J.C. Penney, merchant and chain store executive, was born James Cash Penney, Jr., in Caldwell County, Missouri, the son of James Cash Penney, Sr., a farmer, minister, and civic leader, and Mary Frances Paxton. Three years after Penney was born, his family (which included twelve children) moved from their farm on 390 acres to Hamilton, a nearby town of 2,000 residents on the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad. They continued raising cattle and food on the farm and began participating in Hamilton’s social, business, and political activities. Residing in town also made it easier for the children to attend high school, and Penney’s parents, who graduated from private academies, wanted their children to be well educated. Penney’s formative years were influenced by this combination of farm labor and involvement in town activities, by his family’s religious and political principles, and by his family’s financial difficulties.
After Penney graduated from Hamilton Public High School in 1893 he wanted to attend college, but his parents could not afford the extra expense. He worked on the family farm for two years until his father asked a Hamilton merchant to teach him the dry goods business. J.C. Penney, Sr., who ran unsuccessfully as a Populist candidate for the U.S. Congress in 1894, was pessimistic about his son’s future in farming. The new endeavor was a good match. Soon Penney was the most successful clerk at the J. M. Hale & Bros. store and was saving money to open his own store.
In June 1897, following his doctor’s advice, Penney left Missouri for the drier climate of Colorado. In 1898, he purchased a butcher shop and bakery in Longmont, a small town near Denver. This venture failed after Penney refused to supply liquor to a hotel cook as an inducement for the hotel business. Penney then became a sales clerk at the Golden Rule Store, a Longmont dry goods and clothing store owned by Thomas M. Callahan. Callahan and W. Guy Johnson, his partner in a Golden Rule Store in Wyoming, were impressed by Penney’s hard work. They offered him a position in their Evanston, Wyoming, Golden Rule Store.
Callahan, his relatives, neighbors, and former clerks were the owners of eighteen Golden Rule Stores in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states. By 1898 they had created a buying syndicate and obtained low prices from suppliers for their large-volume purchases. As a result, Golden Rule Stores were popular for having good quality merchandise that was less expensive than that offered by other merchants. Cash-only sales and odd-cent prices made the stores even more popular. This partnership in profitable stores made them all wealthy, and they were eager to open more stores.
On April 14, 1902, Johnson, Callahan, and Penney became one-third partners in a new Golden Rule Store in Kemmerer, a small coal-mining town about fifty miles north of Evanston in southwestern Wyoming. Penney’s investment was $2,000; he used $500 in savings and borrowed $1,500 from a Hamilton bank. This small outpost of the Golden Rule Store chain became the
Becoming a partner with Johnson and Callahan transformed Penney’s life, and he dreamed of building a chain of stores using one-third partnerships. When his two mentors sold Penney their interests in three Wyoming stores in 1907, he started expanding. With new partners, who were his former sales clerks, Penney opened Golden Rule Stores in Utah and Idaho in 1908.
In 1917, when there were 175 stores, 123 shareholders, and sales of $14 million, Penney became chairman of the board. Earl Corder Sams, who was hired by Penney in 1906, became company president and was responsible for daily operations. Although 1917 has been cited as the date Penney retired from the company, it actually was the year that Penney began the important work of planning for the company’s future growth and continued success.
Penney knew that the company’s future depended on careful selection and training of personnel. The
During the 1920s many private-label brands were developed by the company, whose buyers gave specifications to manufacturers; an in-house merchandise testing laboratory ensured quality control. By the company’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1927, the J.C. Penney Company, with 892 stores and sales of $151 million, was a household name across America. Although companywide stock replaced the former classified stock plan by 1929, profit-sharing contracts with store managers preserved the original partnership incentive. The company had become the largest dry goods retail chain in the United States, and Penney was popularly known as
When the Great Depression arrived, the company’s 1,400 stores provided good values to cost-conscious customers. Its well-established conservative fiscal policies and cash-only sales meant it had large cash reserves and no long-term debt. From 1902 to 1958 company merchandising policies did not change. In 1950 Fortune magazine declared the company
During these decades Penney’s personal fortunes rose and fell and rose again. He lost an estimated $40 million in the 1930s because his own company stock was used as collateral for loans to philanthropic activities. After stock prices fell, the banks owned almost all his collateral. As chairman of the board of First National Bank of Miami, Penney was also held responsible for its failure in 1930; eventually he paid several million dollars to satisfy depositors’ claims. Until his financial status improved in the 1940s, Penney accepted a salary from the company for the first time since 1909. He continued his routine of traveling tens of thousands of miles each year to visit stores, where he met associates and customers; he also participated in the company’s regional conventions. Penney was chairman of the board of J. C. Penney Company from 1917 to 1946 and again from 1950 to 1958; he was a member of the board of directors from 1913 until his death in 1971 in New York City.
