When T. Frank McCall’s opened its doors at Sixth and Madison Streets in 1876, Ulysses S. Grant was president, and the Phillies did not yet exist.
The store is still there and thriving today, writes Anthony R. Wood for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
That makes McCall’s a 150-year-old Chester business, family-owned and women-run, that has outlasted nearly everything around it.
Over a century and a half, it has survived 28 presidents, 32 Pennsylvania governors, 32 Chester mayors, two world wars, the Great Depression, and the slow collapse of Chester’s once-mighty industrial economy, a decline that has now ended in municipal bankruptcy.
The company started as George McCall’s feed-and-grain business beside the railroad tracks in Delaware County’s riverfront city.
It passed to his son Thomas, then to the next McCall generation.
The pivotal moment came in the 1880s, when nearby Scott Paper hired McCall’s as a distributor.
From there, the business reinvented itself into a hybrid wholesale general store dealing in janitorial, cleaning, paper, packaging, and maintenance supplies.
In 1957, just as other companies were fleeing Chester, brothers Edward and Charles Witomski bought the firm.
Today, Lisa Witomski runs it, joined by relatives Marcie Witomski, Lisa Claire Witomski, and Chas Wiley.
“Unlike almost all our competition, we haven’t sold out,” said Lisa Witomsk.
The numbers tell the rest.
McCall’s pulls in roughly $10 million a year, ships most orders by truck, owns its 50,000-square-foot building outright, and still puts a human on the phone during business hours.
It’s built a reputation as the leading janitorial and building maintenance supply firm in the Delaware Valley.
The longtime Chester location remains an asset, with easy access to I-95 and the Blue Route, and winter staples like ice melter keep customers coming back.
The Philadelphia Inquirer has the full account of how one family business held its ground while Chester’s economy crumbled around it.
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