liberty was still a little over a quarter of a century away from holding her torch aloft, beckoning immigrants into the country. Morris and his brother, however, were greeted by American immigration services, which asked the two questions about their births, parentage, travels and plans and examined their general health. Once cleared by immigration services, Morris and his brother boarded a train in New York City and headed four hundred miles west to Cleveland, where they would meet the Blacks and start their new, and hopefully better, lives. One of the first steps in creating this new and better life for the brothers was the Anglicization of their surname from Reich to Rich.

Arriving in Cleveland on the southern shores of Lake Erie, Morris and his brother enjoyed a few days of rest and began the process of adjusting to their new homeland. Then, almost immediately, their host family obtained job positions for the two in a local retail store.

After a few weeks of earning pay at his new job, Morris, along with his brother, moved out of the Black household and into a boardinghouse. Morris, armed with little formal education and a bit of watchmaker training he had obtained in Hungary, and his brother, armed with little formal education and a brief apprenticeship as a jeweler in Hungary, were now officially on their own in their newly adopted homeland.

Between 1859, when he first arrived in Cleveland, and 1861, Morris Rich, as he now styled himself, worked as a salesman in various retail outlets in the city. It was also during these first few years in Cleveland that Morris attended night classes and learned to read, write and speak English. Leaving his retail job in 1861, Morris embarked upon a career as a house-to-house salesman. Eventually, this line of work progressed to selling items via horseback in Cleveland and the surrounding area. After a short while, Morris attached a wagon to the back of his horse and entered the more prestigious carriage trade business. Now, Morris could offer his customers a wider array of items to buy, as he did not have to carry only a select few items on his person or strap those items to a single horse.

Morris’s brother William during these early years in Ohio eked out his own career selling goods and kept a close eye on his younger brother. Business for both the boys provided enough income to keep them fed, clothed and sheltered. This peaceful, prosperous new existence, however, was not to last. In 1861, the American Civil War broke out and would ravage the boys’ newly adopted homeland for four years. Little could they have known that when they left war-torn Hungary, they would so soon be living in the midst of yet another war. Fortunately, however, the brothers avoided military service in the Union army, as they were not U.S. citizens and, therefore, could not be forced to enlist or be pressed into duty. As a result, they continued selling their wares throughout Ohio as war raged across the country.

Undeterred by the outbreak of war in America, Morris’s family continued to immigrate into the country. In 1862, Morris’s brothers Daniel, eighteen, and Emanuel, thirteen, would join him and William in Cleveland. They, too, would take up selling wares across Cleveland and the Ohio countryside to make a living.

At the end of the American Civil War in 1865, Morris and his three brothers left Ohio and headed south to Georgia. There, the quartet would separate, each settling on different paths in different parts of the region. William would settle in the young town of Atlanta and establish a wholesale business and, later, a whiskey distillery, as well as having business interests in local coal mines. Daniel and Emanuel would peddle goods throughout the state of Georgia before settling down in Albany, Georgia, where they would open a retail enterprise of their own. At the time, they thought Albany offered better business potential than William’s chosen city of Atlanta. Morris, meanwhile, would settle just over the Georgia state line in Chattanooga, Tennessee. For a short while, he would work as a retail salesman in the city but would soon give this up and go back to peddling goods via horseback across the state of Georgia, particularly in the north Georgia–Atlanta area.

Over the next decade and a half, Morris’s entire family would eventually immigrate to America. His oldest brother, Herman, older and younger sisters Julia and Frances and mother preceded his father in joining the brothers already stateside. Sadly, by the time Morris’s father immigrated to America in 1880, his mother had died. She passed away at the age of fifty-eight in 1875, waiting for her husband to join the rest of the family in a migration that had started sixteen years earlier.

SETTLING ON ATLANTA

In 1867, Morris decided to give up the traveling salesman life, plant roots in Atlanta and try his hand at establishing a retail business. His brother William, who had settled in the city at the end of the American Civil War less than two years earlier, had created a successful wholesale business, W.M. Rich & Co., and Morris thought that perhaps he, too, could replicate his brother’s success. Additionally, Morris thought the rail system being rebuilt in Atlanta would be perfect for supplying a retail establishment with new goods from across the United States and the world.

