History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills — John Shaqi
History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root PillsShaw, Robert B.
History
History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills
Shaw, Robert B.
Patent medicines -- United States; W.H. Comstock Co.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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