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The Romance of a Great Store

Edward Hungerford

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The Romance of a Great Store by Edward Hungerford

Chapter 1 The Ancestral Beginnings of Macy's

Interwoven into the history of the ancient island of Nantucket are the names and annals of some of the earliest of our American families-the Coffins, the Eldredges, the Myricks, and the Macys. Their forbears came from England to America fully ten generations ago. They settled upon the remote and wind-swept isle and there to this day many of their descendants ply their vocations and have their homes.

In the beginning the vocation of these settlers was found to lie almost invariably upon a single path; and that path led down to the sea. They were sea-faring folk, those early residents of Nantucket: God-fearing, simple of speech and of action, yet mentally keen and alert. And from them sprang the segment of a race which was soon to grow far beyond the narrow barriers of the little island and to spread its splendid enthusiasm and energy far into a newborn land.

Among the very earliest of these Nantucket settlers was one Thomas Macy, who, from the beginning, took his fair place in the development of its fishing and its whaling industries. From him came a long line of descendants-a clean and sturdy record-and in the eighth generation of these there was born-on August 29, 1822-as the son of John and Eliza Myrick Macy, the man whose name chiefly concerns this book-Rowland Hussey Macy.

The record of this young man's youth is not so consequential as to be worth the setting down in detail. It is enough perhaps to know that at the age of fifteen he followed the common Nantucket custom of those days and went away to sea; upon a whaling voyage which was to consume four long years before again he saw the belfried white spire of the South Church rising through the trees back of the harbor and which was to make him in fact as well as in name, Captain Macy.

Three years later he married. He chose for his wife, Miss Louisa Houghton, of Fairlees, Vermont. Their pleasant married life continued for thirty-three years, until the day of Mr. Macy's death. Mrs. Macy lived for several years afterwards, dying in New York City in 1886. They had three children, one of whom, Mrs. James F. Sutton, the widow of the founder of the American Art Galleries in New York, still survives and is living at her suburban home in Westchester County.

Such is the simple statistical record of the man who lived to be one of New York's great merchant princes, who, upon the simple foundations of good merchandising, of strength, integrity and initiative, upbuilded one of the great and most distinctive businesses of the greatest city of the two American continents. Back of it is another record-not so simple or so quickly told. It is the story of successes and of sorrows, of triumphs and of failures-but in the end of the final triumph of New England conscience and energy and vision. It is with this last story that this book has its beginning.

It was not many moons after his marriage that young Macy started in business, in store-keeping in Boston. He was convinced that the sea was no calling for a married man, and, with the Yankee's native taste for trading, decided that the career of the merchant was the one that had the largest appeal to him. So he made immediate steps in that direction.

The record of that early Boston store is meagre. It is enough, perhaps, to say here and now that it failed, and that if its collapse had really dismayed the young merchant, this book would not have been written. As it was, the failure seemed but to stir him toward renewed efforts. He stood in the back of his little store and flipped a coin. It was a habit of his in all periods of indecision.

"Heads up, and I go north," said he. "Tails and next week I start south."

Heads came. And Rowland Macy and his wife went north. They went to Haverhill and there upon the bank of the Merrimac he set up his second store. This venture was far more successful than the first. It prospered, if not in large degree, at least far enough to encourage its proprietor. But he did not cease regretting that the coin had not come tails-up. Then he would have gone to New York. For New York, he was convinced, was about to become the undisputed metropolis of the land. Already it was going ahead, by leaps and bounds. And men who slipped into it quickly and who possessed the right qualities of commercial ability would go ahead quickly. Rowland Macy was convinced of this.

He was not a man who lost much time in vain repinings. To New York he would go. He suited action to thought, sold his Haverhill business at a fair profit, again bundled his wife and small family together and set out for the metropolis of the New World.

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The Romance of a Great Store

Contents

Chapter 1 The Ancestral Beginnings of Macy's

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