Atlanta, like Morris, was just twenty years old. The city had started off as a railroad juncture in 1837 but had two prior names—Terminus and Marthasville—before it was incorporated as Atlanta in 1847. In the aftermath of the American Civil War, the city lay in ruins, was under military rule and was in the first few years of the harsh Reconstruction era, when the South was being slowly restored to the Union. Yet despite these conditions, people came to the city in droves. The city’s population was over twenty thousand in 1867, double what it had been before the war, with many of those pouring back into the city being widows and orphans of Confederate soldiers, citizens who had fled the city when it was under siege in the summer of 1864 or businessmen, such as Morris, looking to get a new start in the devastated South.

What these people found when they returned to Atlanta, however, was a city being haphazardly rebuilt. Hundreds of shanties made from the debris of buildings destroyed in the war stretched across the city. Businessmen also were using this debris to build stores to house their wares. The main thoroughfare in Atlanta’s business district, Whitehall Street, later renamed Peachtree Street, contained one intact block that had escaped destruction during the war. A few buildings that were salvaged from other parts of the city were moved to this block, such as jeweler Er Lawshe’s storehouse, but the overall scarcity of buildings made rent very high for someone looking to lease space and set up shop. New building materials to start a store from the ground up were even more scarce and expensive.

Despite what many people would have considered insurmountable odds for starting a successful business in a city that was witnessing so much, Morris saw only opportunity. He went to his brother William and asked for a $500 loan, the approximate earnings of an average worker over the course of two years. With this loan in hand, Morris rented a twenty- by seventy-five-foot rough-hewn log building near the railroad tracks at 36 Whitehall Street and tried his luck at running a retail business.

Part I

PARTNERSHIPS

(1867–1901)

Chapter 1

M. RICH & CO.

(1867–1877)

Morris Rich opened the doors of his little dry goods shop, M. Rich & Co., on May 28, 1867, not quite three decades after Atlanta’s first store, Johnson & Thrasher, opened its doors circa 1840. Immediately, he faced stiff competition from the approximately 250 existing stores in the city, including the successful retail businesses of W.A. Moore; E.W. Marsh; C.E. Boynton & E.P. Chamberlin; M.C. & J.F. Kiser; and Charles Heinz & John Berkele. Berkele would later open Maier & Berkele jewelers. Yet what may have set Morris’s store apart from its competition was the treatment of its customers from the start.

On the first day of business, it rained. Morris, who feared his potential customers might ruin their footwear by trekking through the muddy street into his store, placed boards on the ground in front of his store to provide them with easier, drier access. Also on that first day and thereafter, Morris allowed people to pay on credit. At the time, many stores only did a cash business, but Morris knew that cash was hard to come by after the war. Oftentimes, rural customers might only get paid once a year when their crops were harvested and sold. Therefore, Morris allowed them to buy on credit and pay him when they had been paid for their crops. He also allowed customers to barter for goods with chickens, eggs, corn and other farm produce.

Within months of the store opening, Morris had hired his first employee, his cousin Adolph Teitlebaum. By the end of the first year, Morris had hired three other salesmen. With net sales around $5,000 by the close of 1867, all five employees had witnessed the women of Atlanta snatching up the store’s best sellers, fifty-cent corsets and twenty-five-cent hose. Those early M. Rich & Co. employees also had witnessed, by today’s standards, the strange buying habits of nineteenth-century customers. Since the Better Business Bureau and stricter government regulations on quality goods were decades away in 1867, customers were wary of the quality of the goods they were buying. They would often ravel out the edge of fabric and chew on the thread or set fire to a small scrap of the material and sniff the smoke to see if what they were buying was real wool. Too, it was not uncommon for a customer of the l800s to expect a lagniappe, a small token gift, to be thrown into their purchase when they paid their bill.

A sketch of how M. Rich & Co. might have looked in 1867. This sketch has been widely used as the standard depiction of the first store. Courtesy of the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center.

This view of the store from a 1917 promotional piece might be a more accurate rendition of M. Rich & Co. as it appeared when it opened on Whitehall Street (now Peachtree Street).

By 1871, another cousin of Morris’s, Samuel Rich, was helping customers in the Atlanta store. It was also in 1871 that Morris’s brother Emanuel, who had opened a store in Albany with older brother Daniel, abandoned the south Georgia town and joined Morris as a clerk in his store. Daniel would join his brothers as a clerk in the store a few years later, thereby truly making the enterprise a family one.

An 1870 ad in Hanleiter’s Atlanta City Directory touting M. Rich & Co. as a dealer of dry goods, an array of consumer goods excluding groceries and hardware items.

