Montgomery Ward New London - Throwback Thursday

Montgomery Ward New London - Throwback Thursday

  June 27, 2018    Robby S.

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©CaldorWards4

Howdy everyone!

So here's a tale about a little chain you might or might not know about called Montgomery Ward (of course you've heard of it that's sarcasm!)



While going through some newspapers from the 1970s, I kept stumbling across ads for a Montgomery Ward store at 200 State Street in New London - odd, since I didn't think there were any Wards stores in this area of the country besides Lechmere.

After seeing the street address on the ad, I went over to Google Maps Street View to see if there were any prominent remnants from the old store. Unfortunately, all that remains at 200 State Street is a small office for Frontier Communications

Just out of curiosity, I went over to Google Images to see if I could find any pictures from the old store, but all that kept showing up were these pictures of a mosaic at 123 Bank Street, which is a few blocks south of State Street. This got me really confused since there were a lot of sources claiming for there to have been a Bank Street store while the ads from the 1970s said that the store was on State Street.

Apparently, the mosaic in question turned out to be what's known as the Spirit of Progress, which in the early part of the 1900s was a staple of the Montgomery Ward Company. The mosaic was prominently displayed on a large number of Wards stores across the country, and pretty much guaranteed that indeed at one point there were two Wards stores in New London: one on State Street and one on Bank Street

Spirit of Progress in New London - Source Unknown

Further backing up this idea is this ad that I found in the 4 January 1930 edition of the New London day where a Montgomery Ward ad for 123 Bank Street is found on one of the paper's pages.

Since the mosaic was embedded in the architecture of the building, it's likely that it was placed there upon the building's construction. To check the date of its construction, I headed over to the New London department of Property Records and put in the address of the mosaic and sure enough that building was constructed in 1910. I also checked the date of construction of the building at 200 State Street, which was in 1973. This leads me to conclude that the New London Wards opened on Bank Street in 1910 and then in 1973 moved over to a new location on State Street.

Anyways, I thought that was kind of a nifty find considering how long ago these stores were in business. I cannot say enough how awesome the Google Newspaper Archives are and it may be worth a look to see if one of your local newspapers is archived. If you want to check it out, follow the link below!

https://news.google.com/newspapers

Anyways, until next time!

~RS