This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
In 1860, Margaret Getchell traveled to New York to introduce herself to a distant cousin — Rowland Hussey Macy, the founder of R.H. Macy’s. She was just 19 years old, and she was hoping he would give her a job.
Macy had opened his Manhattan department store two years earlier, and was selling an assortment of gloves, hosiery and millinery.
Getchell had a facility with numbers, so Macy hired her as a cash clerk. She excelled, and before long was training other clerks. Within three years, she was promoted to head bookkeeper.
But it was her ability to anticipate customers’ wants and needs that helped transform R.H. Macy’s into what it is today.
Through her vision, the store would add at least a dozen departments over a decade. She was responsible for the red star logo, which became the company’s emblem, and she developed a number of clever marketing schemes. She also served as a trailblazer for other women in the retail industry, eventually overseeing 200 employees in her role as a superintendent.
“Margaret paved the way for female leaders like me, along with many others at Macy’s, to thrive today,” Kathy Hilt, a division vice president at Macy’s flagship Herald Square store, said in an interview. “She had a knack for knowing what the world wanted and needed first, and led the foundation for Macy’s success and leadership. We are her legacy.”
Margaret Swain Getchell was born on July 16, 1841, in Fairhaven, Mass., to Phebe Ann (Pinkham) Getchell, a Nantucket native who would become a schoolteacher, and Barzillai Getchell, a sawmill operator from Brunswick, Maine. Margaret was one of four children; the youngest, George, died as an infant. She and her two older sisters, Rebecca and Susan, were raised by their mother after their father abandoned them, moving to Maine to start a family with another woman.
Margaret grew up on Nantucket, in Massachusetts, as Macy had 20 years earlier. The two shared a fondness for the island, which they bonded over when they first met.
On Nantucket, she attended the Fair Street School, where she earned exceptional grades. She was known around the island as a poetess, writing and reciting poems for friends and at public events.
She also had a proficiency with numbers, and became an arithmetic teacher after graduating from high school at 16. She taught in upstate New York, in Lansingburgh and Harlemville, and at the Lawrenceville Female Seminary in New Jersey.
But after years of suffering from a childhood injury that left her nearly blind in her right eye, she had surgery in the summer of 1860, when she was 19, to have the eye replaced with a prosthetic. During her convalescence, the doctor suggested that she reconsider her career: In his opinion, grading papers by candlelight would be too taxing on her vision.
Working in retail seemed a reasonable alternative.
Soon after meeting Macy, she became his close confidante and began to share her ideas for new lines of inventory for the store, which was then at the corner of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue.
Among her suggestions were children’s books and toys, which were a hit. Soda fountains were becoming all the rage in Europe, so Macy decided to install a marble and nickel-plated one; it was Getchell’s suggestion to put it near the back of the store, so customers would have to walk past rows of merchandise to get there, resulting in higher sales.
She also took note of a tattoo that Macy had on his wrist — a small red star that reminded him of his youth as a Nantucket whaler. He had begun to use a star in some of his newspaper advertisements, but Getchell took it a step further, suggesting that the store adopt a red star as the company logo, putting it on price tags and the company letterhead.
Decades before Macy’s developed its most ambitious marketing strategy — the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which debuted in 1924 — Getchell was known for her imaginative efforts to bring publicity to the store. In one notable example, she dressed two cats in baby-doll clothing, trained them to sleep in a pram and placed them in the store’s window display, tempting passers-by to come inside and buy matching dresses and carriages.
Stunts like this were in keeping with her personal motto: “Be everywhere, do everything, and never forget to astonish the customer.”
Getchell also knew how to keep customers coming back, by constantly bringing in new merchandise.
Never afraid of working long hours, she was the one to suggest that R.H. Macy’s stay open on Christmas Eve in 1868, catering to procrastinating shoppers. On that single day, according to Robert M. Grippo’s 2009 book, “Macy’s: The Store, The Star, The Story,” sales hit a record of $6,000.
For these innovations, Getchell was rewarded with a groundbreaking promotion: Six years into her tenure, she was named the first female superintendent of the store, second in command to Macy.
At the time, it wasn’t unusual for a woman to manage a small shop, but Getchell is believed to have been the first in the United States to oversee such a large retail establishment.
It was while she was working at R.H. Macy’s that she met the love of her life, a man named Abiel LaForge, who joined the company in 1869 as a lace buyer. The couple married in June of the same year.
LaForge was known to be charming, and a supportive husband, and he worked almost as hard as Getchell did. But while he was committed to the store’s growth, he did not bring the level of ingenuity that Getchell did.
Even so, when Macy needed successors, he looked to LaForge. In 1872, LaForge and Macy’s nephew Robert Macy Valentine were named partners in the business, which moved forward as R.H. Macy & Company. (The store’s name was shortened to Macy’s in 2007.)
Although Getchell worked at the store as a married woman — which was unusual for the time — and well into her six pregnancies, she was overlooked by her employer, who did not consider her qualified for partnership, for whatever reason.
In fact, after her husband became a partner, her compensation was eliminated, and she gradually stepped away from her work to care for her children, Laurence, Adrian, Lily, Rose and Leon. (Her first son, Louis, died as an infant.) Having a husband who owned a stake in the business was considered sufficient, as he would support the family with his earnings.
The closest that Getchell got to leading the store was for about three months in the spring of 1873 while her husband and Macy traveled to Europe on a buying trip. “There is not another woman in America who could do it,” her husband wrote in a letter to his sister.
Despite being snubbed for a partnership, Getchell was an influential figure, and the women who came after her were increasingly promoted to senior roles at the store.
“Miss Getchell’s striking ability convinced Captain Macy of women’s value in business,” Cora Crossman, a co-worker who led the mail-order department, told The New York Evening Journal in 1933, adding that Macy “hired women whenever possible.”
Getchell led an illustrious life, but not a long one. She died on Jan. 25, 1880, at her home in Manhattan. She was 38.
A few years before, in 1877, Macy had died of kidney failure; Getchell had lost her husband to tuberculosis the following year.
Her final years were marked by struggle: She suffered from neuralgia, or nerve pain, and died of heart failure, complicated by ovarian issues resulting from childbirth.
Her plot at Woodlawn Cemetery describes her as “mother.” To the employees at R.H. Macy’s, she was much more.
One co-worker quoted in Grippo’s book put it simply: She was “the brains of the establishment.”
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