Beaumont, Louis D.

Louis D. Beaumont spent only a few years in Cleveland full-time. But the department store he created here, May Co. of Cleveland, became the city's largest department store, and the private foundation funded by his estate was for a time the largest in the city.

Beaumont was born Louis Schoenberg in Dayton, but changed his last name during an extended trip to France. He started working in department stores at age 16. After working his way west, he settled in Leadville, Colo. By 1885, he was in business on his own with brother-in-law David May and brother Joseph Schoenberg.

"I soon saw that I may as well be working for myself so three years later I opened up my own business," he told a reporter almost 50 years later. "In 1887 Col. David May and I formed the partnership that resulted in this remarkable establishment." That "remarkable establishment" was the May Co. of Cleveland, a unit of the May Dept. Stores Inc. David May had opened his own store in Leadville before moving on to Denver. The success of the store there encouraged May and Beaumont to buy Cleveland's E.R. Hull & Dutton Co. in 1899.

Beaumont took on the transformation of the Cleveland store, which was at the southeast comer of Public Square on Ontario Street. May and Beaumont built May Co. into the nation's largest retail department store chain. Beaumont lived here from 1898 to 1905 before turning over management of the Cleveland store to Nathan L. Dauby. By 1912, he withdrew from active management of the corporation and moved to France, spending part of his time supervising the company's European buying operation.

But he still returned occasionally to the United States and endowed several trusts to make charitable donations to Cleveland institutions, such as Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Orchestra, Mt. Sinai Medical Center, the City Club and the local Boy Scouts.