The Final Years
When William Henry Comstock, Sr., moved the Indian Root Pill business to Morristown, in 1867, he was—at age 37—at least approaching middle life. Yet he was still to remain alive, healthy, and in direct charge of the medicine business for more than half a century longer. And the golden era of the patent-medicine business may be said to have coincided very closely with Mr. Comstock's active career—from about 1848 to 1919.
| FIGURE 24.—In its
final years the Comstock factory discontinued most of its old
remedies and concentrated upon the three most successful:
Comstock's Dead Shot Worm Pellets, Comstock's N. & B.
Liniment, and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills. |
While no schedule of sales, net income, or financial results are available, the fragmentary records make it obvious that the business continued to flourish beyond World War I, and long after the passage of the first Food and Drug Act—in 1906. The almanacs were still printed as recently as 1938; while the labels and other advertising matter abandoned their ornate nineteenth-century style and assumed a distinctly modern aspect—to the extent of introducing comic-style picture stories, featuring the small boy who lacked energy to make the little league baseball team (he had worms), and the girl who lacked male admirers because of pimples on her face (she suffered from irregular elimination). Sales volume of the Morristown factory, however, apparently did reach a peak early in the present century—perhaps around 1910—and began a more rapid decline during the 1920s. During this same period the geographical character of the market shifted significantly; as domestic orders dropped off, a very substantial foreign business, particularly in Latin America, sprang up. While this did not compensate fully for the loss of domestic sales, it did provide a heavy volume that undoubtedly prolonged the life of the Indian Root Pill factory by several decades.
William Henry Comstock, Sr., who first came to Brockville in 1860, at a time when the struggle with White for the control of the pills was still in progress, married a Canadian girl, Josephine Elliot, in 1864; by this marriage he had one son, Edwin, who lived only to the age of 28. In 1893 Comstock married, for a second time, Miss Alice J. Gates, and it is a favorable testimony to the efficacy of some of his own virility medicines that at age 67 he sired another son, William Henry Comstock II (or "Young Bill") on July 4, 1897. In the meanwhile, the elder Comstock had become one of the most prominent citizens of Brockville, which he served three terms as mayor and once represented in the Canadian parliament. Besides his medicine factories on both sides of the river, he was active in other business and civic organizations, helped to promote the Brockville, Westport & Northwestern Railway, and was highly regarded as a philanthropist. Although he lived well into the automobile age, he always preferred his carriage, and acquired a reputation as a connoisseur and breeder of horses. As remarked earlier, his steam yacht was also a familiar sight in the upper reaches of the St. Lawrence River.
The medicine business in Morristown was operated as a sole proprietorship by Comstock from the establishment here in 1867 up until 1902, when it was succeeded by W.H. Comstock Co., Ltd., a Canadian corporation. St. Lawrence County deeds record the transfer of the property—still preserving the 36-foot strip for the railroad—from personal to corporate ownership at that time.
Comstock—the same callow youth who had been charged with rifling Lucius' mail in the primitive New York City of 1851—came to the end of his long life in 1919. He was succeeded immediately by his son, William Henry II, who had only recently returned from military service during World War I. According to Mrs. Planty, former Morristown historian, "Young Bill" had been active in the business before the war and was making an inspection of the company's depots in the Orient, in the summer of 1914, when he was stranded in China by the cancellation of transpacific shipping services and was therefore obliged to cross China and Russia by the Transiberian Railway. This story, however, strains credulity a trifle, as the journey would have brought him closer to the scene of conflict at that time, and he was, in any event, only 17 years old when these events are supposed to have occurred.
