| 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.