Bloom Brothers Department Stores

Bloom Brothers Department Stores were located at sites in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore, Maryland, from the company's founding in 1897 as The Old Reliable Dry Goods Store until the closing of the Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, store in 1944.

History
The Old Reliable Dry Goods Store, Conn and Bloom, Proprietors, opened on April 24, 1897, at 84 South Main Street in downtown Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Simon Conn (1860–1932) and Benjamin Bloom (1861–1904), an uncle and his nephew, respectively, whose immediate ancestors had emigrated from western Lithuania to Louisiana and Kansas in the 1840s, opened the store after peddling goods from farm to farm in south-central Pennsylvania and northern Maryland since the mid-1880s. A second store in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, called "Bloom and Conn", succeeded the first (1898–99) but did not flourish; a third, also known as Bloom and Conn, which doubled as a grocery store for its remote Path Valley community, thrived in Dry Run, Pennsylvania, northwest of Chambersburg, at the same time as the Waynesboro store, and the fourth Bloom and Conn began and ended its existence in April 1899 in the Fulton County hamlet of Burnt Cabins, Pennsylvania, for lack of space. The fifth and sixth Bloom stores opened in East Baltimore between 1900 and 1905, offering finer men's clothing and furnishings, respectively, but they closed after less than a year.

In February 1900, with the extended Bloom and Conn families now settled in south-central Pennsylvania and northern Maryland, the partnership between the Conns and Blooms was dissolved and each family started its own company. The Bloom family's oldest child, Jacob Bloom (1869–1898), fell victim to tuberculosis during the company's "Conn and Bloom" phase, leaving Jacob's older brothers Ben and Isaac H. Bloom (1872–1955) to open the first Bloom Brothers store at 84 South Main in Chambersburg on March 10, 1900. Eli F. Bloom (1876–1941), treasurer of the firm, managed the company's finances from an office overlooking the main Chambersburg selling floor, while Harry H. Bloom (1880–1969) became company sales manager after learning the business as a clerk under Isaac at the Waynesboro location. Bloom Brothers opened its second store on March 21, 1901, in the former Old City Hall on Waynesboro's Town Square. The Dry Run location reverted to Conn family ownership in 1900 upon dissolution of "Conn and Bloom/Bloom and Conn".