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Cover Story Tere’s a hominess to the old-money brownstone on East 38th Street in Manhattan that John and Nancy Dunham journey to an astounding twelve to fifteen times a year. Close-quartered, warm and woody, unobtrusively ensconced in a quiet Eastside neighborhood within walking distance of the garment district, the Williams Club is decision central for the scions of what is probably Pennsylvania’s lone surviving family-owned department store. Here, usually in the junior suite with the circa1821 soaring ceiling, marble fireplace and comfy low-key sofa, John and Nancy—and often their daughter Ann—review the day’s selection of the blouses, coats, pants, capris, shorts, shirts, dresses and skirts that within two or three months will hang in Dunham’s Department Store, the 30,000-square-foot, 102-year-old family fortress on Main Street in downtown Wellsboro. As much as Dunham’s is a rock-solid Wellsboro tradition, the four-and-a-half-hour drive from Wellsboro to Manhattan and the two-to-three-day stay at the Williams College alumni residence is a Dunham family tradition. Their forays into the uber-urban New York retail world—and similar shopping sojourns to Las Vegas, Chicago and even Indianapolis—provide stock for what John Dunham calls “the operation.” It’s an oddly dispassionate word to describe the heart and soul of a family, a town, and a national memory. Everyone knows that downtown department stores—especially family-owned downtown department stores—are nearly extinct. The Dunhams themselves joke about it. “We’re an endangered species,” John quips. “It’s lonely out there,” adds Nancy, with a wry smile. They are nothing if not realists —staying afloat in the tsunami of change that has washed away so many of their compatriots requires sure footing. Dunham’s steely, bottom-line vision of the thing has probably kept the store going. If, over the years, he and his brothers Jim, who retired in 2000, and Bob, who runs the furniture store, had had a more sentimental take on the family inheritance, it might not have survived the Wal-Mart-ization of downtown retailing and the seismic, tectonic shifts in a manufacturing world gone global and hugely corporate. Everything has changed around the grocery store on Main Street that Roy J. and Fannie Treat Dunham bought a half interest in back in 1905. Everything but their dream. That, miraculously, has grown and morphed with the times. Today a fourth generation Dunham, Ann, who is thirty-three, is being groomed to merchandise into the future. And that, when you think about it, is pretty amazing. In its striped awninged Mom and Pop splendor, the sprawling three-story Dunham’s Department Store survives in part because it stands alone. And as a survivor, it is a novelty, a tourist attraction, a time trip into a yesterday when shop owners actually knew their customers and shopped specifically for them. “Families serving families” is how John likes to describe it. Many Tioga County visitors from Rochester, Corning, Lancaster and Philly, sick of the sameness of chain stores from Anywhere, America, include a stop at Dunham’s on their sightseeing itinerary so they can wander the close-knit aisles and remember. “Tourists who grew up in towns our size or larger had their own department store. They come back here to grab a little bit of nostalgia,” says Ann, who remembers sorting hangers and sticking Christmas bows on packages at the store as a kid. Out of towners and appreciative locals can walk down a flight of stairs to the Junior Department, up a flight to check out the toys, browse through greeting cards and the men’s shoe department on the main floor, and then lounge at a table in the coffee shop and stare out the big picture window onto Main Street And, while they’re at it, they can munch a $2.99 egg-salad sandwich, with or without chopped olives mixed in. Nostalgia? You want nostalgia? History is everywhere. Hallmark cards are sold in an area that dates back to 1913, when John’s grandparents rebuilt the original grocery store after a fire. Women’s clothes are housed in the three-story expansion constructed in 1932, at the height of the Depression. The coffee shop is part of a late century 1985 expansion. People, too, are part of the history. Employee turnover is not a problem. Ken Shrawder, the men’s and domestics buyer, has worked the aisles and stock rooms at Dunham’s for twenty-five years., starting in a work-study program as a high school senior. Brenda Coder in cosmetics and jewelry has greeted customers for twenty-six years. She joined the forty-employee staff when her kids started school. The sportswear buyer retired after forty years. Nancy, a speech therapist by training, married into the store thirty-nine years ago. “We came back from our honeymoon on a Wednesday and on Saturday the sidewalk salesperson didn’t show up and John taught me what to do,” she says. From that inauspicious beginning she worked in accessories, handbags and jewelry and gradually—like everyone else—worked her way up. “When the kids were little I’d come over at night and worked on the tickets and stuff.” Ever the pragmatist, John monitors tourists’ reactions to determine “what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong.” His favorite is this one: “A father and his young boy were walking around the store and the kid said excitedly, ‘Dad! This is just like Disney World!’ And the father said, ‘Yeah, but it’s real.’” How Disney is the store’s nostalgic niche? Very. Some family-owned stores call themselves department stores, but they’re really specialty stores. They don’t have elevators and whole separate floors of merchandise. They don’t sell to men, women, and children and include housewares as well as fashions. An association of family-owned department stores that John and Nancy joined decades ago has withered. “There were never more than fifteen to eighteen members at one time, but we’d get together at each other’s stores and talk about what we were doing,” recalls John. “There’s Wilson’s in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and one in Wooster, Ohio, but that’s actually owned by a group of people who saw their local department store go down the drain and bought it.” With its period-style gaslights guarding Main Street, its treasure of Victorian houses, and its welcoming town square, Wellsboro is home to some 3,328 souls, according to the 2000 census, nestled amid the Endless Mountains. It is probably one of the prettiest small towns in America “due to a lot of good planning and luck,” says John. With Dunham’s Department Store still present as an anchor and no hideously out of place new skyscraper to mar its feng shui, the downtown seems spared the inevitable poisons of “progress.” Change, though, is another story. As always, Dunham takes inventory. “Local drugstores have been taken over by chains. Our five and dime store has gone the way of all five and dime stores. We lost the downtown sporting goods store, two hardware stores and a furniture store.” It’s all those years tallying the day’s—and the decade’s—receipts. What goes in, what goes out. QRs (quick replacements), rack management, delivery flows, pre-packs. Underneath the surface charm of being small and almost old-fashioned, lies—as in Disney World—another very modern reality. The foundation for all that nostalgia may be “old bones,” but state-of-the-art technology keeps them flexible.
Bob Romano, a vice president at Erika, a division of Jones New York, which produces a moderately priced women’s wear label popular with Dunham’s customers, greets John and Nancy on a recent buying trip. He’s got not so good news. The pending sale of the company did not go through and its owner is consolidating. Amid layoffs and general belt-tightening, the company is cutting smaller clients from its roster. But Romano, who has had a relationship with the Dunham’s for thirty years, has good news too. “You are the only one of the smaller accounts we’re selling to,” he says. “I didn’t want you guys to go by the wayside like a lot of smaller accounts.” He can only ship Missy sizes in the Erika label this spring, but he can offer Willow Bay, a private label used by a large Midwestern retailer. It’s okay to sell that store’s private label to Dunham’s because Wellsboro is far from the Nevada, Idaho, and Nebraska outlets of the mother ship. “It is a Midwestern account which is also a Pennsylvania, ‘Coldwater Creek’ feel.” Romano has promised “to get you guys up and running for spring.” There follows a presentation of clothes samples, casual camp shirts and capris, skirts and shorts in sun-kissed coral, placid blue and Monet prints. This is the way it is now. Fewer vendors, King Kong-sized retailers inflated by unparalleled mergers and acquisitions that can, and often do, suck out all the air in a room. Most of the “big guys” have their own private label clothes that manufacturers cannot sell to anyone else. Wellsboro women like to wear dresses. “What you’d call church dresses,” says Nancy. Easter is early this year and the pressure is on to come up with captivating new styles. But that’s gotten harder. “Our dress buyer used to pick out individual dresses. You can’t do that anymore because everything is made off shore and we can’t be in the market all the time. We used to go through 500 dresses from thirty different vendors in a season. Now we go through 250 to 300 dresses from maybe ten to twelve vendors. “We don’t have our own import program, which is what all the big guys have,” notes John. About five years ago Nancy decided to visit a Fifth Avenue accessory manufacturer she was fond of. “I got off the elevator on their floor and no one was there. I mean no one. It was spooky,” she says. Favorite labels can disappear from one season to the next. Smaller clients such as Dunham’s use buying offices such as Henry Donegar to shop a season and place an order. “It’s gotten to be a small fraternity,” says John. “There used to be twelve or thirteen buying offices. Now there’s just the one.” Donegar’s gives PowerPoint presentations on trends and colors, lets clients know which manufacturers have certain styles, and they usually have samples the client can touch to determine fabric weight and hold up on a hanger. “A lot of merchandising is done off a computer screen anymore. We like to look at the goods,” says Nancy. “We try to merchandise to our customers. The bigger stores have an ‘A-B-C-D’ pack based on the size of the stores. An ‘A’ store may get thirty of one item, a ‘B’ store more or less,” says John. “It’s kind of a pre-packaged formula.” Dunham’s merchandising strategy is to be broad and not so deep “so everyone doesn’t see themselves coming and going down the street,” John says. “We’re inclined to buy smaller quantities of more items so we have a broader selection than most of the national chains. They try to zoom in and give a narrow, deep assortment.” If it seems like there’s a science to all this, there is. And father and daughter share a solid education in it. Both graduated from college with retail merchandising degrees. Both interned at “the big guys”—John at Kauffman’s in Pittsburgh and Higbee Co. in Cleveland (Kauffman’s became part of May Company, which became part of Macy’s. Higbee was absorbed the same way.)