The decline of the patent-medicine business was ascribed by Stewart Holbrook in his
Golden Age of Quackery
to three main factors: the Pure Food and Drug Acts; the automobile; and higher standards of public education. All of these were, of course, strongly in evidence by the 1920s, when William Henry Comstock II was beginning his career as the head of the Indian Root Pill enterprise. Nevertheless, the Morristown plant was still conducting a very respectable business at this time and was to continue for some four decades longer. The Comstock enterprise never seemed to have been much embarrassed by the muckraking attacks that surrounded the passage of the Federal Food and Drug Act of 1906. Aside from the enforcement of these measures by the energetic Harvey Wiley, the two most effective private assaults upon the patent-medicine trade probably were the exposures by Samuel Hopkins Adams in a series of articles in
Collier's
magazine in 1905-1906, under the title, "The Great American Fraud," and the two volumes entitled,
Nostrums and Quackery
, embodying reprints of numerous articles in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
over a period of years. Both sources named names fearlessly and described consequences bluntly. But the Comstock remedies, either because they may have been deemed harmless, or because the company's location in a small village in a remote corner of the country enabled it to escape unfriendly attention, seemed to have enjoyed relative immunity from these attacks. At least, none of the Comstock remedies was mentioned by name.[13] To be sure, these preparations—or at least those destined for consumption within the United States—had to comply with the new drug laws, to publish their ingredients, and over a period of time to reduce sharply the extensive list of conditions which they were supposed to cure. Nevertheless, it seems probable that the general change in public attitudes rather than any direct consequences of legislative enforcement caused the eventual demise of the Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills.
| FIGURE 25.—Comstock
packaging building (upper floor used as residence for
manager—note laundry) at left, hotel at right. Ferry slip
directly ahead. About 1915. |
Foreign business began to assume considerable importance after 1900; shipments from Morristown to the West Indies and Latin America were heavy, and the company also listed branches (perhaps no more than warehouses or agencies) in London, Hongkong, and Sydney, Australia. Certain of the order books picked up out of the litter on the floor of the abandoned factory give a suggestion of sales volume since 1900:
SALES OF DR. MORSE'S INDIAN ROOT PILLS
gross Estimated
Dollar
Domestic Foreign Total Amount
1900 —— —— 6,238 100,000
1910 5,975 —— —— 96,000
1920 3,243 —— —— 52,000
1930 —— 1,893 —— 30,000
1941 316 —— —— 5,000
The foregoing data show sales of the Indian Root Pills only; this was by far the most important product, but the factory was also selling Worm Pellets, Judson's Pills (up to 1920), and N & B Liniment. Also, this tabulation excludes sales in quantities less than one gross, and there were actually many such smaller orders. Only physical shipments were shown in the records recovered, and the dollar volume is the author's computation at $16 per gross, the price which prevailed for many years. Through 1900 there was only a single order book; beginning prior to 1910, separate domestic and foreign order books were introduced, but most of them have been lost. On the assumption that there was a fair volume of foreign sales in 1910, total sales must have continued to climb through the decade then ending, but by 1920 domestic sales—and probably total sales—had dropped materially. The number of employees, apparently about forty at the peak of the business, had dropped to thirteen according to the 1915 paybook but recovered slightly to sixteen in 1922. These fragmentary data suggest that the Morristown branch of the Comstock enterprise probably never grossed much over $100,000, but in an era when $12 or $15 represented a good weekly wage and the clutching grasp of the income-tax collector was still unknown, this was more than adequate to support the proprietor in comfort and to number him among the more influential citizens of the district. It is not known how Morristown sales compared with those of the Brockville factory, but it may be assumed that the company utilized its "dual nationality" to the utmost advantage, to benefit from favorable tariff laws and minimize the restrictions of both countries. The Morristown plant supplied the lucrative Latin American trade, while during the era of Imperial preference, Brockville must have handled the English, Oriental, and Australian business.
| FIGURE 26.—In its
final years the Comstock advertising assumed a modern guise.
Depicted here is the N. & B. Liniment (originally registered
with the Smithsonian as Carlton's Celebrated Nerve and Bone
Liniment for horses, in 1851). |
For many decades—from 1900 at least up into the 1930s—a number of very large shipments, normally 100 gross or more in single orders, were made to Gilpin, Langdon & Co., Baltimore, and to Columbia Warehouse Co. in St. Louis, important regional distributors.
Many substantial orders were also received from legitimate drug houses, such as Lehn & Fink; Schieffelin & Co.; Smith, Kline & French; and McKesson & Robbins. Curiously, A.J. White & Co. of New York City also appears in the order book, around 1900, as an occasional purchaser. Among the foreign orders received in 1930 the United Fruit Company was, by a wide margin, the largest single customer.
Pills destined for the Latin American market were packaged alternatively in "glass" or "tin," and were also labeled "Spanish" or "English," as the purchasers might direct. Spanish language almanacs and other advertising matter were generally inserted in the foreign parcels, along with many copies of "tapes"—the advertisements of the worm pills conspicuously illustrated with a horrifying picture of an enormous tapeworm.
