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

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 79 pages of information about History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills.

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

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 79 pages of information about History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills.

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

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History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.