Huntington Hartford - Ancestry

Ancestry

His grandfather George Huntington Hartford and his uncles John Augustine Hartford (1872–1951) and George Ludlum Hartford (1864–1957) privately owned the A&P Supermarket, which at one point had 16,000 stores in the U.S. and was the largest retail empire in the world. In the 1950s A&P was the world's largest grocer and, next to General Motors, it sold more goods than any other company in the world. Time magazine reported that A&P had sales of $2.7 billion in 1950. The Time magazine published on November 13, 1950 had both John Augustine Hartford and George Ludlum Hartford on its front cover. Time said that "the familiar red-front A & P store is the real melting pot of the community, patronized by the boss's wife and the baker's daughter, the priest and the policeman. To foreigners A & P's vast supermarkets are among the wonders of the age; to the U.S. middle class, they are one of the direct roads to solvency. 'Going to the A & P' is almost an American tribal rite.'" In 2007, A&P had revenue of 6.9 Billion. A&P is considered an American icon. The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial on December 10, 2010, said that "A&P was as well known as McDonalds or Google is today" and that A&P was "Walmart before Walmart." "To immortalize outstanding American merchants", Joseph Kennedy in 1953 commissioned a bronze bust of George Huntington Hartford, four times life size along with 7 other men, which would come to be known as the Merchandise Mart Hall of Fame in Chicago.