A Modest Proposal for a Further Examination of the Companies Utilizing Proprietary Battleship Cancels
Editors Note: Malcolm A. Goldstein was a contributing blogger on 1898 Revenues. This page provides an introduction to his column on the companies that used proprietary battleships.
On Beyond Holcombe: An Introduction
An examination of the companies producing the countless variety of cancels appearing on the battleship series of proprietary revenue stamps offers a fresh opportunity to explore the contradictions of a com¬plex American society, where the fortunes of men, eventually exposed as among the most ruthless of the “robber barons,” were molded into the benevolence of philanthropic organization that today bear their names. In sanctioning battleship revenues to evidence payment of tax imposed to finance the Spanish-American War, Congress elected to tax patent medicines because they were profitable. The men who led the industry became unimaginably wealthy. As their histories unfold, strange and juicy tales emerge.
This story has been approached in two different ways. In the compilation Patent Medicine Tax Stamps, Henry Holcombe (1897-1973) created the definitive history of private die proprietary stamps and Prof. James Harvey Young (1915-2006), in his Toadstool Millionaires, recounted the social implications of the patent medicine era in American history. Yet, to a collector of battleship revenue cancels, while each book tells a unique and memorable story, it reveals only part of a vast and fascinating legacy of good and evil that patent medicines and the fortunes they created have bestowed upon society as their legacy.
Holcombe’s book dealt with companies that ordered private dies. He was not recounting the history of patent medicines per se and ignored virtually all of those companies that did not place orders for their own stamps. The taxes on proprietary medicine and cosmetics had originated during the Civil War and lasted for more than twenty years until they finally expired in 1883. The great bulk of private die proprietary stamps date from that period. Between 1880 and 1898, the drug industry expanded enormously. During the Spanish-American War period, since printing procedures had changed and the tax was repealed entirely within four years (three years for patent medicines), very few companies had time to order their own stamps, so Holcombe’s book does not cover the younger group of companies. Young was not a philatelist, and did not mention revenue stamp cancels in his cautionary tale concerning the over-reaching, death-inducing claims the patent medicine proprietors often indulged and the sinister pressures they exerted to keep their industry flourishing. Proprietary battleship cancels provide a window through which to examine the companies that Holcombe did not feature (and perhaps to amplify upon some the companies he did), while Young’s social history of the era provides the context for re-examining the contributions as well as the excesses of the patent medicine industry.
1898 is an excellent year to examine the entire drug industry in the United States for it was then at the height of its influence and power. Taking the measure of the drug trade, in preparation for a meeting of the wholesale drug dealers association in New York City in October, 1894, a reporter for the New York Times wrote: “With the possible exception of the National Bankers’ Association, there is not another organization in the country that represents as much wealth in the aggregate as the druggists.” Yet, the industry’s decline was already foreshadowed, for by the end of the century, scientific inquisitiveness had developed tests allowing for clear and certain identification of the secret compounds contained in patent medicines. Within a few years after the end of the Spanish-American War, a series of exposes printed in McClure’s Magazine (gathered into the volume The Great American Fraud by Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871-1958)), instigated the first serious examination of the patent medicine industry’s excesses. These articles, in turn, led to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. This Act made the first incursions on the industry’s outsized and unsubstantiated claims to positive cures. Nevertheless, the medical profession was still forced to relentlessly hammer for the next 30 years, with notice after notice to physicians (Nostrums & Quackery vols. 1-3: 1912, 1921 and 1936), before it successfully winnowed from the marketplace the blatant poisons, and strange decoctions (often featuring alcohol, but sometimes nothing more than plain water, as the undisclosed principal ingredient) which masqueraded as absolute cures for implacable diseases like cancer.
This column introduces a series of articles dedicated to re-examining the companies comprising the drug industry following the natural contours of the industry itself. That drug industry divides into three branches: 1) Manufacturers: 2) Wholesalers; 3) Retailers. These branches fought as often as they cooperated and the trail of lawsuits strewn in their wake is one previously unexplored source of insights into the nature of patent medicine company operations.
