William Henry Comstock, Sr., who first came to Brockville in 1860, at a time when the struggle with White for the control of the pills was still in progress, married a Canadian girl, Josephine Elliot, in 1864; by this marriage he had one son, Edwin, who lived only to the age of 28.  In 1893 Comstock married, for a second time, Miss Alice J. Gates, and it is a favorable testimony to the efficacy of some of his own virility medicines that at age 67 he sired another son, William Henry Comstock II (or “Young Bill”) on July 4, 1897.  In the meanwhile, the elder Comstock had become one of the most prominent citizens of Brockville, which he served three terms as mayor and once represented in the Canadian parliament.  Besides his medicine factories on both sides of the river, he was active in other business and civic organizations, helped to promote the Brockville, Westport & Northwestern Railway, and was highly regarded as a philanthropist.  Although he lived well into the automobile age, he always preferred his carriage, and acquired a reputation as a connoisseur and breeder of horses.  As remarked earlier, his steam yacht was also a familiar sight in the upper reaches of the St. Lawrence River.

The medicine business in Morristown was operated as a sole proprietorship by Comstock from the establishment here in 1867 up until 1902, when it was succeeded by W.H.  Comstock Co., Ltd., a Canadian corporation.  St. Lawrence County deeds record the transfer of the property—­still preserving the 36-foot strip for the railroad—­from personal to corporate ownership at that time.

Comstock—­the same callow youth who had been charged with rifling Lucius’ mail in the primitive New York City of 1851—­came to the end of his long life in 1919.  He was succeeded immediately by his son, William Henry II, who had only recently returned from military service during World War I. According to Mrs. Planty, former Morristown historian, “Young Bill” had been active in the business before the war and was making an inspection of the company’s depots in the Orient, in the summer of 1914, when he was stranded in China by the cancellation of transpacific shipping services and was therefore obliged to cross China and Russia by the Transiberian Railway.  This story, however, strains credulity a trifle, as the journey would have brought him closer to the scene of conflict at that time, and he was, in any event, only 17 years old when these events are supposed to have occurred.

The decline of the patent-medicine business was ascribed by Stewart Holbrook in his Golden Age of Quackery to three main factors:  the Pure Food and Drug Acts; the automobile; and higher standards of public education.  All of these were, of course, strongly in evidence by the 1920s, when William Henry Comstock II was beginning his career as the head of the Indian Root Pill enterprise.  Nevertheless, the Morristown plant was still conducting a very respectable business