Pills destined for the Latin American market were packaged alternatively in “glass” or “tin,” and were also labeled “Spanish” or “English,” as the purchasers might direct.  Spanish language almanacs and other advertising matter were generally inserted in the foreign parcels, along with many copies of “tapes”—­the advertisements of the worm pills conspicuously illustrated with a horrifying picture of an enormous tapeworm.

Sales volume began to decline more precipitously in the 1930s, and the Morristown factory was no longer working even close to capacity.  The domestic order book for 1941 shows sales of the Indian Root Pills, in quantities of one gross or more, of only 316 gross.  The Royal Drug Co. of Chicago gave one single order for 44 gross, and Myers Bros.  Drug Co. of St. Louis bought 25 gross in one shot, but otherwise orders in excess of five gross were rare, and those for one gross alone—­or for one half gross, one fourth gross, or one sixth gross—­were far more common.  The number of orders was still substantial, and the packing and mailing clerks must have been kept fairly busy, but they were working hard for a sharply reduced total volume.  Some stimulus was provided for the factory during the war years by a military contract for foot powder, but the decline became even more precipitous after the conflict.  The Comstock Hotel was destroyed by fire in 1925, never to be rebuilt.  And by the late 1940s the once-busy railroad bisecting the factory property—­the old Utica & Black River—­had deteriorated to one lonely train crawling over its track in each direction, on weekdays only, but still carrying a New York City sleeping car.  The 1950 order book reveals a business that had withered away to almost nothing.  Once again, as in 1900, both foreign and domestic sales were recorded in a single book, but now foreign sales greatly outstripped the domestic.  In fact, a mere 18 gross of the pills were sold—­in quantities of one gross or more—­in the domestic market in that year, contrasting sadly with nearly 6,000 gross in 1910.  Even the Henry P. Gilpin Co. of Baltimore, which at one time had been ordering 100 gross or more every month or six weeks, took only a meager four gross during the entire year.  There were a large number of very small shipments—­such as four boxes of pills here, or a bottle of liniment there—­but these did not aggregate very much and gave the appearance of merely accommodating individual customers who could no longer find their favorite remedies in their own local drug stores.

The foreign business—­chiefly in the West Indies, Puerto Rico, and South America—­was still fairly substantial in 1950, amounting to 579 gross of the Indian Root Pills, but this was far from compensating for the virtual disappearance of the domestic market.  At the old price of $16 per gross—­which may no longer have been correct in 1950—­the Morristown factory could not have taken in a great deal more than $10,000—­hardly enough to justify its continued operation.  In any case, it was obviously only the foreign business that kept the plant operating as long as it did; without that it would probably have closed its doors 20 years earlier.