Macy's was founded by
Rowland Hussey Macy. Between 1843 and 1855, he opened four retail dry goods stores, including the original
Macy's store in downtown
Haverhill, Massachusetts, established in 1851 to serve the mill industry employees of the area. They all failed, but he learned from his mistakes.
Macy moved to
New York City in 1858 and established a new store named
R.H Macy Dry Goods on
Sixth Avenue between
13th and
14th Streets, which was far north of where other dry goods stores were at the time. On the company's first day of business, on 28 October 1858, sales totaled US$11.08, equal to $297.09 today.
From the very beginning,
Macy's logo has included a star (shown) in one form or another, which comes from a tattoo that
Macy got as a teenager (debate exists whether it was on his hand or his back; Rico votes for the back, as shown below) when he worked on a
Nantucket whaling ship, the
Emily Morgan, later lost in the ice in Alaska.
Rico says that, when he lived on Nantucket in the early 1970s, both the Husseys and the Macys were still famous families, with their ancestral homes on the 'tour':
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