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