Sales volume began to decline more precipitously in the 1930s, and the Morristown factory was no longer working even close to capacity. The domestic order book for 1941 shows sales of the Indian Root Pills, in quantities of one gross or more, of only 316 gross. The Royal Drug Co. of Chicago gave one single order for 44 gross, and Myers Bros. Drug Co. of St. Louis bought 25 gross in one shot, but otherwise orders in excess of five gross were rare, and those for one gross alone—or for one half gross, one fourth gross, or one sixth gross—were far more common. The number of orders was still substantial, and the packing and mailing clerks must have been kept fairly busy, but they were working hard for a sharply reduced total volume. Some stimulus was provided for the factory during the war years by a military contract for foot powder, but the decline became even more precipitous after the conflict. The Comstock Hotel was destroyed by fire in 1925, never to be rebuilt. And by the late 1940s the once-busy railroad bisecting the factory property—the old Utica & Black River—had deteriorated to one lonely train crawling over its track in each direction, on weekdays only, but still carrying a New York City sleeping car. The 1950 order book reveals a business that had withered away to almost nothing. Once again, as in 1900, both foreign and domestic sales were recorded in a single book, but now foreign sales greatly outstripped the domestic. In fact, a mere 18 gross of the pills were sold—in quantities of one gross or more—in the domestic market in that year, contrasting sadly with nearly 6,000 gross in 1910. Even the Henry P. Gilpin Co. of Baltimore, which at one time had been ordering 100 gross or more every month or six weeks, took only a meager four gross during the entire year. There were a large number of very small shipments—such as four boxes of pills here, or a bottle of liniment there—but these did not aggregate very much and gave the appearance of merely accommodating individual customers who could no longer find their favorite remedies in their own local drug stores.
The foreign business—chiefly in the West Indies, Puerto Rico, and South America—was still fairly substantial in 1950, amounting to 579 gross of the Indian Root Pills, but this was far from compensating for the virtual disappearance of the domestic market. At the old price of $16 per gross—which may no longer have been correct in 1950—the Morristown factory could not have taken in a great deal more than $10,000—hardly enough to justify its continued operation. In any case, it was obviously only the foreign business that kept the plant operating as long as it did; without that it would probably have closed its doors 20 years earlier.
A number of customers were, however, faithful to the Comstock Company for very many years. Schieffelin & Co. and McKesson & Robbins were both important customers way back in the 1840s, and their favor had been an object of dispute in the split between Lucius and the other brothers in 1851. Schieffelin still appeared frequently in the order books up to the 1920s; during the final years McKesson & Robbins was by far the largest single domestic customer. A number of other firms—John L. Thompson Sons & Co. of Troy, N.Y.; T. Sisson & Co. of Hartford, Conn.; and Gilman Brothers of Boston, Mass.—appear both in the 1896 and the 1950 order books, although unfortunately the quantities taken had fallen from one or two gross at a shot in the earlier year to a mere quarter gross or a few dozen boxes by 1950.
Toward the end, in the late 1950s, employment in the factory dropped to only three persons—J.M. Barney (foreman), Charles Pitcher, and Florence Cree—and they were only doing maintenance work and filling such few orders, mostly in quantities of a few dozen boxes only, that came to the factory unsolicited. Gone were the days of travelers scouring the back country, visiting country druggists, and pushing the pills, while simultaneously disparaging rival or "counterfeit" concoctions; gone were the days when the almanacs and other advertising circulars poured out of Morristown in the millions of copies; long since vanished were the sweeping claims of marvelous cures for every conceivable ailment. In these final days the Indian Root Pills, now packaged in a flat metal box with a sliding lid, were described modestly as the Handy Vegetable Laxative. And the ingredients were now printed on the box; nothing more was heard of Dr. Morse's remarkable discovery gleaned during his long sojourn with the Indians of the western plains.
| FIGURE 27.—The
pill-mixing building, about 1928 (building torn down in
1971). |
Although the records disclose nothing to this effect, it is a fair premise that the Comstock family often must have considered closing the Morristown plant after World War II and, more particularly, in the decade of the 1950s. Such inclinations may, however, have been countered by a willingness to let the plant run as long as a trickle of business continued and it did not fall too far short of covering expenses. The last few surviving employees were very elderly, and their jobs may have been regarded as a partial substitute for pensions. This view is evidenced by an injury report for George Clute, who suffered a fit of coughing while mixing pills in January 1941; he was then 77 years old and had been working in the factory for 34 years. The final paybooks show deductions for Social Security and unemployment insurance—specimens of vexatious red tape that the factory had avoided for most of its existence.
