Eagle Feathers #238– A ribbon, a globe and a star

By Bob (Monty) Doherty

The year was 1841, one year before Somerville broke away from Charlestown, when the barely nineteen-year-old Eben Dyer Jordan completed his first transaction. The sale was of one yard of cherry-colored ribbon made to a young girl who was his first customer.

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One hundred and seventy years ago in 1851, Eben and a fellow shop owner, Benjamin L. Marsh, went into business together. The result of the partnership between these two friends created the largest department store in New England, Jordan Marsh Company, with its policy of “the customer is always right.” Through the years, this Yankee household name of “Jordan’s” expanded and offered the most extensive array of merchandise in New England for the buyer and his home.
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Eben Dyer Jordan

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Not everything went well for Mr. Jordan. In 1872, the year Somerville became a city, he led a group of businessmen in establishing the Boston Daily Globe newspaper which began to fail in its first year. He was lucky in recruiting young State Representative Charles H. Taylor, a wounded Civil War veteran and newspaperman.
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Charles H. Taylor

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Taylor dedicated his life to saving the Globe, even mortgaging his home on Belmont Street in Somerville. In this effort, the two men and their families remained in close union retaining the Globe’s circulation and building it up to the largest in Boston. Later, Taylor and his son John would build Fenway Park, own the team, and give the Red Sox its name.
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In 1981 the Assembly Square Mall in Somerville opened inside the former Ford Motor Company’s Assembly Plant. A Jordan Marsh store anchored the northern end of the mall. In 1996 the R.H. Macy Company acquired the Jordan Marsh Company’s chain and re-branded their stores as Macy’s but eventually closed its Somerville’s store in 1997.
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Rowland Hussey Macy adopted a red star as his company’s symbol dating back to his life as a whaling sailor. He was once lost at sea and guided himself back to shore by a star. After that, he sported a red-star tattoo to remind him of his luck but never again went to sea. Today, the 170-year-old-department store that he established is the largest in America and Eben Jordan’s legacy still runs through it.