Word: hartfords
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...fantastic story about the company is that the Rockefellers own the A. & P. stores. That is false. They do not, nor have they ever. The A. & P. stores are owned by two sons of the man who founded them, the late George Huntington Hartford...
George Huntington Hartford, a "down-easter" born at Augusta, Me., went to Manhattan before the Civil War and there operated a modest hide and leather business from his store on Vesey street. A neighboring store keeper, one Gilman from Bridgeport, Conn., was in the spice and tea business, and in 1859 the first Hartford went to work for Gilman as store manager. Gilman soon withdrew from the business. He had a peculiarity that doubtless was most trying to Hartford. He feared death so terribly that he would endure near him no mirrors in which he might note the shriveling...
...Under Hartford's management the spice and tea business prospered and in 1864 he organized it as the Great American Tea Co. The idea of neighborhood stores came to him. Promptly he opened such stores in scattered parts of New York and Brooklyn and by the end of the Civil War he had several doing well...
...late James Jerome Hill drove the last spike into the ties of the Northern Pacific railroad and the Atlantic coast became tied thereby to the Pacific coast by steel rails. It was a dramatic event, which kept the entire country talking. Hartford capitalized the "news" interest by renaming his company the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. In 1912 telephones were taken out of A. & P. stores. Credit and delivery privileges were no longer granted customers. These changes brought an increase in business of 65%. Three years ago the company was reincorporated as the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. of America...
...original Hartford died in 1917. Two of his three sons carried on the business; George is Chairman, John is President.* They are unique: although they are heads of a mammoth nation-wide company dealing in vital commodities, they are permitted to lead a life of almost absolute seclusion from the public. Thus a minimum of publicity ensued from a romantic interlude in which President John Hartford was divorced from his wife, married his wife's modiste, remarried his first wife, as a result of which the modiste-wife told great tales of living at the rate...