Part 3

[Footnote 6: The "temporary" tax placed upon drug manufacture as a revenue measure during the Civil War remained in effect until 1883.]

[Illustration: FIGURE 11.--This announcement, sent to all customers of the Indian Root Pills, marked the final termination of the long dispute between two firms, both named A.J. White & Co., and both of whom claimed ownership of the pills.]

During this period Judson and William Henry Comstock became interested in a coffee-roasting and spice-grinding business, operated under the name of Central Mills, and located in the Harlem Railroad Building at the corner of Centre and White Streets. Possibly George objected to his partners spreading their energies over a second business; in any case, dissension must have arisen over some matter. On April 1, 1866, balance sheets were drawn up separately for B.L. Judson & Co. and Comstock & Judson; the former showed a net worth of $48,527.56 against only $5,066.70 for the latter. Both of these firms had a common bookkeeper, E. Kingsland, but the relationship between the firms is not known.

On April 25, Judson and William H. Comstock sold their coffee-roasting business to one Alexander Chegwidden, taking a mortgage on the specific assets, which included, besides roasters and other machinery, a horse and wagon. But if this had been a factor in the controversy among the partners, the sale failed to end it, for we find that on December 21, 1866, George W. obtained an injunction against William Henry and Judson restraining them from collecting or receiving any accounts due the partnership of B.L. Judson & Co., transferring or disposing of any of its assets, and continuing business under that name or using any of its trademarks. Unfortunately, we have no information as to the details of this case or the terms of settlement, but we do find that on February 1, 1867, the law firm of Townsend, Dyett & Morrison rendered a bill for $538.85 to B.L. Judson and William H. Comstock for "Supervising and engrossing two copies of agreement with George W. Comstock on settlement" and for representing the two parties named in several actions and cross actions with George.

This settlement, whatever its precise character may have been, obviously marked the termination of the old partnership--or, more properly, the series of successor partnerships--that had been carried on by various of the Comstock brothers for over thirty years. William Henry, the former clerk and junior partner--although also the son of the founder--was now going it alone. Before this time he had already transferred the main center of his activities to Canada, and he must have been contemplating the removal of the business out of New York City.

After this parting of the ways, George W. Comstock was associated with several machinery businesses in New York City, up until his death in 1889. During the Draft Riots of 1863 he had played an active role in protecting refugees from the Colored orphanage on 43rd Street, who sought asylum in his house at 136 West 34th Street.[7]

*Dr. Morse's Pills Move to Morristown*

In April 1867, the home of Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills and of the other proprietary remedies was transferred from New York City to Morristown, a village of 300 inhabitants on the bank of the St. Lawrence River in northern New York State. This was not, however, the initial move into this area; three or four years earlier William H. Comstock had taken over an existing business in Brockville, Ontario, directly across the river. No specific information as to why the business was established here has been found, but the surrounding circumstances provide some very good presumptions.

The bulk of the Comstocks' business was always carried on in rural areas--in "the back-woods." Specifically, the best sales territory consisted of the Middle West--what was then regarded as "The West"--of the United States and of Canada West, i.e., the present province of Ontario. A surviving ledger of all of the customers of Comstock & Brother in 1857 supplies a complete geographic distribution. Although New Jersey and Pennsylvania were fairly well represented, accounts in New York State were sparse, and those in New England negligible. And despite considerable travel by the partners or agents in the Maritime Provinces, no very substantial business was ever developed there. The real lively sales territory consisted of the six states of Ohio, Indiana,

[Footnote 7: _National Cyclopedia of American Biography_, IV:500.]

Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa, which accounted for over two thirds of all domestic sales, while Canada West contributed over 90 percent of Canadian sales. More regular customers were to be found in Canada West--a relatively compact territory--than any other single state or province. The number of customers of Comstock & Brother in 1857 by states and provinces follows:

Alabama 12 Arkansas 1 Connecticut 3 Delaware 5 D.C. 1 Florida 5 Georgia 15 Illinois 415 Indiana 298 Iowa 179 Kansas Ter. 1 Kentucky 21 Louisiana 7 Maine 2 Maryland 21 Massachusetts 5 Minnesota Ter. 6 Mississippi 8 Missouri 32 Michigan 194 New York State 88 New York City 3 New Jersey 212 New Hampshire 1 North Carolina 9 Ohio 179 Pennsylvania 192 Rhode Island 2 South Carolina 5 Tennessee 21 Texas 1 Virginia 30 Wisconsin 303 New Brunswick 15 Nova Scotia 19 Canada East (Quebec) 7 Canada West 434

Total United States 2,277 Total Canada 475

The concentration of this market and its considerable distance from New York City at a time when transportation conditions were still relatively primitive must have created many problems in distribution. Moreover, the serious threat to the important Canadian market imposed by White and Moore, although eventually settled by compromise, must have emphasized the vulnerability of this territory to competition.