The decision to close the Morristown factory was finally forced upon the family, on May 15, 1959, by the death of William Henry Comstock II—"Young Bill"—who had been president of the company since 1921. Like his father, "Young Bill" Comstock had been a prominent citizen of Brockville for many years, served a term as mayor—although he was defeated in a contest for a parliamentary seat—was also active in civic and social organizations, and achieved recognition as a sportsman and speedboat operator.
| FIGURE 28.—The
packaging and office building at left, depot in center, and
Comstock Hotel at right. Canadian shore and city of Brockville
(location of another Comstock factory) in background. |
The actual end of the business came in the spring of 1960. The frequency and size of orders had dropped sharply, although the names of many of the old customers still appeared, as well as individuals who would send one dollar for three boxes of the pills. These small shipments were usually mailed, rather than going by express or freight, as formerly. The very last two shipments, appropriately, were to old customers: One package of one-dozen boxes of pills on March 31, 1960, to Gilman Brothers of Boston, and two-dozen boxes to McKesson & Robbins at Mobile, Alabama, on April 11. And with this final consignment the factory closed its doors, concluding ninety-three years of continuous operation in the riverside village of Morristown.
Very little of this story remains to be told. Mrs. Comstock became president of the company during its liquidation—and thus was a successor to her
father-in-law
, who had first entered the business as a clerk,
119 years earlier
, in 1841. The good will of the company and a few assets were sold to the Milburn Company of Scarborough, Ontario, but the Comstock business was terminated, and the long career of Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills brought to a close. The few superannuated employees were assured of protection against all medical expenses, by the company or by the Comstock family, for the rest of their lives. A few years later the associated Canadian factory standing in the heart of Brockville was torn down; during its lifetime that community had grown up around it, from a village to a flourishing small city. The buildings in Morristown were sold to other parties and left to stand untenanted and forlorn for years. The upper (packaging) building, from which the records were recovered, remains in fair condition and may yet be renovated for some further use. The lower (pill-mixing) building, after standing derelict and at the point of collapse for many years, was finally torn down in 1971. The hotel, a large water tank behind the factory, and the combination depot and customs house have all vanished from the scene. The shed where the Comstocks kept their yacht has been maintained and still shelters several boats, but the ferry slip just below the factory steps is now abandoned, and no longer do vessels ply back and forth across the river to connect Morristown and Brockville. The railroad only survived the passing of the factory by a year or two and is now memorialized by no more than a line of decaying ties. The main highway leading westward from Ogdensburg toward the Thousand Islands area has been straightened and rerouted to avoid Morristown, so that now only the straying or misguided traveler will enter the village. If he does enter he will find a pleasant community, scenically located on a small bay of the St. Lawrence River, commanding an enticing view of the Canadian shore, and rising in several stages above the lower level, where the factory once stood; but it is a somnolent village. No longer do river packet steamers call at the sagging pier, no longer do trains thread their way between the factory buildings and chug to a halt at the adjacent station. No longer do hope-giving pills and elixirs, or almanacs and circulars in the millions, pour out of Morristown destined for country drugstores and lonely farmhouses over half a continent. Only memories persist around the empty ferry slip, the vanished railroad station, and the abandoned factory buildings—for so many years the home of the distinguished Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills.
Footnotes
National Cyclopedia of American Biography
, VII: 280.
The Comstock brothers' grandmother, Esther Lee, was apparently unrelated to Dr. Samuel Lee, the inventor of the Bilious Pills.
Receipts for these registrations were signed by the prominent librarian, Charles Coffin Jewett, later to be superintendent of the Boston Public Library for many years.
Young, James Harvey,
The Toadstool Millionaires, A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation
. Princeton University Press. 1961.
Moore claimed later (his affidavit of November 22, 1859) that he thought he was hired only by White personally, and did not realize that A.J. White & Co. was controlled by the Comstocks.