Philatelically, while it is not readily apparent, these divisions are subtly reflected in the cancels applied to the battleship proprietaries, and have influenced the present state of the cataloguing of proprietary battleship cancels. The re-categorizing proposed here will supplement the excellent existing cancel compilations. The Chappell-Joyce compilation - itself now in the process of revision through the columns of this blog - painstakingly focuses on the variety of printed cancels applied to these stamps. However, by constraining itself to printed cancels, it selects against important segments of the drug trade. On the other hand, the very exuberance of the listings in the Battleship Desk Reference book compiled by Robert Mustacich and Anthony Giacomelli, does not leave room for studied consideration of the nuances and variety of the histories while underlie the companies set forth in its exhaustive table. This study proposes to add anecdotal muscle to the articulate skeleton created by these two cancel compilations.
The center of the drug trade was the manufacturers. These companies produced their own goods and usually had their own networks of traveling salesmen, or “drummers,” to arrange for sales and distribution as well. Manufacturers had a natural wish to expedite the flow of their products and fairly quickly incorporated the entire collection of the tax into the process of pack¬aging their products. The most creative manufacturers, who realized (as had their Civil War predecessors) the advertising value that government mandated stamps might add to their product, immediately placed their orders for the group of stamps that became the Spanish-American War addendum to the Scott RS list. Other large manufacturers, such as J.C. Ayer, Lydia Pinkham and C.I. Hood, created printed cancels to regularize the tax collection process. Ayer was an old enough company to have created RS stamps, and, had the new tax continued longer, might have done so again. The Pinkham and Hood companies, which made extensive use of printed cancels, became a manufacturing giants too late to have needed their own Civil War private dies, and thus were not included by Holcombe. Lydia Pinkham has accounted for several books in her own right, but her story is not widely told in philatelic circles. While the Pinkham and Hood cancels are common and well known to battleship revenue collectors (and are found in the Chappell-Joyce listings), the stories of these companies also legitimately fall within the ambit of the new study proposed here.
However, there are a great many more large or influential manufacturers within the drug trade itself who relied solely on hand stamped cancels. The proprietors of these companies, some later as notorious as William Radam and Frank Cheney, and others as diverse as W.W. Gavitt, Frederick Stearns and Leslie Keeley, relied on hand stamped cancels. This study proposes to recount their stories which are as varied and interesting as any set forth in Holcombe.
Wholesale druggists tended to supply their local regional druggists, although some of them competed on a national level. The largest, like Charles Marchand, actually did produce RS stamps during the Spanish-American War period. Others, like E. Ferrett of New York, who distributed the Wright product line, opted for printed cancels. Many prominent companies, like Meyer Brothers of St. Louis and George C. Goodwin of Boston, however, stuck with hand stamped cancels, and have not been scrutinized as carefully as the others. For example, Meyer Brothers catalogues provide much information about the state of the drug business at the turn of the Twentieth Century.
Retailers tended to have a single location or a group of locations around a single city, although there were a few regional affiliations and even the first, faint stirring of a national chain. They mainly had to account for tax to be paid on pro¬ducts already in stock on the effective date of collection, July 1, 1898, or had to stamp small batches of their own generic or home-brewed products or other miscellaneous goods. For this reason, most retail cancels appear on low denominations and are virtually all hand stamped. They remain largely obscure and are most often identified only if the entire name is given or the location is identified. Armed with that information, it is generally easy to match the cancel to known drug industry outlets. While most were small town druggists, the stories of retailers as varied as R.H. Macy (a large enough operation to have invested in printed cancels), J.N. Adams, and L.O. Gale, form the tributary streams of information which ultimately lead to the vast, still largely unexplored, ocean of patent medicine knowledge.