It was also probable that the office in lower Manhattan--at 106 Franklin Street after May 20, 1862--was found to be increasingly congested and inconvenient as a site for mixing pills and tonics, bottling, labeling, packaging and shipping them, and keeping all of the records for a large number of individual small accounts. A removal of the manufacturing part of the business to more commodious quarters, adjacent to transportation routes, must have been urgent.

But why move to as remote a place as Morristown, New York, beyond the then still wild Adirondacks? It is obvious that this location was selected because the company already had an office and some facilities in Brockville, Canada West.

William H. Comstock must have first become established at Brockville, after extensive peregrinations through Canada West, around 1859 or 1860. During the dispute between A.J. White and Comstock & Judson, Blakely, the aggressive Canadian agent, had written to White, on September 1, 1859, that he had heard from "Mr. Allen Turner of Brockville" that the Comstocks were already manufacturing Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills at St. Catherines. Evidently the Comstocks thought of several possible locations, for on July 2 of the following year Blakely advised his principals that the Comstocks were now manufacturing their pills in Brockville. Two years later, in November 1862, when Blakely sued William H. Comstock for the forgery of a note, the defendant was then described in the legal papers as "one Wm. Henry Comstock of the town of Brockville Druggist." And in July 1865, Comstock was writing from Brockville to E. Kingsland, the bookkeeper in New York City, telling him to put Brenner--the bearer of the letter--"in the mill." Comstock had apparently taken over an existing business in Brockville, as receipts for medicines delivered by him describe him as "Successor to A.N. M'Donald & Co." Dr. McKenzie's Worm Tablets also seem to have come into the Comstock business with this acquisition.

This did not mean a final move to Brockville for William H. Comstock; for several years he must have gone back and forth and was still active in New York City as a partner of his brother and of Judson. We have seen that he subsequently went into partnership with Judson in the purchase of the coffee-roasting business. In December 1866, he was a defendant in the lawsuit initiated by his brother George, when he was still apparently active in the New York City business. Nevertheless, he apparently shifted the center of his activities to the Brockville area about 1860, relinquishing primary responsibility for affairs in New York City to his brother and to Judson.

[Illustration: FIGURE 12.--Label for Victoria Hair Gloss, Comstock & Brother, 1855.]

We now find the Comstock business established at Brockville. Exactly why a second plant was built at Morristown, right across the river, is again a matter for conjecture. It is a fair assumption, however, that customs duties or other restraints may have interfered with the ability of the Canadian plant to supply the United States market. Thus, facilities on the other side of the border, but still close enough to be under common management, must have become essential. In an era of water transportation, Morristown was a convenient place from which to supply the important middle western territory. Ogdensburg was the eastern terminus of lake boats, and several lines provided daily service between that point and Buffalo. The railroad had already reached Ogdensburg (although not yet Morristown) so that rail transportation was also convenient. And the farms of St. Lawrence County could certainly be counted upon to supply such labor as was necessary for the rather simple tasks of mixing pills and elixirs and packaging them. Finally, the two plants were directly across the river from each other--connection was made by a ferry which on the New York side docked almost on the Comstock property--so that both could easily be supervised by a single manager. In fact, if it had not been for the unusual circumstance that they were located in two different countries, they could really have been considered as no more than separate buildings constituting a single plant.

Surviving receipts for various goods and services show that the move to Morristown was carried out in March or April of 1867. Although the Morristown undertaking was obviously regarded as a continuation of the New York business, it was operated by William Henry Comstock as the sole proprietor for many years, and the terms of any settlement or subsequent relationship with Judson are unknown. A "Judson Pill Co." was subsequently established at Morristown, but this was no more than a mailing address for one department of the Comstock business. What happened to Judson as an individual is a mystery; like Moore, he quietly disappears from our story.

It is also puzzling that no record of the transfer of land to Mr. Comstock upon the first establishment of the pill factory in Morristown in 1867 can be found. The earliest deed discovered in the St. Lawrence County records shows the transfer of waterfront property to William Henry Comstock "of Brockville, Ontario," from members of the Chapman family, in March 1876. Additional adjoining land was also acquired in 1877 and 1882.

*The Golden Era*

With the establishment of the Comstock patent-medicine business at Morristown in 1867, this enterprise may be said to have reached maturity. Over thirty years had passed since William Henry's father had established its earliest predecessor in lower Manhattan. Possession of Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills was now unchallenged, and this and the other leading brand names were recognized widely in country drug stores and farmhouses over one third of a continent. No longer did the medicines have to be mixed, bottled, and packaged in cramped and dingy quarters above a city shop; spacious buildings in an uncongested country village were now being used. No further relocations would be necessary, as operations exceeded their capacity, or as landlords might elect to raise rents; the pill factory was to remain on the same site for the following ninety years. And the bitter struggles for control, perhaps acerbated because of the family relationship among the partners, were now a thing of the past. William H. Comstock was in exclusive control, and he was to retain this position, first as sole proprietor and later as president, for the remainder of his long life.

