The Erisman Grocery Company

Growing up in Ft. Worth, Texas, I was vaguely aware that my great-great-grandfather, Richard Y. Erisman, had once run a grocery store in the city. As a child, I supposed it was like the grocery stores I knew, where you navigated aisles of food and other products with a grocery cart and took your purchases to the cashier for checkout.

Erisman Grocery Co. listing. 1909-10. Fort Worth City Directory. 15th Edition. Morrison & Fourmy Directory Co.

Like those stores, I assumed the aisles containing hardware and kitchen utensils would have been blocked off on Sundays to accommodate Texas’s Blue Law. [1] When I recently found a picture of the Erisman Grocery Store, circa 1909, I laughed at myself for having envisioned such a relatively modern supermarket. And while I’m certain the Erisman Grocery Store was closed on Sundays, it would not have been to comply with the Blue Law, which wasn’t enacted until 1961.

Prior to the Civil War, most Americans lived in rural areas and had little need for a grocery store because they either produced their own food through farming and hunting or bartered their skills or surplus food for what they needed. In more urban areas of the country, where food had to be brought in from the nearby countryside, groceries were sold primarily at public markets, where different vendors sold the type of food in which they specialized (Mayo 1993). [2] In rural areas, the crucial retailer was the general store, where people would purchase items that could not easily be locally produced, including metal tools, cooking utensils, ammunition, cloth, sewing notions, patent medicines, whiskey, and tobacco (Gale n.d.). The food items such stores did carry tended to be non-perishable and imported or hard to produce, such as coffee, tea, cocoa, rice, sugar, molasses, and spices (Mayo 1993).

Social trends in the late 19th century led to the development of the grocery store as a standard retail outlet. Industrialization encouraged people to move to rapidly developing urban areas and to take factory jobs rather than farming. It also greatly expanded the availability of mass-produced products, including food items, and these products were far more easily distributed with the expansion of the railroads. Existing public markets couldn’t meet the demand of the growing urban population, and newer cities often didn’t even have a public market. People have to eat, of course, so enterprising storekeepers saw the potential of opening neighborhood grocery stores to accommodate city-dwellers (Mayo 1993).

 Richard Y. Erisman was one such entrepreneur. In 1880, he was newly married and farming in Salt River, Missouri, but by 1887, he, his wife and three young children, and his brother John had moved to Ft. Worth, where Richard and John entered the grocery business. Ft. Worth was a good choice for a young man making his way in the world. The city began life as an abandoned army post in 1853 and was incorporated in 1873, at which time its population was around 4,000. What put Ft. Worth on the map was the cattle drives that came through the area on the way from South Texas to Kansas along the Chisholm Trail. Ft. Worth became a stop on the Texas & Pacific Railroad in 1876, and by the 1890s, the city had its own meat-packing facility and a growing population of 23,000 (Schmelzer 1952).

Richard and John started their grocery careers working for the Southern Union Tea Company, selling tea, coffee, and spices, with Richard as manager and John as clerk. Tea and coffee importers were a crucial force in the grocery world because their wares had to be imported, and several such companies expanded into grocery stores around the turn of the century. The A&P grocery chain, for example, began as the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (Mayo 1993). By 1896, Richard and John had struck out on their own, opening the Ft. Worth Tea & Coffee Company in premises on the edge of the rapidly growing Fairmount district, south of downtown Ft. Worth. By 1905, the store had become the Erisman Grocery Company, selling groceries and feed, with Richard and John as the proprietors and Richard’s three sons working as clerks. Over the next few years, the family added a bakery and meat market to their store, consolidating a range of comestibles into a single location, a practice that could be seen across the United States at this time (Mayo 1993).

Erisman Grocery Company, Ft. Worth, Texas, c. 1909. Family photo.

Running a grocery store at the turn of the century was a complex and labor-intensive undertaking. Goods for the store were ordered from wholesalers, whose traveling salesman, or “drummers,” visited stores to take orders from the proprietors. For the first time, brand names started to become important, as wholesalers competed for retailer customers and consumers began to ask for products by name.

Advertising played a role in this process, with wholesalers buying newspaper ads that listed the local retailers that carried their products. Once goods arrived at the store, they had to be stored and then retrieved for customers. The grocery stores of this era were full-service affairs, where the customer asked a clerk for the desired product and the clerk brought the product to the counter and packaged it for the customer (Mayo 1993).

Fort Worth Cotton Oil Company advertisement. Fort Worth Star-Telegram. May 15, 1910. Page 5.

Grocery stores, like the general stores from which they developed, also served as hubs of community life. Local news was passed along, fraternal organizations held meetings, and concerned citizens addressed the issues of the day.  In 1903, the Erisman store hosted a neighborhood meeting at which a committee was appointed “to confer with the city council with reference to devising ways and means of establishing a system of sewerage over that portion of the city” (“For Sewerage System” 1903). The store also served as a polling place during primary elections and was the location of a city fire alarm.

