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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
*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.