The patent-medicine business as a whole was also entering, just at this time, upon its golden era--the fifty-year span between the Civil War and World War I. Improved transportation, wider circulation of newspapers and periodicals, and cheaper and better bottles all enabled the manufacturers of the proprietary remedies to expand distribution--the enactment and enforcement of federal drug laws was still more than a generation in the future. So patent medicines flourished; in hundreds of cities and villages over the land enterprising self-proclaimed druggists devised a livelihood for themselves by mixing some powders into pills or bottling some secret elixir--normally containing a high alcoholic content or some other habit-forming element--created some kind of a legend about this concoction, and sold the nostrum as the infallible cure for a wide variety of human (and animal) ailments. And many conservative old ladies, each one of them a pillar of the church and an uncompromising foe of liquor, cherished their favorite remedies to provide comfort during the long winter evenings. But of these myriads of patent-medicine manufacturers, only a scant few achieved the size, the recognition, and wide distribution of Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills and the other leading Comstock remedies.

[Illustration: FIGURE 13.--Comstock factory buildings, about 1900.]

[Illustration: FIGURE 14.--Wrapper for Longley's Great Western Panacea.]

Of course, the continued growth of the business was a gradual process; it did not come all at once with the move to Morristown. Even in 1878, after eleven years in this village, the Comstock factory was not yet important enough to obtain mention in Everts' comprehensive _History of St. Lawrence County_.[8] But, as we have seen, additional land was purchased in 1877 and 1882, obviously bespeaking an expansion of the enterprise. In 1885, according to a time book, the pill factory regularly employed about thirty persons, plus a few others on an occasional basis.

Mr. Comstock, from his residence across the river in Brockville, was the manager of the business; however, the operations were under the immediate charge of E. Kingsland, former chief clerk of the Judson and Comstock offices in New York City, who was brought up to Morristown as superintendent of the factory. E. Kingsland was a cousin of Edward A. Kingsland, one of the leading stationers in New York City, and presumably because of this relationship, Kingsland supplied a large part of Comstock's stationery requirements for many years. Kingsland in Morristown retired from the plant in 1885 and was succeeded by Robert G. Nicolson, who had been a foreman for a number of years. Nicolson, a native of Glasgow, Scotland, was brought to America as a child, first lived at Brockville, and then came to Morristown as foreman in the pill factory shortly after it was established. He was succeeded as superintendent by his own son, Robert Jr., early in the present century.

The great majority of the employees of the pill factory were women--or, more properly, girls--in an era when it was not yet common-place for members of the fair sex to leave the shelter of their homes for paid employment. The wage rates during the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s were $3 to $5 a week for girls and $7 to $12 a week for men; the last-named amount was an acceptable rate at that time for a permanent and experienced adult man. The factory management of this era was joyously unaware of minimum wages, fair employment laws, social security, antidiscrimination requirements, fair trade, food and drug acts, income taxes, and the remaining panoply of legal restrictions that harass the modern businessman. Since only a few scattered payroll records have been recovered, Comstock's maximum employment during the Morristown period is not known, or just when it was reached. In a brief sketch of the Indian Root Pill business, however, Mrs. Doris Planty, former Morristown town historian, mentions a work force of from "40 to 50" around the turn of the century.

In 1875, twenty years after its original projection, the Utica & Black River Railroad finally came through the village, bisecting the Comstock property with a right-of-way thirty-six feet wide and dividing it thereafter into a "lower shop," where the pills and tonics were made, and the "upper shop," where the medicines were packaged and clerical duties performed. The superintendent and his family lived above the upper shop in an apartment; it was in the spacious attic above this apartment that the records of the business, in a scattered and ransacked condition, were found. Inasmuch as the first recorded sale of land to Comstock occurred in March 1876, almost simultaneously with the arrival of the railroad, it is a fair surmise that the second building was put up about this time.

The coming of the railroad also put a station almost at the doorstep of the factory, and thereafter many shipments came and went by rail. The company's huge volume of mailings, often ten or fifteen bags a day, was also delivered directly to the trains, without going through the local post office. For some years, however, heavy shipments, including coal for the factory's boilers, continued to come by ship. The Brockville ferry also operated from a dock immediately adjacent to the railroad station; one end of the station was occupied by the United States Customs House.

