April, 1873 was a busy time for milliners, those ladies or shopkeepers who supplied the city with hats, bonnets and other feminine accoutrement. John and Mary Earl, a very young married couple moved from Fairbury to try their hand at millinery and dry goods in the big city in that month and secured a location at 209 Main Street, just east of the courthouse. Their first establishment was a millinery store run by Mrs Earl. She announced her presence to the ladies of Bloomington by posting an advertisement in the Pantagraph:
Mrs. Earl was pleased with the results of her opening days and congratulated herself publicly in the Pantagraph:
Her success was not greeted with congratulations on all sides. A competitive milliner named H.R. Dunn ran a challenging advertisement:
The young Mrs. Earl could not keep silent when mocked in this way and responded in print with the following:
But Mr. Dunn went one step too far in his next posting:
His mocking tone and allusion to a letter enraged the Earl's and resulted in the last of this correspondence via newspaper:
This challenge was never answered and the two merchants refrained from responding to one another after this letter was published. The letters probably did much to increase business at both establishments and may even have been a calculated effort to boost sales and traffic.
Mary and John continued in the millinery and dry goods business for another nine years, with a couple of bankruptcies and several trips to New York to stock their stores. John was an Englishman and had been in business with his brother, H S Earl in Bloomington for a short while, but his brother "retired" from the business and was next noted in the Pantagraph with the appellation "Rev." In the next mention of John, he was declared bankrupt an explanation of his financial difficulties was printed in the Pantagraph. It was explained that he had borrowed money from two of his brothers and that the brothers had called the notes due and obtained a judgment that attached to all his stock, ruining his business and causing his creditors to call his debts due immediately in 1877. Other members of the family to whom John owed money were located in England and probably had little idea of the difficulties that the young couple might face in running a business in a bustling western city on the financial roller coaster that was our economy (and still is).The dry goods store closed but Mary continued to work as a milliner in her own establishment. John was listed as a real estate agent in the 1880 census and after that time it is unknown how long this couple stayed in Bloomington.
I do wonder if H R Dunn's shop was in the 1852 Skylight Room? A sky lit room would have been perfect for a photographer of the early days.
