At mom's in Huntsville I recently came across the small jewelry box shown below, now being used to hold a few photographic slides [remember those?]. Naturally I thought, "There's a blog post in that..." And here we are...
Alabama marriage records show that Englishman Charles John Gayfer married Caroline Lurbeck in Mobile on April 11, 1871. Later in that decade he opened a dry goods store at 20 North Joachim. He soon partnered with A.N. Edmondson, and they relocated to 103 Dauphin at the corner with Conception. A move to St. Emmanuel in 1919 became the final downtown location of Gayfer's.
Charles died in Mobile on December 7, 1915; he is buried in Pine Crest Cemetery. By that time the store had 150 employees and around $500,000 in annual sales. The business continued to thrive, and in the 1950's it was purchased by Mercantile Stores Company, a department store chain operating under various names. The new owners soon expanded the Gayfer's brand beyond Mobile. By 1969 stores had opened in Pensacola, Biloxi, Mississippi, and Tuscaloosa.
The apostrophe in the name disappeared in 1970. That same year a Montgomery Fair store [the one where Rosa Parks had once worked] became a Gayfers and a store opened in Jackson, Mississippi, and a second one in Pensacola. The flagship store in downtown Mobile closed in 1985 and moved to West Mobile. By the early 1990's Gayfers was one of the largest southeastern department store chains.
In 1998 the end arrived. The Dillards chain purchased Mercantile and the Gayfers brand came to an end. The name had a good run.
In the 2001 book Mobile: Photographs from the William E. Wilson Collection by Marilyn Culpepper you can see Wilson's photograph of Gayfer's taken around 1900. At that time the store occupied the first floor and the Fidelia Club operated upstairs.
A recent article by John Sharp, "‘I Wish for Gayfers’: Memories of beloved Mobile department store surface as redevelopment evolves" can be found here.
A drawing of what became the Gayfer's store that opened on St. Emanual in 1919. This one remained the downtown location until the move to West Mobile in 1985.
Source: Alabama Dept. of Archives and History
Teenagers modelling back-to-school clothes in the Mobile Gayfers on July 19, 1977. The young woman in the middle is holding a copy of Seventeen magazine.
Source: Alabama Dept. of Archives and History
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