This ocean of knowledge exists on the same Internet which makes this blog available, for just as it has made the archives of the New York Times readily researchable and readable, it has made reachable, through scanning, obscure local histories, numerous dusty trade publications and other source material such as patent medicine company catalogues. In addition to these reproductions of older written materials, websites promoting study of family genealogies, and local points of interest, as well as hobby websites in neighboring fields like bottle and postcard collecting, have also contributed to widen the field of inquiry into patent medicines. This article argues that we should all take another plunge into the vastly improved ocean of knowledge.
On Beyond Holcombe Posts:
Malena Company: September 23, 2012
The Malena Company was the brainchild of Chauncey F. York. During the Spanish-American War, it was located in Warriors Mark, PA, a town in central western Pennsylvania. In 1910, York opened a spacious new factory in Detroit, MI and moved his whole operation there. The local Huntingdon County Pennsylvania paper, fondly recalling the history of Warriors Mark a hundred years later, noted that York “became a millionaire” only after he moved the operation to Detroit.
York was born in New York City in March, 1850. In 1876, he graduated from Penn State located in State College, PA, and by 1880 had settled with his wife and infant son, Henry, born in 1879, in Warriors Mark, not far from Penn State. The Malena Company manufactured the basic compound Malena, meant to be used either as an ointment or salve, and later added Malena Liver Pills, Pills, Worm and Blood Tablets, as well as Gu-Ma Gum - “the best chew for a cent.” The pitch for the Liver Pills, a laxative, was stark and straight forward: “Constipation leads to death. Use Malena Liver Pills and don’t die.”
From its factory in Warriors Mark, as well as the “medicines” themselves, the company poured forth scads and scads of colorful trade cards in a great variety of designs ranging across the gamut of traditional Victorian subjects, such as cheerful, chubby, dewy-cheeked children, cuddly kittens and puppies, landscapes, flowers, birds and assorted combinations of the foregoing. On the back of each trade card, the products were relentlessly touted. Malena, itself was advertised to remedy catarrh, neuralgia, rheumatism, stiff joints, rough or chapped skin, cuts, burns, scalds, blister, bruises, bites, stings, sore lips, mouth and throat, corns, dandruff, and warts. The idea seemed to be to persuade people to apply as much of the compound as possible at every moment. The graver the illness, the more product ought to be applied. The company also issued short story booklets, precursors of the comic books of a later age, with product plugs and testimonials woven in among the pages of the story.
Son Henry followed in his father’s footsteps and graduated from Penn State in 1900. He received his M.D. from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City in 1904, and opened a medical practice in Warriors Mark, where he married in 1906 and began his family. Father Chauncey soon moved on from central Pennsylvania. By 1908, he had relocated to Detroit and had a new, younger wife. In the 1910 Census, he reported an infant son with his new wife. He soon acquired an estate, which he named Malena Park, in central Michigan near Clark Lake in Columbia, MI. Henry moved to Detroit in 1910 and became the manager of the relocated company. In the 1914 edition of the local Who’s Who, Henry, now called Harry, listed himself as a Democrat and a Methodist. He was a member of the Detroit Chamber of Commerce and a Mason. His hobbies were hunting and fishing.
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In 1915, Chauncey launched a new career. He became an author, publishing a book of stories called the Overlook Farm Books, which he stated “give a vivid description of the early, backwoods pioneer life and are replete with thrilling pioneer stories intensely interesting and instructive to everyone, especially the boys and girls.” A random excerpt from the book reads as follows:
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Ladd & Coffin: September 16, 2012
Ladd & Coffin Co’s battleship cancels are not only frequently seen (at least on proprietary stamps, unlike the documentary example), but come in at least four formats: small with a year date; small with a month, day and year; large with a year date; and large with a month, day and year date. The company had started much earlier in the era of the first revenues and had even issued its own private die proprietary stamps (RT26-33). Since Holcombe’s book dealt only with the medicine companies, and it was a manufacturer of perfume, it escaped Holcombe’s scrutiny. The RT stamps were ordered and used by L & C’s predecessor, Young, Ladd and Coffin. They came in four values, from 1c to 4c, and are known perforated and imperforate, as well in the b, c and d paper varieties, accounting for 24 varieties in all, most moderately uncommon, and RT32b genuinely rare. By 1898, these private die proprietary perfume stamps themselves were already being catalogued and offered to the public by stamp dealers.
