John Wanamaker - Biography

Biography

Wanamaker was born on July 11, 1838.

He opened his first store in 1861, called "Oak Hall", at Sixth and Market Streets in Philadelphia, adjacent to the site of George Washington's Presidential home. Oak Hall grew substantially based on Wanamaker's then-revolutionary principle: "One price and goods returnable". In 1869, he opened his second store at 818 Chestnut Street and capitalizing on his own name (due the untimely death of his brother-in-law), and growing reputation, renamed the company John Wanamaker & Co. In 1875 he purchased an abandoned railroad depot and converted it into a large store, called John Wanamaker & Co. "The Grand Depot". Wanamaker's is considered the first department store in Philadelphia.

In 1860 John Wanamaker married Mary Erringer Brown (1839–1920). They had six children (two of them died in childhood):

• Thomas Brown Wanamaker (1862–1908), married Mary Lowber Welch (1864–1929)
• Lewis Rodman Wanamaker (1863–1928), married Fernanda de Henry
• Horace Wanamaker (born 1864, died in infancy during the Civil War)
• Harriett E. Wanamaker (1865–1870)
• Mary Brown Wanamaker (1871–1954) married Barclay Harding Warburton I, father of Barclay Harding Warburton II
• Elizabeth "Lillie" Wanamaker (1876–1927) married Norman McLeod

John Wanamaker's son Thomas B. Wanamaker, who specialized in store financial matters, purchased a Philadelphia newspaper called The North American in 1899 and irritated his father by giving regular columns to radical intellectuals such as single-taxer Henry George, Jr., socialist Henry John Nelson (who later became Emma Goldman's lawyer), and socialist Caroline H. Pemberton. The younger Wanamaker also began publishing a Sunday edition, which offended his father's Biblically informed religious views.

His younger son Rodman Wanamaker, a Princeton graduate, lived in France early in his career and is credited with creating a demand for French luxury goods that persists to this day. Rodman Wanamaker was credited with the artistic emphasis that gave the Wanamaker stores their cachet and also was a patron of fine music, organizing spectacular organ and orchestra concerts in the Wanamaker Philadelphia and New York stores under music director Alexander Russell.