Sears Mail Order Business (connection to the railroad)

Sears, Roebuck and Company, colloquially known as Sears, is a chain of department stores founded by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck in 1893.

In 1863, Richard Warren Sears was born in Stewartville, Minnesota to a wealthy family.  In 1879, Sears' father died shortly after losing the family fortune in a speculative stock deal.  Sears moved across the state to work as a railroad Station Agent in North Redwood, as well as in Minneapolis. While in North Redwood, a jeweler received an impressive shipment of watches which were unwanted. Sears purchased them, then sold them at a low price to the station agents and made a considerable profit.

He started a mail-order watch business in Minneapolis in 1886, calling it "R.W. Sears Watch Company." Within the first year, he met Alvah C. Roebuck, a watch repairman. In 1887, Sears and Roebuck relocated the business to Chicago. That same year, R.W. Sears Watch Company published Richard Sears' first mail-order catalog, offering watches, diamonds, and jewelry. In 1889 Sears sold his business for US $100,000 ($2.8 million today) and relocated to Iowa, intending to be a rural banker.

Sears returned to Chicago in 1892 and established a new mail-order firm, again selling watches and jewelry, with Roebuck as his partner, operating as the A. C. Roebuck watch company. In 1893, they renamed the company to Sears, Roebuck & Company and began to diversify the product lines offered in their catalogs. Before the Sears catalog, farmers near small rural towns usually purchased supplies—often at high prices and on credit—from local general stores with narrow selections of goods. Prices were negotiated and relied on the storekeeper's estimate of a customer's creditworthiness.

Sears took advantage of this by publishing catalogs offering customers a wider selection of products at clearly stated prices. By 1894, the Sears catalog had grown to 322 pages, including many new items such as sewing machines, bicycles, sporting goods, automobiles. By 1895, the company was producing a 532-page catalog. By 1896, dolls, stoves, and groceries had been added to the catalog.

In areas dominated by Jim Crow racial segregation, the Sears Catalogue was a vital retail alternative to local white-population-dominated stores, bypassing the stores' frequent intention to deny them fair access to their merchandise.

You could even buy a mail order home kit from the Sears catalog and Brooksville has one of these houses.  It is located at 201 S Main Street and assembled in 1925.  The house was shipped by rail to the Russell Street Train Depot and then transported to the building site by a 1920 Model T Truck.