When Rockford Sold Seeds to the World

Rockford is remembered as a furniture town, a machine-tool town, the home of the sock monkey and the city that gave the world Cheap Trick. Far fewer people remember that Rockford was once one of America’s great seed-selling cities.

For decades, brightly illustrated catalogs bearing a Rockford address traveled to farms, gardens and kitchen tables throughout the United States and beyond. Customers selected tomatoes, beans, sweet corn, flowers and farm seed, mailed their orders to Rockford and waited for packets of possibility to return.

At the center of that forgotten industry was the building that still stands at 624–642 Cedar Street.

The old Condon Brothers and R. H. Shumway building does not announce its importance very loudly today. It is a long, irregular brick complex assembled in several stages between 1912 and 1946. Its various sections once contained offices, a retail store, freight elevators, warehouse space, seed-cleaning equipment and rooms where orders were filled and prepared for shipment.

A railroad spur originally ran directly behind the building. That was no accident. Seeds could arrive in bulk, be cleaned, sorted and packaged inside the plant, and then leave Rockford by rail as thousands upon thousands of individual orders.

This was not a quaint neighborhood garden shop. It was part of a national mail-order operation.

R. H. Shumway Builds a Seed Empire

The older of the two businesses began in 1870, when Roland Hallett Shumway founded the R. H. Shumway Seed Company on his family’s farm near the meeting of the Rock and Kishwaukee rivers.

Shumway had been born in Winnebago County in 1842. He spent his early years on the farm, served during the Civil War and returned home with an understanding of what farmers and gardeners needed. By 1871, he had made the quality of his seeds the foundation of his business.

Mail order allowed him to reach far beyond northern Illinois. A printed catalog could travel anywhere the postal service traveled, turning a Rockford seed house into a national business without requiring stores in every town.

Shumway first maintained a Rockford sales outlet at 323 East State Street. By 1885, the company had moved to the 100 block of South First Street, where it remained for approximately forty years. The operation expanded repeatedly as its reputation and customer list grew.

A 1900 history of Rockford and Winnebago County reported that Shumway had acquired a national reputation as a seedsman and accumulated a considerable fortune. In 1905, he reportedly paid the highest personal-property tax of any Rockford resident. That same year, he donated East State Street land for the creation of a farmers’ market—the origin of the building later known as Shumway Market.

Roland Shumway died in 1925 after being struck by an automobile while walking home from his seed company. His son, Myron Raymond “Ray” Shumway, continued operating the business. When Ray died in 1933, his widow sold the company to another Rockford seed family: the Condons.

The Condon Brothers on Cedar Street

Condon Brothers Seedsmen had been established in 1910 by Thomas Condon and his sons Leonard R. and John R. Condon.

Thomas Condon was an Irish immigrant from County Tipperary. His sons already knew the seed trade. Both had worked for H. W. Buckbee, another enormous Rockford seed company. John Condon had been a Buckbee foreman for approximately twenty years, while Leonard began working there at thirteen.

The Condons opened a small retail store at 513 West State Street. In 1912, only two years after entering business, they relocated to Cedar Street and established a seed-cleaning and refining plant, mail-order department and wholesale store.

Cedar Street was still little more than a muddy industrial road. Nearby stood a railroad freight station, a bakery and a paper company. The Condons, however, had chosen a location with room to grow and immediate access to rail transportation.

The business expanded in 1918 and twice during 1928. A retail storefront and additional offices were added, along with more space for processing and storing seed. By 1933, the plant occupied roughly 175 feet along Cedar Street and was conducting several million dollars in annual business.

After the Condons purchased R. H. Shumway that year, they moved the older company’s operations into the Cedar Street complex. They wisely retained the famous Shumway name. Condon Brothers and R. H. Shumway continued to issue separate catalogs and appear to customers as distinct seed houses, although both were being operated from the same Rockford building.

Rockford’s Other Famous Crop: Catalogs

The seeds were the product, but the catalogs made the industry possible.

These were more than price lists. Their colorful covers and illustrations offered visions of enormous tomatoes, perfect flowers, abundant fields and gardens without weeds, insects or disappointment. During the coldest months of the year, they allowed customers to imagine the garden that might emerge in spring.

Millions of Condon and Shumway catalogs were eventually distributed around the world. Historic Condon catalogs survive in the collections of the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Library, including editions with titles such as Condon’s Sure Crop Garden and Farm Guide. Collections preserve Rockford catalogs dating from the 1910s through the 1950s.

Rockford was not home to only two important seed houses. H. W. Buckbee, George S. Haskell & Company, Alneer Brothers and several smaller firms also operated here. One 1914 directory listed 51 prominent seed firms in the United States and France. Only three were in Illinois—and all three were in Rockford: Buckbee, Condon Brothers and R. H. Shumway.

For a time, the words “Rockford, Illinois” printed on a seed catalog were familiar to gardeners across the country.

The industry also proved unusually resilient. Seed sales increased during the Great Depression as families planted gardens to stretch their food supplies. The Victory Garden campaigns of World War II created another surge in demand. Whatever else was happening in the economy, people still needed to grow things.

Eight Hundred Drawers of Seeds

Leonard and John Condon retired in 1958. Leonard Condon Jr. took responsibility for the Shumway mail-order operation, while Ernie and Gertrude Smith ran the Condon retail business.

A 1978 newspaper account described Gertrude Smith standing before 800 drawers filled with seeds at the Condon Lawn and Garden Center. Eleven large storage barrels supplemented the drawers, and even that was reportedly insufficient for everything the store carried.

It is a marvelous final image of the old business: hundreds of drawers, barrels of seeds and the accumulated smell of fields and gardens inside a brick building on Cedar Street.

But the industry was consolidating. Large firms purchased smaller companies, regional operations disappeared and Rockford’s era as a seed capital came to an end. Condon Brothers closed and left Cedar Street in 1980. The Shumway operation departed in 1984.

The R. H. Shumway name survives today under different ownership, but its Rockford chapter is over.

The Building That Remembers

The Cedar Street complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2015 because of its importance to Rockford commerce and the American seed industry. It is one of the last substantial Rockford buildings directly connected to that history.

The building also occupies ground with an unexpectedly deep past. Before the seed plant was constructed, the area had served as part of an early west-side cemetery and later as the location of an Irish immigrant settlement known as Tipperary Patch. The railroad displaced the cemetery, industry replaced the settlement, and a seed company eventually rose over both.

Today, motorists can pass 624–642 Cedar Street without knowing that orders once arrived there from across the country, that workers cleaned and packaged untold quantities of seed inside, or that Rockford catalogs helped decide what grew in distant American gardens.

Rockford did not merely manufacture furniture, drills and cabinet hardware. For nearly a century, it packaged springtime and sent it through the mail.