Salina Post proudly presents Flashback Friday in partnership with the Smoky Hill Museum. Enjoy a weekly tidbit of local history from the staff at Salina Post and the Smoky Hill Museum as we present "Salina-Flashback Fridays."
By SALINA POST
Just as Santa Fe Avenue began filling its streets with hardware stores and pharmacies, Henry David Lee, better known as H.D. Lee, opened the H.D. Lee Mercantile Company in town and unknowingly started a company that continues more than a century later.
According to the Smoky Hill Museum, Lee was born on Dec. 9, 1849, in West Randolph, Vermont, the youngest of nine children. After a career in the oil business, Lee contracted tuberculosis and sold his interest in Central Oil to John Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company.
In 1889, Lee moved to Salina and established a wholesale grocery business named the H.D. Lee Mercantile Company at 254 N. Santa Fe Avenue.
From the new mercantile, Lee sold clothing items, various foods and house goods to Salina residents and visitors. In only five years, the value of the H.D. Lee Mercantile doubled with the successes from his signature lines — Lee Mother's Style, Summer Girl, Sailor Boy and Cadet.
In 1899, Lee saw a new path of success through handling large shipments of perishable goods with the Kansas Ice & Cold Storage Company. Around this time, he founded the H.D. Lee Flour Mill.
Right after the turn of the century, disaster struck Lee's business — a fire that burned down the H.D. Lee Mercantile Wholesale Building and Warehouse in December 1903.
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The Smoky Hill Museum provided documentation on the fire. Lee Mercantile engineer David Arnold discovered flames on the second floor of the company's building at Santa Fe Avenue and Elm Street around 12:30 p.m. in the rear of Lloyd Potter's office.
Arnold attempted to quench the fire with a nearby water hose, but it only grew and reached the elevator shaft, spreading to the rest of the building.
The fire destroyed the building, with "great bellows of flames [rolling] skyward," until the building collapsed and local volunteer firefighters finally subdued the blaze.
Smoky Hill Museum staff documented that the loss totaled about $610,000 in canned goods, candy and tobacco products, which is almost $20 million today.
This didn't stop Lee's business, though—within the year, Lee built a new mercantile and warehouse and pursued a new venture in 1911.
Disgruntled with the late deliveries from clothing manufacturers further east, Lee began producing his own clothing line with the first garment factory in Salina.
The factory first produced overalls, jackets, and dungarees, which would soon become Lee Riders.
"I said to the boys that we were going to miss an opportunity if we didn't come, but I really did not appraise the full size of the field," said H.D. Lee in the April 8, 1917 edition of The Kansas City Star. "It's bigger, better than we expected. A field susceptible of great and rapid development in almost any line."
The company's popularity then skyrocketed, and Lee opened a second garment factory in Kansas City.
In 1917, a supply officer at Camp Funston noticed Lee's clothing lines early into World War I and decided to recruit the company to produce the uniform for the doughboys.
Throughout World War I and later into the late 1920s, Lee continued to develop different clothing items, like the first U-shaped saddle crotch in pants alongside the new Lee Jelt Denim.
Almost 40 years after beginning the H.D. Lee Mercantile, Lee died in 1928, and in June 1929, Leonard C. Staples, who started as a stock boy at the Mercantile, succeeded Lee as president of the company.
The business was worth $6.5 million when Staples took over, about $118 million today.
The business only thrived under the new leadership, with new clothing items refreshing their shelves each year and catering to Kansas's cowboy and western crowd.
During World War II, the now-renamed Lee Company joined the war effort and manufactured fatigue and flight suits alongside field jackets for the United States Army.
Throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, Lee continued to produce more fashionable clothing items and continues today under the H.D. Lee name.
Today, the buildings that once housed H.D. Lee Hardware are now under remodeling by the Overland Property Group and Flint Hills Holding Group for loft apartments in town.