A peddler, a wagon and a family yard.

Grossman’s did not begin as a lumber yard. A company history published by the Gale Group in its International Directory of Company Histories says the business was founded in Massachusetts before the turn of the twentieth century by Louis Grossman, who had emigrated from Russia and settled in the Boston area. He worked as a peddler, and after saving for a horse and wagon became a travelling junk dealer, collecting and selling goods on a route between Quincy, to the south of Boston, and Walpole. Gale says he later added imperfect products from a roofing firm to what he sold, and that these roofing seconds started the family’s trade in building materials.

The family name went onto the business in 1900. Gale says Louis Grossman brought his two eldest sons, Reuben and Jacob, into the business that year and renamed it L. Grossman and Sons. In 1907 the family bought its own property, an old monument works in Quincy, and in 1915 it bought a supply yard from which it sold building materials while still running the junk business. Two more sons, Joseph and Sidney, followed; Gale says Sidney joined in 1923, by which time building materials had overtaken junk.

Gale also records that the company was incorporated in 1919. When Louis Grossman retired in 1928, it says, the firm became L. Grossman Sons, Incorporated, with Reuben as president, Jacob as vice-president, Joseph as treasurer and Sidney as secretary. The following year the company opened a branch lumber yard in Billerica, Massachusetts, which Gale presents as proof of a retail idea that stretched the traditional lumber yard to cover almost anything needed to build or repair a house. Gale says the company advertised that idea as “everything to build with, under one roof,” and backed it with generous credit for contractors, carpenters and homeowners.

Salvage remained part of the business for decades. Gale says the Grossmans bought war-surplus goods after World War I, beginning with a purchase from the Hingham Naval Ammunition Depot, dismantled former military sites including part of the Newport Naval Training Station in Rhode Island, and in 1927 bought the wreck of the five-masted schooner Nancy on the beach at Nantasket, selling its masts to a local granite company.

Hurricane timber, Braintree, Evans Products and a Bargain Outlet.

The 1930s and 1940s widened the business again. Gale says that after the 1938 New England hurricane felled vast numbers of trees, the federal government bought the timber and contracted Grossman’s to turn it into usable lumber, for which the company set up the Eastern Pine Sales Corporation. In 1946 it formed the Grossman Surplus Company and bought a large site in Braintree, Massachusetts, to store World War II surplus; Gale says the stockpile drew sightseers as well as buyers. The company sold surplus Quonset huts and barracks to young couples as temporary homes and developed a “Build-It-Yourself” home sold as plans, instructions and materials, which grew into a Grossman Homes Division.

After the war the yards became home-improvement stores. Gale says that in 1958 the company began a campaign under the slogan “Do It Yourself — Or We’ll Do It For You,” and marketed a “We Start It — You Finish It” idea for more confident customers. In 1962 it opened a trial cash-and-carry store in Wallingford, Connecticut, which sold lumber and high-volume supplies to customers who loaded their own vehicles at the railroad sidings, and then extended the format across New England. A third generation of Grossmans, six of Louis Grossman’s grandsons, joined in the same decade.

Family ownership ended in 1969, when Gale says Grossman’s was bought by Evans Products Company of Portland, Oregon, with Grossman family managers staying in place inside Evans’ retail division. Evans came under the control of the investor Victor Posner in the early 1980s, and Gale records that Evans filed for bankruptcy in March 1985. When a restructured business emerged in November 1986, Gale says, Evans’ lenders made Grossman’s the umbrella company for its retail operations, with Maurice Grossman back in charge; the company offered shares to the public in July 1987 and opened a remodelled prototype store in Hanover, Massachusetts, in 1988.

Gale describes the early 1990s as a period of selling and closing stores, fending off a takeover attempt in 1990 and expanding a Contractor’s Warehouse format to the Midwest from 1993. Today the name appears in the history of another retailer: E.C. Barton & Company of Jonesboro, Arkansas, says its Home Outlet stores began as Grossman’s Bargain Outlet in the Northeast and Surplus Warehouse in the Southeast, and that the brands were united under the Home Outlet name in 2019.

Design and documentation.

A home-improvement store brand is carried by more than a logo. It sits on a tall roadside sign meant to be read from a moving car, on the fascia above the entrance, on shopping carts and on the aprons and name badges worn by the staff who walk the aisles. It is printed on weekly circulars and newspaper inserts, on paint-can labels and on the stickers and tags that mark what is on sale.

Many of these chains grew out of lumber yards and hardware counters, and the yard side of the business left its own marks: names stencilled on delivery trucks, stamped on bundles of wood and painted on the sheds where contractors loaded up. When a chain changes owners, closes or is folded into another company, those objects tend to outlive it, turning up in old advertisements, archived photographs and the memories of shoppers.

Each guide in this group looks at one store name: who started it, who owned it over time and what became of it, and how its signs, ads and printed matter presented the store to the people who shopped there. The colours shown are our own reading, not an official specification.

A family surname that travelled by truck.

Grossman’s built its identity around the family surname from the moment Louis Grossman put his sons’ names on the business in 1900. The possessive form — Grossman’s, the store belonging to the Grossmans — read as a family yard rather than a corporate chain, and it survived the sale to Evans Products, the 1985 bankruptcy of the parent and the rebuilt public company that emerged in 1986 under the Grossman’s name.

One documented piece of the visual identity is a phrase on a truck. Gale says Grossman’s made prefabricated component homes, office buildings, cottages, garden houses and garages at a plant in Braintree, and shipped the pieces along the East Coast on flatbed trucks that carried the legend “Here Comes Grossman’s,” which Gale calls the company’s long-time logo. A logo built as a moving announcement suited a business whose product arrived in pieces on the back of a truck, and it turned every delivery into an advertisement along the road.

The slogans followed the same direct, spoken style. “Everything to build with, under one roof” described the store as a single stop for builders; “Do It Yourself — Or We’ll Do It For You” spoke to homeowners who were not sure of their own skills; “We Start It — You Finish It” offered a halfway point between the two. All three put the customer’s project at the centre and left the Grossman’s name to do the branding on the sign, the truck and the yard.

The name has since moved into another company’s history. E.C. Barton & Company says its Home Outlet stores began in the Northeast as Grossman’s Bargain Outlet, and that the Home Outlet name replaced it in 2019.

For a design guide, Grossman’s shows how a family surname, a few plain-spoken slogans and a lettered truck could carry a building-supply business from a junk wagon to a regional chain. Compare it with Hechinger, another East Coast home-improvement name, and The Home Depot, whose arrival in the Northeast Gale notes as a challenge Grossman’s faced. For this guide we use yard red, pine board and primer white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Grossman’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.