S. Fram

Solomon Fram (1875-1958) was born in Lithuania and raised in London, England. In 1899, he married Eastern European immigrant Katy (also spelled Katie) Goldburg (1876-1962) and then the following year, Solomon and Katy immigrated to the United States via Canada and settled in Worcester, Massachusetts. There, Solomon worked as a peddler before joining his brother Israel From (1879-1935) in Union, South Carolina in the early 1910s.¹ Building on skills he learned in Europe, Solomon quickly opened The Electric Shoe Repair Shop and successfully operated as a cobbler for several years.

In 1920, he sold the shoe shop and moved to Chester, South Carolina with his wife and children. There, he purchased Annie Baer’s dry goods store on Gadsden Street and expanded the store’s line of shoes. In March of 1923, he was forced to declare bankruptcy and subsequently moved back to Union County where he managed a department store until his retirement in the mid- to late 1940s.

¹ According to descendants, many members of Solomon’s family changed the spelling of their last name from Fram to From when they immigrated to the Unites States in order to maintain their preferred pronunciation of their surname. However, Solomon kept the original spelling.