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Not to be confused with The Brothers Bloom (film)
Bloom Brothers Department Stores were located at sites in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore, Maryland, from the company's founding in 1897 as The Old Reliable Dry Goods Store until the closing of the Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, store in 1944.
The Old Reliable Dry Goods Store, Conn and Bloom, Proprietors, opened on April 24, 1897, at 84 South Main Street in downtown Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Simon Conn (1860–1932) and Benjamin Bloom (1861–1904), an uncle and his nephew, respectively, whose immediate ancestors had emigrated from western Lithuania to Louisiana and Kansas in the 1840s, opened the store after peddling goods from farm to farm in south-central Pennsylvania and northern Maryland since the mid-1880s. A second store in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, called "Bloom and Conn", succeeded the first (1898–99) but did not flourish; a third, also known as Bloom and Conn, which doubled as a grocery store for its remote Path Valley community, thrived in Dry Run, Pennsylvania, northwest of Chambersburg, at the same time as the Waynesboro store, and the fourth Bloom and Conn began and ended its existence in April 1899 in the Fulton County hamlet of Burnt Cabins, Pennsylvania, for lack of space. The fifth and sixth Bloom stores opened in East Baltimore between 1900 and 1905, offering finer men's clothing and furnishings, respectively, but closed after less than a year.
In February 1900, with the extended Bloom and Conn families now settled in south-central Pennsylvania and northern Maryland, the partnership between the Conns and Blooms was dissolved and each family started its own company. The Bloom family's youngest child, Nathan (1884–1899), had not survived the effects of his trans-Atlantic crossing; another, Jacob Bloom (1869–1898), fell victim to tuberculosis during the company's "Conn and Bloom" phase. These circumstances left oldest brother Ben and the next oldest, Isaac H. Bloom (1872–1955), to open the first Bloom Brothers store at 84 South Main in Chambersburg on March 10, 1900. Eli F. Bloom (1876–1941), treasurer of the firm, managed the company's finances from an office above the Chambersburg store, while Harry M. Bloom (1880–1969) became company sales manager after clerking in Waynesboro under Isaac. Bloom Brothers opened its second store on March 21, 1901, in the former Old City Hall on Waynesboro's Town Square. The Dry Run location reverted to Conn family ownership in 1900 upon dissolution of Bloom and Conn.
Benjamin Bloom died of tuberculosis in March 1904 at the age of 43, but Bloom Brothers thrived under Isaac as president and principal buyer, earning a dedicated customer base by offering "15% to 25% lower prices than other stores" advertised in the Chambersburg Valley Spirit and the Waynesboro Herald. Having grown too large for its inaugural space, the Chambersburg store moved in April 1903 to its second location at 83 South Main Street on the northwest corner of Main and Queen, where the company began a tradition of offering seven departments of wares to the public: dry goods, men's furnishings (including shoes), millinery, clothing, china, household furnishings, and carpets.
Thanks to the company's aggressive discounting, the frugal farmers and merchants of the surrounding Pennsylvania and Maryland countryside descended upon Bloom Brothers every Saturday, and the Waynesboro store, having outgrown the first floor of the Old Town Hall, moved to a double-storefront at 23-25 West Main Street in March 1903 (see pictures).
In 1905, the brothers’ newly widowed father, Morris Bloom (1838-1925), opened men's clothing and furnishings stores at 32 and 100 Exeter Street in East Baltimore, but he left the country in October, 1906, to aid a brother who had contracted tuberculosis while dairy farming in Boksburg, South Africa. The Baltimore stores did not reopen when Bloom returned to the US after his brother's death.
The Chambersburg store was the largest of its kind in the Borough of Chambersburg, and both surviving Bloom stores were the first in Franklin County to employ an overhead cash system. Later in their history, the stores pared household furniture, carpeting, and china from their inventory and by the 1930s sold mainly clothing.
While the Waynesboro store remained at 23-25 West Main from March 1903 until it closed in 1931 during the Great Depression, the Chambersburg store had four locations. Begun at 84 South Main as Conn and Bloom, it moved in 1903 across the street to 83 South Main (1903-1913). The store assumed its third location in 1913 on the first floor of the Reisher Building at 74-76 South Main Street. In 1939, the store moved to the Keefer Building at 100 South Main, occupying three floors. But with World War II claiming most consumer goods and the family's youngest generation serving in the armed forces, the Chambersburg store closed on March 1, 1944.
The Bloom Building, an office building at 17 West Main in Waynesboro carved out of the National Hotel/Hotel Werner when the First National Bank of Waynesboro (now a part of M&T Bank) built its granite headquarters, survived intact until the bank repurchased it in December 1972 for its annex. On June 28, 1973, a fire consumed the former Bloom Brothers store, occupied since 1931 by Sherman's Shoe Store, hastening its demolition.
After dividing his time since 1912 buying for the stores and serving as second vice-president of the Waynesboro Trust Company, Isaac Bloom moved permanently to Baltimore in 1926 and founded the Bloom Building and Loan Association, a small Maryland bank. The bank occupied successive locations in downtown Baltimore until 1955.