Penney was married three times and had five children. In 1899, he married Berta Alva Hess, with whom he had two sons; she died in 1910. In 1919 he married Mary Hortense Kimball, who bore one son before her death in 1923. In 1926 Penney married Caroline Autenrieth, who was his wife for forty-five years; they had two daughters.
Penney and the Company moved from Salt Lake City, Utah, to New York City in 1914. He had a home in White Plains, New York, from the 1920s to the mid-1950s; in the 1960s he had residences on Park Avenue in Manhattan and in Greens Farms, Connecticut. During the 1920s he had a winter home in Miami Beach, Florida.
Penney’s avocations and philanthropies were farming, education, and religion. From 1921 until his death, he raised purebred dairy cattle on farms in New York and Missouri. In the 1920s the J.C. Penney Foundation supported vocational guidance programs broadcast by radio and underwrote the
In 1954 Penney received the highest award given by the retailing community, the Tobe Award For Distinguished Contributions to American Retailing, from the National Retail Dry Goods Association. He received the Horatio Alger Award from the American Schools and Colleges Association, was elected to the National Business Hall of Fame sponsored by Junior Achievement, and seventeen colleges and universities awarded him honorary degrees.
James Cash Penney, Jr. was one of America’s greatest merchants and is a continuing role model for achieving business success. His career combined the ideals of the nineteenth-century self-made man with many of the cooperative, economic, and social ideals held by Populists and Progressives. The company’s principles, which evolved from the 1890s Golden Rule Stores partnership plan and merchandising system, were written down in 1913 and included serving the public, expecting only a fair remuneration, and participating in company’s profits. Penney wanted store managers to operate as entrepreneurs, and he established a corporate structure that motivated employees to work hard. A successful store manager received one-third of his store’s profit due to the classified stock system. Managers could also invest their profits in opening new stores and earn more profits. The same opportunities were offered to new employees until the late 1920s; then the profit-sharing contracts were given to store managers. This policy resulted in the company’s rapid expansion to nationwide status between 1913 and 1929. Under Penney’s direction, modern methods of distribution, merchandising, training, and communications were devised to assist the company’s rapid growth.
The company Penney founded in 1902 had sales of almost $18.8 billion in 2005. Although it had changed in many respects, including credit card sales and a mail order catalog, its goals remained the same. Upholding the
Written by Mary Elizabeth Curry, from
Materials in this collection include correspondence, speeches, clippings, genealogies, greeting cards, photographs, diaries and travel logs, and other related materials. These materials include not only business speeches and correspondence, but also information on James Cash Penney's dairy and livestock interests and philanthropies, including Penney Farms, the Penney Retirement Community, and the J.C. Penney Foundation.
Of most interest to researchers is Mr. Penney’s correspondence (1906-1971). Mr. Penney corresponded with company executives, store managers, and customers. Most of the correspondence is arranged by date. Letters between Mr. Penney and Earl C. Sams (second JCPenney chairman) are found in the J.C. Penney Company records (A2004.0007), filed under Earl C. Sams. Mr. Penney corresponded with prominent persons including U.S. Presidents, Senators, and other newsmakers and celebrities. These are arranged by decade.
Mr. Penney bought a home near Miami called Belle Island. The files on Belle Island (Box 26) include correspondence from Herbert Hoover, who spent his pre-inaugural time (winter of 1929) at Mr. Penney’s home.
Mr. Penney’s speeches reflect his life and his philosophies. Speech topics range from information about the company he founded, farming, youth education and training, overviews of American heritage, religion, and philanthropies.
The collection is organized into 9 series:
Collection is open for research use.
J.C. Penney Company records, 1902-2004. (A2004.0007)
Caroline Autenrieth Penney papers. (A2004.0017)
Carol Penney Guyer letters.
Dick Penney correspondence.
Permission to publish materials must be obtained from the Director of the DeGolyer Library.
It is the responsibility of the user to obtain copyright authorization.
This collection is indexed under the following terms in the Southern Methodist University Libraries' online catalog. Researchers desiring related materials may search the catalog using these terms.
