Montgomery Ward
retailer in the United States
Montgomery Ward is the name of two U.S. retail corporations, one of which is defunct. The original Montgomery Ward & Co. was a mail-order business and later a department store chain that operated between 1872 and 2001; its common nickname was "Monkey Wards". The current Montgomery Ward Inc. is an online shopping and mail-order catalog retailer that started three years after the original Montgomery Ward went out of business.
Original Montgomery Ward (1872–2001)
Company origins
Aaron Montgomery Ward started his business in Chicago; conflicting reports place his first office either in a single room at 825 North Clark Street or in a loft above a livery stable on Kinzie Street, between Rush and State Streets.
In 1883, the company's catalog had grown to 240 pages and 10,000 items. In 1896, Ward encountered its first serious competition in the mail order business, when Richard Warren Sears introduced his first general catalog. In 1900, Ward had total sales of $8.7 million, compared to $10 million for Sears, and both companies vied for dominance during much of the 20th century. By 1904, Ward had expanded such that it mailed three million catalogs, weighing 4 lb (1.8 kg) each, to customers.
“Montgomery Ward” enters the record as retailer in the United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Montgomery, Ward and retailer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Montgomery Ward” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Montgomery, Ward and retailer provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3246929. VIAF identifies the subject as 134855151. The Library of Congress control number is n79075632. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1872, 2001, 1883 and 1896.
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This entry incorporates text from “Montgomery Ward” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.