Edward Pearson was in his 90s when he told a newspaper reporter about the most magical day of his childhood. “As long as I live,” he said, “and I’ve lived quite a few years, I’ll never forget that experience.”

It was December 1890, and a young Pearson was wandering the aisles of the Boston Store, an upscale department store in Brockton, Massachusetts, when he turned a corner and saw a portly man with a white beard and a red suit. “All of a sudden, right in front of me, I saw Santa Claus,” he recalled. “I couldn’t believe my eyes.” The man smiled and approached Pearson. Like most kids, Pearson had only seen interpretations of Santa in magazine illustrations, never in the flesh. But here, in a department store in a small town near Boston, was the man himself.

In reality, Santa was James Edgar, the owner of the Boston Store and a man who bore a resemblance to the holiday icon long before he ever asked a tailor to fashion a costume for him. For the hundreds of kids who visited his store, Edgar became something their eyes could hardly believe: the first department store Santa.

Edgar was born in Duns, Berwickshire, Scotland in 1843, arriving in the United States some 24 years later. A big, jolly man who carried his generosity with him everywhere, Edgar opened the Boston Store – later renamed Edgar’s – in 1878 and promptly began to personify the holiday spirit.

To say children were awestruck would not be an exaggeration. Like Pearson, they had never conceived of meeting their mysterious benefactor face-to-face before. Lines began to spiral out of the store and around the block, surging when school was let out. Edgar had planned on being Santa for just an hour a day and three on Saturdays, but he eventually had to hire a second man to play Santa when the demand outstripped his energy.

The notion of a living Santa was so intriguing that Edgar’s store attracted visitors from as far away as New York and Rhode Island. By the following year, several other stores across the country had picked up on the idea, which helped bolster foot traffic and sales. Unlike many of his successors, however, Edgar never had a place to sit and idle. He roamed his store, actively seeking out children so they could confide in him.

By the time Edgar died in September 1909, the department store Santa had become a tradition. The owners of his namesake property also seemed determined to continue his philanthropy, devoting an entire floor to cobbling shoes for the poor during the 1920s.

Edgar was not the first man to put on a Santa costume: because of the character’s many incarnations—from 4th century bishop to Coca-Cola advertising icon—that will forever be an issue of semantics. But he was the first documented department store Santa, and he arguably was the man who most closely resembled the character in terms of the good will he circulated. When he died, his funeral service was held in his second-floor apartment in Brockton. As soon as local schools let out for lunch, hundreds of children filed past his casket to pay their respects.

From the El Dorado Springs Chamber of Commerce