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.