By 1867, Atlanta’s rebuilding efforts following the Civil War were well underway. Whitehall Street, the former main business district, had been reduced to a smoldering ruin with only a single intact block remaining by the time Sherman’s forces departed, but had started a rapid rebuilding almost as soon as Johnston’s armies finally surrendered a half-year later. A German-Jewish immigrant from Hungary, Morris Rich, arrived in the rebuilding city after wandering through Tennessee and Georgia peddling various small goods. Something about Atlanta appealed to Rich enough to inspire him to put down some roots there.
Barely three years after the Battle of Atlanta, and the subsequent near-total arson destruction of the city, there was a rapidly growing commercial business boom going on, primarily due to the influx of Northern “Carpetbaggers” and the Southern “scalawags” who did business with them. The city was able to report that nearly 250 businesses had reopened or established themselves since the end of the war, helping to reverse the severe economic depression that had gripped Atlanta since the middle of the war years. Rich chose a vacant lot on Whitehall Street to build his first store, the avenue that had been the pre-war central business district. Lacking the funds and the time to build a more substantial structure, he borrowed $500 from his brother William, and set up a hasty rough-sawed pine framed, twenty by seventy-five foot building, at what today would be directly next to Plaza Park. Rich remarked later that for days before he opened his store, it had been raining torrentially, and he risked some of his small remaining capital to lay down a board sidewalk over the thick, red clay mud side of the street, so his potential customers might find an easier path to his door.
On May 28, 1867, “M. Rich Dry Goods” opened its doors for the first time, and despite the postwar economic problems, customers did indeed find a way to his door. At first, his bestselling goods were inexpensive corsets and hosiery, for the proper but broke ladies of the rebuilding city. The brief wartime boomtown emphasis on luxury goods had given way to far more mundane concerns over iron pots and washboards, which Rich soon stocked in affordable abundance. His small store had serious competition from larger and much better stocked establishment popping up all along Whitehall street, but Rich was one of the few that extended “market credit” for anything in his store, an old farming tradition where bills would be settled once a year, after the crops had come in. Rich was soon able to hire his first employee, his cousin Adolph Teitlebaum, but lived with William for a number of years, pouring his profits into the business. Four years later, his younger brother Emanuel joined the growing business, and a third brother Daniel in 1876, prompting the rename to M. Rich & Brothers Company.
The Rich brothers soon outgrew the first crude building, continually adding on, expanding, and moving to what became their flagship store on Peachtree Street in 1881, which one Atlanta Constitution reporter tagged as the “handsomest store in Atlanta.” The first business in Atlanta to have large plate glass windows along its frontage on Peachtree, it inspired the first “window shoppers” by displaying good and fashions in these dedicated window displays. In 1924, with business still increasing steadily, the Rich brothers moved to their final main location, a six story, $1.5 million edifice at Broad and Alabama street, connected to annexes along adjoining Whitehall and Hunter Streets.
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, It Happened in Atlanta, which is available for pre-order now at Amazon.com.
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