J. C. Penney papers, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.
These papers were held by JCPenney Company and organized by Company employees over a 30-year span. The collection was donated in 2004 to the DeGolyer. Because of this 30-year time span, folder "titles" are often inconsistent.
Mr. Penney kept many of his papers and early company records. His office staff kept and used these records to keep track of his activities. It is often difficult to discern what were his "personal papers" and what were "company records." Soon after Mr. Penney’s death in 1971, JCPenney appointed Virginia Mowry (Mr. Penney’s secretary) as archivist. She collected and organized his materials from the late 1960s until the early 1980s. She also actively collected other JCPenney historical materials to establish the JCPenney corporate archives.
Parts of the collection were organized or processed by Virginia Mowry, Mary Elizabeth Curry, Dorothy Rushing (farm records), Mary Hays (personnel), Cristi Jackson (Mrs. Penney), Helen Curran (photographs) and Charles Matyas (speeches), Jeff Pirtle, Jerry Probst, Gary Long (videos), and Joan Gosnell. Partial finding aids were written by the above people as well.
Gift, J.C. Penney Co., Penney family, Wagley family, and Guyer family, 2004.
The biography of Mr. Penney was written by Mary Elizabeth Curry and was taken from
Lara Corazalla, 2006.
Materials in these boxes are records of his family and letters from family members. Although Mr. Penney was born in Missouri, his parents were born in Anderson County, Kentucky. In this series are records on Mr. Penney’s homes in New York, Florida, Missouri and Wyoming, as well as museums in Hamilton, Missouri and Kemmerer, Wyoming.
In addition, there is information, often gathered by others, concerning his birthday celebrations and his religious philosophy. Information about his death and funeral is also included.
The correspondence includes letters written to and from Mr. Penney. Most of the letters written by Mr. Penney exist only as very fragile carbon copies typed on very acidic papers. Very little correspondence exists from the earliest days of the Golden Rule stores. Most, but not all, of this correspondence concerns the company he founded.
Mr. Penney corresponded with prominent persons including U.S. Presidents, Senators, and other newsmakers and celebrities. These are arranged by decade. Mr. Penney bought a home near Miami called Belle Island. The files on Belle Island (Box 26) include correspondence from Herbert Hoover, who spent his pre-inaugural time (winter of 1929) at Mr. Penney’s home.
Beginning in the 1940s and until the late 1960s, Mr. Penney became a sought-after speaker. When he visited JCPenney stores, he would often have other speaking engagements in town, in places such as the local Rotary Club, other service clubs, churches or even local radio or television stations.
Mr. Penney’s speeches reflect his life and his philosophies. Speech topics range from information about the company he founded, farming, youth education and training, overviews of American heritage, religion, and philanthropies.
Abbreviations used in this series are:
Mr. Penney and his staff collected articles written by or about Mr. Penney. They are arranged in chronological order.
This musical made in 1966 by Michael Brown and showed to Store Managers at Company meetings recreated Mr. Penney first days in Kemmerer.
Mr. Penney kept diaries, which functioned mostly as appointment calendars. Several of his travel logs include more reflective materials.
As Mr. Penney’s wealth grew with the growth of the JCPenney Company, he became a board member of several banks in Florida. When the bank had financial problems, he became the target of lawsuits.
As Mr. Penney became financially secure, he established a pattern of charitable giving and in 1954 created a formal philanthropy called the
After the Penney Company was well-established, Mr. Penney bought Emmadine Farms near White Plains, NY, in 1922, where he raised Guernsey cattle and Hampshire sheep. His Missouri farm operations began when he gradually bought parcels of land outside his hometown of Hamilton until they encompassed the original farm of his parents and the house where he was born.
He named this farm
As a breeder, Penney gained an international reputation for raising Guernsey, Hereford, and Black Angus cattle. Leading livestock producers from all over the United States traveled to Hamilton for the annual sales and expected to pay top prices. These records include correspondence about the livestock business, magazine articles, and sale catalogs.
This series includes Mr. Penney’s photo albums, scrapbooks and guest books from several of his birthdays.
In addition, forty boxes of Mr. Penney’s photographs are a part of the collection. The filing system is idiosyncratic. There are 11 boxes of photographs of Mr. Penney by himself and 13 boxes of photographs of Mr. Penney with others. There are also 18 boxes of photographs of individual family members, family groups or Mr. Penney’s houses and livestock.