The Fair Store!

I was walking through Old Town Square in Fort Collins and was drawn to the plaque attached to the building in the photograph on the left, which was built in 1888 and is named the Miller Block.  It stated that the building was the home to a department store called The Fair Store, specializing in china. This brought back a flood of memories, since I remember going to The Fair Store at the Evergreen Park Shopping Center in that south side Chicago suburb with my mother Mary and my Grandmother Spillard when I was a child.  Was the store in Fort Collins part of that chain?

My sister Susan also remembers going to The Fair Store - not at Evergreen Park but in downtown Chicago - with my Grandmother Spillard (seen in the photo on the left) and her sister, my Great Aunt Babe (on the right) when she was a little girl. Susan recalls that they would try on corsets and girdles there, and never buy anything, to the consternation of the sales clerks, who evidently knew them all too well. Both Grandmother Spillard and Aunt Babe also enjoyed going to the bookies, but that is a story for a different time.  In any case, I did some research on the internet, and found that The Fair Store in Chicago was founded in 1874, but only had branches in Chicago. And so no, the Fort Collins store was an independent operation.  The Chicago Fair Store was taken over by Montgomery Wards in 1962, and disappeared after that, but seeing that plaque on the Miller Block sure brought back some fun memories.