History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills Part 6

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 quant.i.ties less than one gross, and there were actually many such smaller orders. Only physical s.h.i.+pments 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 a.s.sumption 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 a.s.sumed 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGURE 26.--In its final years the Comstock advertising a.s.sumed 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 s.h.i.+pments, 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 "gla.s.s" 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts of the worm pills conspicuously ill.u.s.trated 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 quant.i.ties 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 quant.i.ties 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 s.h.i.+pments--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, Ma.s.s.--appear both in the 1896 and the 1950 order books, although unfortunately the quant.i.ties 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 quant.i.ties 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 subst.i.tute 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGURE 28.--The packaging and office building at left, depot in center, and Comstock Hotel at right. Canadian sh.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+pments were usually mailed, rather than going by express or freight, as formerly.

The very last two s.h.i.+pments, 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 a.s.sets 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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sociated 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 flouris.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sing 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 sh.o.r.e, 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.

*Bibliography*

The princ.i.p.al source of information for this history of the Comstock medicine business comprises the records, letters, doc.u.ments, 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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sociation. _Nostrums and Quackery._ Chicago: American Medical a.s.sociation Press. (Reprints from the _Journal of the American Medical a.s.sociation_: 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.