In these early years, Morris started to advertise his business. Barring handbills, window displays and posters hung around town, one of the first widely distributed ads on the business was in the 1870 Atlanta City Directory. That ad stated, M. Rich & Co., WHOLESALE AND RETAIL DEALERS IN STAPLE AND FANCY DRY GOODS, Boots, Shoes, Hats, Etc., Etc.² By 1875, M. Rich & Co. had been mentioned in the Atlanta Constitution more than a dozen times with ads proclaiming: Great Sale of Goods From the Great Boston Fire…100 dozen French Woven Corsets, at 65 cents each…500 dozen latest style Ladies’ Linen Collars at 5 cents to 10 cents each; Another Slaughter of Dry Goods For Twenty Days only at M. Rich & Co.’s—We offer our splendid stock of Dry Goods…at prices that will induce the public to buy, whether they wanted them or not; and POSITIVELY FOR SIX DAYS ONLY…Ladies will do well to avail themselves in getting cheap goods. Go to M. Rich & Co’s.³

Within eight years, Morris’s business had exploded and as a result had outgrown its original location at 36 Whitehall Street. On July 19, 1875, the store moved to 35 Whitehall Street, and not quite two months later, on September 1, the store moved once again to 43 Whitehall Street, where it shared the building with a shoe salesman by the name of Robinson. A month later, the store moved again to the former location of fellow Atlanta retailer Peck de Saulles’s store at 65 Whitehall Street. This new location provided greater exposure for M. Rich & Co., as it was on the corner of busy Hunter and Whitehall Streets.

Chapter 2

M. RICH & BRO.

(1877–1884)

In a December 1876 Atlanta Constitution ad, Morris Rich announced to the public that he was selling large quantities of merchandise to make room for forthcoming spring merchandise and that he was going out of the Shoe Trade, which he never did; however, the ad contained a much bigger announcement: come February 1, Morris’s brother Emanuel would be admitted to the firm’s partnership, and the name of the firm would be changed from M. Rich & Co. to M. Rich & Bro.⁴

Just a year after Emanuel joined the firm as a partner and the store changed its name, M. Rich & Bro. became one of the Big Five retailers in the city, joining Chamberlin, Boynton & Company; John Ryan’s; John Keely’s; and D.H. Dougherty’s, all of which were located within close proximity to each other on Whitehall Street. The leader of the Big Five, Chamberlin, Boynton & Company, was divided into three departments—dry goods, carpets and boots and shoes—a precursor to becoming a true department store, which many of the other stores would copy. Later, John Ryan’s was pushed out of the Big Five by J.M. High’s store, High & Herrin; High’s name would later become synomonus with Atlanta’s leading art museum, the High Museum of Art.

Equally important was that about the time the store became one of the Big Five, it opened a small sales room for the display of ladies’ and children’s ready-made dresses and underwear where women were employed as sales clerks. While women having jobs at this time during the nineteenth century was the exception rather than the norm, M. Rich & Bro.’s was not the first store in Atlanta to utilize their employ. That distinction went to smaller competitor Regenstein & Kutz’s. In addition to being sales clerks, women, alongside men, worked in M. Rich & Bro.’s tailoring and made-to-order facilities, which manufactured underwear and children’s clothes.

The Rich brothers pose for a photographer in the mid-1870s. Left to right: Daniel, Morris and Emanuel Rich. Courtesy of the Cuba Family Archives of The Breman Museum.

In 1880, a dressmaking shop was added to M. Rich & Bro.’s store on the third floor. As ready-to-wear goods were in their infancy in the late 1870s and early 1880s, M. Rich & Bro. hoped its new shop would lure more women to the store. In advertisements that were written in the form of letters targeting women, the store touted its ability to make dresses in the latest style and sell them cheaper than any woman could buy the fabric and make comparable dresses at her home. Therefore, not only money but also time was saved by buying dresses directly off the store’s sales racks.

Looking south down Whitehall Street at the heart of Atlanta’s retailing center in 1882.

A bill of sale dated April 8, 1881, showing an image of M. Rich & Bro.’s store at the corner of Whitehall and Hunter Streets.

A Mrs. M.A. Taylor was temporarily hired in 1881 to manage the store’s dressmaking department, but Morris and Emanuel knew they had to hire someone with renown to head up the department, someone they could tout as a master seamstress, dressmaker and style icon. To that end, Morris went to New York City and scouted around for a candidate. It was not long before he telegraphed Emanuel back in Atlanta: Have engaged Madame Marie Gillette, formerly of Paris, France…Let the Ladies Know This.⁵ Morris snagged Gillette from