Quay continued to supply the boxes for at least fifteen years, during
which his need for prompt payment never diminished. Comstock also bought
large quantities of bottles, corks, packing boxes, and wrappers.
Throughout the company's long existence, however, more frequent payments
were made to printers and stationers--for the heavy flow of almanacs,
handbills, labels, trade cards, direction sheets, and billheads--than
for all the drugs and packaging materials. In the success achieved by
the Indian Root Pills, the printing press was just as important a
contributor as the pill-mixing machine.
*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.
[Footnote 12: 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.]
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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:
[Footnote 13: Dr. William's Pink Pills, also headquartered in
Brockville, were not so fortunate, as they were mentioned disparagingly
in both the _Collier's_ and American Medical Association articles. Among
numerous proprietary manufacturers who protested, blustered, or
threatened legal action against _Collier's_, the Dr. Williams Co. was
one of only two who actually instituted a libel suit.]