The American merchant Marshall Field (1834-1906) established one of America's first innovative wholesale and retail dry-goods businesses.

The son of a farmer, Marshall Field was born near Conway, Mass., and attended local schools until he was 17. He clerked in a dry-goods store in Pittsfield, Mass. In 1856 he went to Chicago, where he worked for Cooley, Wadsworth and Company, a wholesale dry-goods firm, in 1861 becoming the general manager and a partner. In 1864 Levi Z. Leiter, a large-scale real estate operator, joined the company as a silent partner. When Potter Palmer, an entrepreneur and real estate developer, joined his dry-goods business with Field's and Leiter's, the company became Field, Palmer and Leiter. When Palmer retired in 1867 and Leiter in 1881, the organization became Marshall Field and Company, owned almost entirely by Field and run directly by him. Field was in fact the source and inspiration of the ideas that revolutionized retail...