Almost from the time of its arrival in Morristown, the Black River Railroad operated a daily through Wagner Palace Sleeping Car from New York City via Utica and Carthage, and service over the same route was continued by the New York Central after it took over the North Country railroads in 1891. This meant that Mr. Comstock, when he had business in New York City, could linger in his factory until the evening train paused at the station to load the afternoon's outpouring of pills and almanacs, swing aboard the waiting Pullman, and ensconce himself comfortably in his berth, to awaken in the morning within the cavernous precincts of Grand Central Station--an ease and convenience of travel which residents of the North Country in the 1970s cannot help but envy. The daily sleeping car through Morristown to and from New York City survived as long as the railroad itself, into the early 1960s, thus outlasting both of the Comstocks--father and son.

[Footnotes 8: 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.]

The pills were originally mixed by hand. In the summer of 1880 the factory installed a steam engine and belt-driven pill-mixing machinery. At least one rotary pill machine was purchased from England, from J.W. Pindar, and delivered to Comstock at a total cost (including ocean freight) of £19-10-9--about $100. One minor unsolved mystery is that a bill for a second, identical machine made out to A.J. White--with whom Comstock had not been associated for twenty years--is filed among the Comstock records; it can only be surmised that at this time Comstock and White were again on good terms, the memories of lawsuits, arrests, and prosecutions long since forgotten, and Comstock either ordered a machine in behalf of White or perhaps agreed to take one off his hands. At the time of this expansion, certain outbuildings and a dock for the unloading of coal were erected adjoining the lower building. During 1881 an underwater telegraph cable was laid between Morristown and Brockville, allowing immediate communication between the two Comstock factories.

With the advent of the electrical age, around the turn of the century, the Comstock factory also installed a generator to supply lighting, the first in the locality to introduce this amenity. The wires were also extended to the four or five company-owned houses in the village, and then to other houses, so that the company functioned as a miniature public utility. Its electric lines in the village were eventually sold to the Central New York Power Corporation and incorporated into that system. Steam heat was also supplied to the railroad station and the customs house, and the company pumped water out of the river to the water tower on the hill above Pine Hill Cemetery, following the installation of the public water system.

In 1908, Comstock built a large hotel across the street from the upper factory; sitting part way up the hill and surrounded by a wide veranda, it represented a conspicuous feature in the village and dominated the waterfront scene until its destruction by fire in 1925. The Comstock family, in 1910, also built a town hall and social center for the village. Adjacent to the lower shop a large boathouse was erected to shelter Mr. Comstock's yacht, the _Maga Doma_, a familiar sight on the river for many years.

[Illustration: FIGURE 15.--The village of Morristown from the waterfront. Railroad depot, Comstock Hotel, and pill-factory buildings located left of center.]

In any large city, of course, a factory employing, at most, forty or fifty workers would have passed unnoticed, and its owner could hardly expect to wield any great social or political influence. In a remote village like Morristown, things are quite different; a regular employer of forty persons creates a considerable economic impact. For two generations the Indian Root Pill factory supplied jobs, in an area where they were always scarce, and at a time when the old forest and dairy industries were already beginning to decline. But the recital of its close associations with the village makes it clear that the pill factory was more than a mere employer; for ninety years it provided a spirit that animated Morristown, pioneered in the introduction of utilities and certain social services, linked the village directly with the great outside world of drug stores and hypochondriacs, and distinguished it sharply from other, languishing St. Lawrence County villages. One may wonder whether Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills really did anyone any good. They certainly did heap many benefits upon all citizens of Morristown.

[Illustration: FIGURE 16.--Depot, Comstock Hotel, and factory buildings (at right), about 1910.]

While there was only a single Comstock medicine business, operated as a sole proprietorship until 1902, Comstock found it convenient to maintain several dummy companies--really no more than mailing addresses--for some years after the move to the North. Thus, in Morristown was to be found, at least in business and postal directories, besides the Comstock company itself, two other proprietary manufacturers: Judson Pill Co. and E. Kingsland & Co.

The Judson Pill Co. preserved the name of Comstock's former partner, while use of the name E. Kingsland perhaps flattered the vanity of the former chief clerk and later plant superintendent. The major Kingsland product was Chlorinated Tablets, a sure cure for coughs, colds, hoarseness, bronchial irritation, influenza, diphtheria, croup, sore throat and all throat diseases; these were especially recommended by Dr. MacKenzie, Senior Physician in the Hospital for Diseases of the Throat (was there any such hospital?) in London, England. The Kingsland pills were also popularized under the name of Little Pink Granules.

Over on the Canadian side of the river, where another plant approximately the same size as the Morristown facilities was in operation, the Comstock Company had assimilated the Dr. Howard Medicine Co. Dr. Howard's leading remedies were his Seven Spices for all Digestive Disorders and the Blood Builder for Brain and Body. The latter, in the form of pills, was prescribed as a positive cure for a wide array of ailments, but like many other patent medicines of the era, it was hinted that it had a particularly beneficial effect upon sexual vitality.