“I just figured I might as well do it for myself,” she says. “My whole thing was that (working for someone else) I couldn’t make the decisions that drove my business. I was someone else’s workhorse.” Retail, she says, “is in your blood. It’s not a career, it’s a lifestyle. It’s your holidays. It’s your nights and weekends. You have to like it to be in it.” Her husband, Air Force Captain Joe Rawson, “knew I was in retail when he married me so he knew weekends wouldn’t be fun.” Ann, an animated young woman who is as grounded as her parents, has introduced a podcast and store Web site to the advertising mix. She works with the new computer system, buys for the junior, toys, and gifts department and is the store’s merchandise manager, training new sales associates and overseeing product placement. Her sister Ellen, thirty-seven, a lawyer in Maryland and the mother of two toddlers, writes the store newsletter for her. “I can’t get bored because I’m always thinking of six months from now,” she laughs. It’s that odd retail timetable that folks such as the Dunhams live on. Your calendar may say December but to them it’s late spring and they’re already thinking about the faux suede and rouched blouses they need to order for fall. Ann’s not too worried about the future—hers or Dunham’s. She’s flexible. It’s flexible. Always has been. It’s the family way. Dunham retailers in the past 100 years have “We’ve always been able to change with the times,” Ann says. “I think probably in the future we’ll be there.”
100 Years and Counting... 1908 The couple buy out Hammond’s interest and become sole owners. They expand the store to include farm supplies, crockery, lamps and tobacco. 1913 The grocery store is badly damaged by a fire that started in the restaurant next door. The couple temporarily moves the store to East Avenue while they demolish the original building and rebuild. Roy launches a successful bartering operation with local farmers and becomes a major shipper of poultry and fresh eggs. Next, the couple builds a feed store across the alley, and connect it to the main store by an overhead walkway. World War I Roy packs train boxcars with hay, eggs and maple syrup and ships them to New York restaurants and hotels, including the Algonquin Hotel. The New York Police Department horses get Dunham’s 1919 The store suffers major flood damage. Once again Roy and Fannie rebuild and expand. They buy the building that currently houses the coffee shop and start selling dry goods and clothing. They rename the 1929 Roy and Fannie add the hardware store on Waln Street to their growing repertoire of businesses. Their son, Frank, joins the operation. Roy concentrates on the hardware and farm supply end of the business. During the Great Depression, the Dunhams create the “Rolling Store,” a modified truck packed with dry goods, hardware and groceries that travels to farmers and neighbors who can’t get into town easily. The Rolling Store makes its rounds around Tioga County until World War II gas and tire rationing put a stop to it. 1932 Roy and his son Frank build the present three-story building on Main Street. 1937 Roy dies and Frank takes over the business, which includes hardware, milling, and farm supplies. Fannie stays in charge of the office. Frank is particularly fond on the food business. He makes his own doughnuts, pancake flour, potato chips, mayonnaise, and peanut butter. He roasts his own peanuts and coffee. 1952. The feed store is expanded to Pearl Street and building materials are added. 1955 Frank’s oldest son, Jim, takes over the department store operations. 1961 Jim’s brother, John, joins him in the department store. 1966 The Dunhams’ youngest brother, Bob, takes over the operation of Dunham’s Furniture, and still runs that business. 1967 The feed store was converted to the present furniture store. 1970 Just a month shy of her 90th birthday, Fannie becomes ill while working in the office. She dies the next day. 1973 Frank closes the grocery store operation and decides to run the Arcadia Theatre and Penn Wells Hotel. 1974 Frank dies. Jim and John expand the department store into the grocery building and create a Junior Department. 1985 Jim and John construct a new building that now houses the men’s and shoe departments and the coffee shop. 2000 Jim retires and John and Nancy buy the department store from him. Their daughter Ann joins the operation. 2003 The Dunhams redesign the children’s and lingerie departments. |
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And flexibility is key to retail survival. 
Ann worked at Dillard’s in North Carolina, Lord & Taylor and interned at a New York buying office before opting to come home.
bartered with live and dressed poultry, shipped hay to the New York Police Department to feed their horses, supplied maple syrup to the Algonquin Hotel in New York, cut their own meat, made their own peanut butter and mayonnaise, sold furniture, farm supplies and ladies’ hosiery. During the Depression they took their wares to neighbors in a goods-laden truck they called the “Rolling Store.” Who knows what they’ll do in the next hundred years.