The "temporary" tax placed upon drug manufacture as a revenue measure during the Civil War remained in effect until 1883.
National Cyclopedia of American Biography
, IV:500.
Or perhaps Mr. Comstock merely failed to pay for an engraved plate and to order a book; these county histories were apparently very largely written and edited with an eye to their subscribers.
These facsimile bills were registered as a trademark at the United States Patent Office. In his registration application, Mr. Comstock described himself as a citizen of the United States, residing at Morristown, N.Y.—although he had served three terms as mayor of Brockville, Ontario, prior to this time.
In connection with this offer the pills were priced to agents at $2 per dozen boxes—$24 per gross—and were to be retailed at $3 per dozen—25¢ per box. Other agreements, however, probably intended for more substantial dealers, specified a price of $16 per gross for the Indian Root Pills.
Actually, the formula for the Indian Root Pills would seem to have corresponded closely with that for "Indian Cathartic Pills" given in
Dr. Chase's Recipes
, published in 1866. These were described as follows:
Aloes and gamboge, of each 1 oz.; mandrake and blood-root, with gum myrrh, of each 1/4 oz.; gum camphor and cayenne, of each 1-1/2 drs.; ginger, 4 oz.; all finely pulverized and thoroughly mixed, with thick mucilage (made by putting a little water upon equal quantities of gum arabic and gum tragacanth) into pill mass; then formed into common sized pills. Dose: Two to four pills, according to the robustness of the patient.
However, additional items were manufactured by the Dr. Howard Medicine Co., affiliated with the Comstock factory in Brockville. Also, during World War II the company accepted an Army contract for the manufacture and packaging of foot powder.
Bibliography
The principal source of information for this history of the Comstock medicine business comprises the records, letters, documents, and advertising matter found in the abandoned pill-factory building at Morristown, New York. Supplemental information was obtained from biographies, local and county histories, old city directories, genealogies, back files of newspapers, and materials from the office of the St. Lawrence County Historian, at the courthouse, Canton, New York.
Two standard histories of the patent-medicine era in America are:
Holbrook, Stewart H.
Golden Age of Quackery.
New York City: Macmillan Co. 1959.
Young, J.H.
The Toadstool Millionaires, A Social History of Patent Medicines in America Before Federal Regulation.
Princeton University Press. 1961.
Early in the present century, during the "exposure" of the patent-medicine industry, two principal critical works also were published, each highly specific and naming names fearlessly:
Adams, Samuel Hopkins.
The Great American Fraud.
Serially in
Collier's
Magazine in 1905-1906. (Reprinted in book form, 1906.)
American Medical Association.
Nostrums and Quackery.
Chicago: American Medical Association Press. (Reprints from the
Journal of the American Medical Association
: volume I, 1911; volume II, 1921; volume III, 1936.)
Recently two books have appeared, which are largely pictorial, essentially uncritical, and strive mainly to recapture the colorfulness and ingenuity of patent-medicine advertising.
Carson, Gerald.
One for a Man, Two for a Horse.
128 pages. New York City: Doubleday and Co. 1961.
Hechtlinger, Adelaide.
The Great Patent Medicine Era.
New York City: Grosset and Dunlap. 1970.
A highly recommended source of information on the very early history of patent medicines in America is:
Griffenhagen, George B., and James Harvey Young. Old English Patent Medicines in America.
United States National Museum Bulletin 218, Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology
, paper 10: 155-183 1959.
|
DR. MORSE'S PILLS LIVE ON
Although the original Comstock enterprise has been dissolved
and all of its undertakings in North America terminated, as has been related herein, Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills and Comstock's Worm Tablets are still being manufactured and sold—by the W.H. Comstock Company Pty. Ltd., in Australia. This concern, originally a subsidiary of the Canadian company, is headed by the former branch manager for the Comstocks, who acquired the rights for Australia and the Orient following the dissolution of the Brockville company. Distribution is also carried out from this source into New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Packaging and directions are now modern, the pills being described as "The Overnight Laxative with the Tonic Action," but a reproduction of the old label and the facsimile signature of William Henry Comstock, Sr., are still being portrayed. Thus, the Indian Root Pills have been manufactured continuously for at least 115 years and the Comstock business, through the original and successor firms, has survived for nearly 140 years. |