If you lived on a farm near a small town similar to Bonfield in the 1890s, your shopping choices were limited. For basic necessities, there was the local general store; for other needs, you had to devote most of a day to the 12-mile trip into Kankakee and back.

There was a third alternative: shopping by mail order from the Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog. The huge catalog — 532 pages in 1895 — offered almost every kind of goods a rural family would want or need, from hairpins to hay rakes. In many farm homes, the catalog was as popular and well-read a book as the family Bible.

Shopping from the Sears catalog was the earliest type of economic involvement the people of Kankakee County had with the giant Chicago-based firm. Sears' major impact on the local economy, as an industrial employer, began in the year 1910, when it purchased the David Bradley Manufacturing Co. That company, which had moved its plow works to Bradley 15 years earlier, would produce agricultural equipment for Sears for more than 75 years.

In 1914, four years after buying the David Bradley Co., Sears purchased the E-Z-Est Way Stove Works. That firm, which was located in Chicago Heights, was relocated to a building on the western edge of Kankakee that previously had been used to manufacture sewing machines. It later became the Florence Stove Co., and in 1957, the Geo. D. Roper Corp. The two Sears-owned plants, in Bradley and Kankakee, provided thousands of well-paying jobs for Kankakee County residents for many years.

The two factories were not the only source of Sears-related manufacturing jobs in the county. The A.O. Smith water heater manufacturing operation on Illinois Route 49, south of Kankakee, was a major supplier for Sears. From 1946 until the mid-1960s, 6 out of 10 water heaters it produced in Kankakee wore the Sears Kenmore brand. Other Kankakee factories making products sold by Sears included Bear Brand Hosiery, Amberg File and Index, and Commercial Uniform Factories Inc. In 1950, it was estimated more than $40 million in consumer goods was produced for Sears in Kankakee County.

In addition, a number of local businesses, large and small, provided components or services to the Sears-owned factories. One example was a local technical artist, Ellis Gravlin, who created many of the "exploded view" drawings for the owners manuals and repair manuals that accompanied garden tractors and other products produced at the plant in Bradley.

By the early 1980s, however, the Sears-related manufacturing jobs disappeared as the local factories closed. The Roper Corp., which by that time operated both the Kankakee and Bradley plants, decided to relocate production to lower-cost operations in southern states.

Despite the loss of manufacturing jobs, Sears remained a major player on the local retail scene. The company had opened a retail store in Kankakee in 1933, the same year it issued a separate Christmas catalog. The Kankakee store was in the heart of the city's shopping district, midway down the east side of the 100 block of South Schuyler Avenue. During the 1950s, the company also operated a separate Sears Farm Store on the west side of Dearborn Avenue, south of Court Street.

Sears would remain on Schuyler Avenue until 1958, when it opened a much larger store that served as one of the major attractions of the Meadowview Shopping Center. Located on the city's northern edge on the east side of what now is Kennedy Drive, Meadowview was the community's first shopping center; during the 1960s, it gradually replaced downtown Kankakee as the area's retail center.

After 32 years in the open-plan Meadowview Center, Sears relocated in 1990 to Northfield Square mall in Bradley. The new Sears store was the largest of the four original anchor stores (the others were J.C. Penney, Carson Pirie Scott & Co. and Venture) in the 527,000 square-foot enclosed shopping mall.

In early January of this year, Sears Holdings (parent company of Sears and Kmart) announced the Northfield Square store was among 100 locations nationwide that would be shut down. The Sears auto center, attached to the store, would close by the end of this month, and the store itself would turn out its lights and lock its doors some time in early April.

Once the retail store closes, only one business bearing the Sears name will be operating in Kankakee County: Sears Logistics Services, a warehousing and cargo-handling operation located in Manteno's Diversatech industrial park. (Another Sears Holdings property in Manteno is the large Kmart Distribution Center west of Interstate 57.)

The long-storied history between Sears and Kankakee County will draw to a close in April, when the 107,000-square-foot retail store in Northfield Square mall goes out of business.

The once-dominant retailer, which has anchored Northfield since its August 1990 opening and Meadowview Shopping Center before that, announced in early January that of the more than 100 Kmart and Sears stores closing, the Bradley store was included.

The Sears auto center at Northfield will close later this month as well.

The company has had difficulty adjusting to the changing patterns of shoppers. In addition to shoppers changing the manner in which they shop, they also pulled away from Sears in favor of other locations.

Namdar, a New York-based property management company, purchased Northfield in July 2016. The company is pursuing retailers to locate in this soon-to-be-empty space.

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