Aaron Montgomery Ward built one of the most famous retail companies in American history, yet in his own lifetime, the customers who made him rich burned his catalogs in town squares. Rural shopkeepers organized against him, newspapers called him a swindler, and when he later fought to protect Chicago’s lakefront, the city itself turned on him. He won four cases before the Illinois Supreme Court, and the catalog company he founded is long gone—but the park he saved and the medical center his widow funded still stand today. Ward was born in Chatham, New Jersey, in February 1843.
When he was about nine, his family moved to Niles, Michigan, and at 14 he left school to find work. His first job paid 25 cents a day at a factory making barrel staves. He moved on to stacking bricks at a kiln, then took a job at a shoe store. Within a few years, he became head clerk and general manager of a country general store, learning exactly how rural merchants operated—including how they marked up goods and extended credit that often went unpaid.
In 1865, Ward moved to Chicago. He worked for several wholesale firms, and a traveling job took him across Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri. Farmers repeatedly told him they were being squeezed by high prices, poor quality, and no refunds. Ward calculated that buying goods directly from manufacturers in volume, shipping by rail, and cutting out every middleman could undercut local stores while still turning a profit.
By 1871, he had nearly saved enough to start. Then the Great Chicago Fire destroyed his savings and his stock of goods. He started over, married Elizabeth Cobb of Kalamazoo in 1872, and by August of that year had raised only $1,600 with two co-workers. He rented a small shipping room on North Clark Street and produced his first catalog: a single sheet of paper listing 163 items with no pictures.
Orders came in slowly, and both partners withdrew within the first year. Ward took on a new partner, George Thorne, his wife’s brother. Then the National Grange, a farmers’ organization with more than 200,000 members, made Ward its official purchasing agent. The catalog grew from one sheet to eight pages, then to 32, and the business became profitable.
In 1875, Ward added a promise few retailers had ever made: “Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. ” Customers could return broken or unwanted goods for a full refund, a direct challenge to the era’s “buyer beware” assumption. By the late 1880s, the catalog had become a large book with thousands of items, from sewing machines and windmills to dresses and birdcages. Farmers’ families called it the wish book, sometimes the only thick volume in the house besides the Bible.
The success rested on the expanding railroad network, the arrival of rural free mail delivery in 1896, and the trust built by a decade of honest refunds. By 1894, Ward was mailing about three million catalogs a year, each weighing nearly four pounds. In 1899, Ward completed a 394-foot tower in Chicago, the city’s tallest building for 23 years, topped by an 18-foot gilded copper statue. Nine years later, he opened a massive mail-order complex on the Chicago River covering 2.
25 million square feet, with its own post office and loading docks for 24 freight cars. From his office, Ward looked east across Michigan Avenue at a strip of lakefront that was supposed to be public ground. A city ordinance from 1836 had dedicated the land as a park, meant to remain “forever open, clear, and free of any buildings or other obstructions whatever. ” Instead, it held railroad tracks, military barracks, an exposition hall, a firehouse, and piles of debris.
In 1890, Ward sued to stop construction on the land. The Illinois Supreme Court agreed with him. The city tried again with a permanent exhibition hall, and Ward won a second case in 1897. Then trustees of Marshall Field’s estate proposed building the Field of Natural History on the strip, backed by $8 million and Chicago’s commercial leadership.
Ward sued a third time, and the press turned against him with full force, calling him an obstructionist. In 1909, he told a Tribune reporter he had fought for 19 years to preserve a park for the people against their will, and doubted he would have started if he had known how long it would take. The court ruled in his favor, and the museum was moved a mile south. He won a fourth case in 1910 against an eminent domain attempt.
By then, Ward’s private life was strained. In the autumn of 1909, his estate in Wisconsin burned down while he and Elizabeth were in California. He never rebuilt the house. He stayed in a hotel suite in Oconomowoc and bicycled to the stables each day to watch the coachman work with his horses.
He and Elizabeth had no biological children; in 1892, they adopted a baby girl, Marjorie, after Elizabeth’s sister died in childbirth. In late 1913, Ward fell and fractured his hip. Pneumonia followed, and he died on December 7, 1913, at his home in Highland Park, Illinois, at age 70. His estate was valued at about $20 million, left almost entirely to Elizabeth.
The Tribune, which had called him an obstructionist years earlier, now called him the watchdog of the lakefront. Elizabeth Ward spent the next decade deciding what to do with the fortune. In December 1923, she wrote to Northwestern University with three conditions for any memorial: it had to be visible, enduring, and useful. She gave about $8 million, an amount worth well over $100 million today, to construct a medical center on the university’s downtown campus.
Architect James Gamble Rogers designed a Collegiate Gothic building that became the world’s first skyscraper medical center. The cornerstone was laid in May 1925, but Elizabeth died in July 1926, before the building was finished. The Montgomery Ward Memorial Building still houses Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Aaron Ward had been dead for 31 years when the army came for his company’s chairman.
In 1944, during World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the military to seize Montgomery Ward under wartime emergency powers. Chairman Sewell Avery had refused to comply with National War Labor Board orders to recognize a union at the company, which produced war supplies. Attorney General Francis Biddle flew to Chicago; witnesses said Avery shouted at him and called him a New Dealer. Two soldiers lifted Avery from his chair and carried him out.
The army held the offices until the end of the war, and Avery returned after Roosevelt died. Avery’s later decisions proved disastrous. Convinced the post-war boom was a mirage and another depression was coming, he refused to open new stores while Sears and others expanded into growing suburbs. He stockpiled cash and waited for a collapse that never came.
The company fell far behind. In 1955, a proxy fight broke Avery’s grip, and he resigned at age 80. Montgomery Ward spent the next decades trying to catch up, but the suburban market had been taken by Sears and rising discount chains. In 1976, the Mobil Corporation bought the company, but the oil giant could not make it work.
After a leveraged buyout and two bankruptcies, the company announced on December 28, 2000, that it would close all remaining stores. Through the spring of 2001, about 250 stores shut their doors, and roughly 28,000 people lost their jobs. The company founded on one sheet of paper with $1,600 in 1872 had lasted 129 years. What survives are two legacies unrelated to the stores.
Grant Park remains free of buildings because of Ward’s four lawsuits, and the city’s lakefront still stretches unbroken for miles. Across the river, the Montgomery Ward Memorial Building still trains doctors. Ward once spent more on legal fees than most people earned in a lifetime, defending land that was not his, for a public that hated him for it. Elizabeth gave away almost the entire estate for a hospital she never saw completed.
Both got what they asked for: a park that is visible, and a hospital that is enduring and useful. Few Chicagoans today know the name behind either one.