Richard Erisman’s experiences in running a grocery store show many of the challenges faced by storekeepers of this era. In 1911, “burglars entered with a skeleton key and took $5 from the cash register, which they forced open” (“Boys Are Suspected” 1911). The next year, a six-week strike by the baker’s union caused a disruption for the store (““Bakers and Their Employers Agree” 1912). In 1913, Richard was one of the leading opponents of a proposed city ordinance intended to standardize the weight and price of loaves of bread, which bakers argued would put them out of business when four prices fluctuated (“Bakers in Clash” 1913).

Perhaps the biggest challenge faced by Richard Erisman came about as a result of the Pure and Food and Drug Act. This law, passed by Congress in 1906, came about as a result of a national outcry over poor hygiene in the food industry as well as the deliberate contamination of products to increase profits. Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, chief of the Bureau of Chemistry for the federal Department of Agriculture, was a leading proponent of the bill, testing out potentially dangerous additives on his volunteer “poison squad,” and these experiments, together with the work of muckrakers like Upton Sinclair, raised public awareness of the dangers of unsanitary and adulterated food (Wood 1985).

Following passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, Texas, like many states, created the position of dairy and food commissioner. This position when to Dr. J.S. Abbott, a graduate of the Universities of Mississippi and Chicago, who set out to improve food safety in the state until being hired away by the federal government in 1914 to run what eventually became the Food and Drug Administration (Couture 2020).  Abbott advocated for women as food inspectors, arguing that they “would be better able to determine whether dairies, restaurants and hotels are in sanitary condition” (“Women Inspectors Needed” 1912), and he hired several women to serve in this role. He also seems to have been genuinely concerned about food safety and launched numerous campaigns across the state, including investigating the widespread use of adulterants (and cocaine) in soft drinks (Couture 2020). It was one such campaign, which instituted rules regarding the delivery of bread from bakeries, that caught up with Richard Erisman in 1913, when Abbott filed a complaint alleging that employees of the Erisman Bakery “delivered bread to customers without using wrappers, covered baskets or anything else that protected it” (“Pure Food Campaign Planned” 1913).

“Dr. J.S. Abbott.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram. April 12, 1912. Page 11. “In the Courts.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram. March 14, 1913. Page 7.

Without a trip to Ft. Worth to go through court records, I haven’t been able to determine exactly what happened with the charges against Richard. The result can’t have been too dire since the store remained open until after Richard’s death in 1918. I suspect that the store’s fate was determined, not by Abbott’s food safety crusade, but by competition with Piggly Wiggly, which opened a store in Ft. Worth in 1918. Piggly Wiggly, established in 1916 in Memphis, Tennessee, was the world’s first self-service grocery store chain, complete with multiple check-out stands. This new approach revolutionized the grocery industry, reducing labor costs and allowing retailers to sell a wider variety of products. Putting the shopper in charge of selecting among different products also greatly accelerated the growing importance of brand names and advertising (Mayo 1993). In the march toward the supermarkets of today, Piggly Wiggly was the future, and small stores like the Erisman Grocery Company had little chance to succeed.

[1] Texas’s Blue Law, which was repealed in 1985, banned sales of alcoholic beverages and 42 different non-food items on consecutive weekend days. As a result, most stores closed on Sundays, although grocery stores sometimes just limited Sunday sales to food products. Bizarrely, the repeal didn’t cover car dealerships, which are still required to close on either Saturday or Sunday in Texas.

[2] Many of these public markets are still in operation today. Two of the oldest are Lancaster Central Market in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (established in 1730), and Lexington Market in Baltimore, Maryland (established in 1782).

Piggly Wiggly advertisement. Fort Worth Star-Telegram. August 9, 1918. Page 11.

Works Cited

“Bakers and Their Employers Agree; Strike Now Over.” May 26, 1912. Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. Page 12.

“Bakers in Clash Over Bread Law.” July 22, 1913. Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. Page 20.

“Boys Are Suspected of Four Burglaries.” April 14, 1911. Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. Page 2.

Couture, Leslie. 2020. “Dipping, the Soft Drink Situation and Other Offal Things: Texas’ First Food Inspector.” Denton, TX: Denton Public Library.

“For Sewerage System: Enthusiastic Meeting of Citizens in the Eighth Ward.” August 7, 1903. Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. Page 6.

Gale, Neal. n.d. “The Term "Grocery" Had a Different Meaning Prior to the 1850s.” Digital Research Library of Illinois History Journal.

Mayo, James M. 1993. The American Grocery Store: The Business Evolution of an Architectural Space. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

“Pure Food Campaign Planned by Abbott.” May 14, 1913. Ft. Worth Record-Telegram. Page 3.

Schmelzer, Janet. 1952. “A Comprehensive History of Fort Worth, Texas.” Handbook of Texas. Austin, TX: Texas State Historical Association.

“Women Inspectors Needed.” September 24, 1912. Austin American-Statesman. Page 4.

Wood, Donna J. 1985. “The Strategic Use of Public Policy: Business Support for the 1906 Food and Drug Act.” The Business History Review 59 (3): 403-32.