Notable New Orleanians: A Tricentennial Tribute

Daniel Henry Holmes.
ILLUSTRATED NEWS NEW ORLEANS, VOL. 3 NO. 22, APRIL
22, 1922.
the tastes of New Orleans and became a longtime
hallmark of his store. The business prospered
on Chartres Street until 1849 when
Holmes decided that Canal Street had even better
prospects. That year, he had the contractor
Charles Pride build a four-story Gothic-style
store in the 800 block of Canal, complete with
lancet windows, hood moulds, and an interior
atrium. Its full-length shop windows were predecessors
of the memorable holiday-dressed windows
dear to Orleanians for a century. It was the
heart of boom times in New Orleans owing to
the explosive growth of the cotton trade. 1
Daniel Henry Holmes’ retailing innovations
became legendary. He introduced home delivery
in horse-drawn carts or by streetcar, a convenience
that housewives had never experienced.
The Holmes delivery system ultimately developed
into the Mercedes-Benz brown-on-brown
delivery trucks familiar to New Orleanians until
the demise of the store. Holmes also introduced a
guaranteed-return of merchandise policy, one
with a known loss rate outweighed by the
increase in volume it promoted. During the Civil
War, he hired female clerks owing to a shortage
of men, a practice that survived the war. He operated
on a cash-only basis, avoiding the dangers of
credit in an economy that usually required business
owners to wait weeks or months to be paid.
He opened an office in New York to handle much of the ordering and shipping. 2
During the 1850s Holmes, growing wealthy, decided that the summer climate in New Orleans
was too dangerous for his family. He purchased land across the Ohio River from Cincinnati where
his old French friend Eugene Levassor now lived. After the Civil War Holmes constructed a monumental
stone castle there, which survived until 1936.
As did several other successful men in 19th century New Orleans Holmes avoided society,
declining to join political organizations or social clubs. While he had little or no formal education,
he learned languages throughout his life and at his death spoke fluent French, Spanish, Italian,
Greek and Hebrew. He married Eliza Maria Kerrison of New Orleans in 1847 and had four children.
Only two survived him—his namesake D. H. Holmes, Jr., and Georgine Holmes who lived
into the 1940s and had a shop in the French Quarter.
Before his death Holmes turned the management of the store over to two associates, Samuel
Geoghegan in New Orleans and James T. Walker in New York. After his death, local businessmen
Hugh and Bernard McCloskey led a consortium to buy out Holmes’ heirs and to found D. H.
Holmes Company, Limited. The company expanded into the New Orleans suburbs and south
Louisiana while its Canal St. store remained a landmark where New Orleanians made it a custom
to meet under its clock. It prospered until 1989, when it was sold to Dillard’s Department Store,
which closed the Canal Street store and abandoned it to the City of New Orleans.
1 Betty Lee Nordheim, Echoes of the Past: A History of the Covington Public School System Published May 2002 see
http://covingtoncsd.ky.schoolwebpages.com/education/school/schoolhistory.
2 Obituary D. H. Holmes, in The Times-Picayune, July 4, 1898.
NOTABLE NEW ORLEANIANS: A Tricentennial Tribute
74