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The company’s product was a line of Lundborg’s Perfumes, and its history predates the Civil War. Its founder was a Swede who emigrated to the United States, John Marlie Lundborg How he acquired his knowledge of perfume seems now lost in time. He is listed as a “perfumer” in the 1860 Trow’s Business Directory for New York City, but apparently lived in Hudson, NJ. By 1872, he had sold an interest in his business to Richard D. Young, and by 1873, the firm was reorganized as Young, Ladd & Coffin. Although an advertising brochure was issued in his name as late as 1876, he retired when the firm reorganized, and died of “softening of the brain” in Hudson in 1880 at age 57.
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Richard D. Young took the premier spot in the new partnership because he was already an established businessman. Born in Pennsylvania in 1840, by 1876 he was influential enough to be a member of the New York City Board of Trade. He remained associated with Y, L & C from 1872 to 1887 when that company dissolved by “mutual consent.” He then established his own perfume manufacturing business, the R. D. Young Perfumery Co. It did not fare well, for reasons which will become readily apparent.
The bland explanation for the undoing of Y, L & C may have concealed more profound difficulties Young was experiencing. He had married Emma Bushnell, who came from an old New York City family, but after their five children had begun to mature, the marriage had gone stale. Emma had filed for a separation in 1885. Apparently, since the two were already pursuing their separate lives, she did not force him to litigate to divorce, perhaps because blatant evidence of adultery was the only acceptable proof to obtain a divorce. In 1888, Young later declared, his business difficulties caused him to go temporarily insane. He suffered from “melancholia” and was hospitalized in three different sanitariums. During this period, in the Spring of 1888, while she was exercising “undue influence” over him (according to his later account), he deeded to Emma their house together with several perfume formulas. However, by 1889, he had recovered his health. Now robust and reinvigorated, he not only sued Emma to recover the deed to the house, but also persuaded her to withdraw her separation action.
Peace did not ensue. In 1890, Emma decamped to her mother’s house in Montclair, NJ. A strange event then transpired. One of Young’s clerks, Melano Reichardt, who, coincidently, was boarding with Emma’s mother, accompanied Emma to the Hamilton Hotel in Patterson, NJ. She said Reichardt was “attentive to” her and they stopped during a normal Sunday drive merely to have dinner. Out of the same circumstances, Young shaped a different narrative. He charged that he and another of his clerks had discovered Emma at the hotel in a “compromising position” with Reichardt. She renewed her suit for separation and he cross-sued for divorce. By November, 1889, Emma was being shadowed by Young’s “private Hawkshaws,” as she called them (“Hawkshaw” was then a popular detective cartoon strip). She averred they had tried to break into her quarters and so harassed her that, in the supercharged words of the New York Times reporter, “she began to feel that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were but a hollow mockery.” After one detective so menaced her as she made her way to the Astor House hotel (where, she stated she was merely picking up a left umbrella), she had him arrested. The same New York Times reporter cynically concluded his article on the incident with the aside that the detective posted $300 bail “and left apparently delighted at the leniency of the court.”
When the marital cross-suits of the Youngs came to trial, Emma testified that the deed to the house was Young’s birthday present to her that year, and, further, she had abandoned the family home only after Young tried to shoot her. Young testified his “melancholia”prevented his even remembering his conveyance of the house to Emma. But the tale of Young’s degradation grew even juicier. During the divorce trial, a Grand Jury in New Jersey indicted Young and his two clerks for the crime of “conspiracy” in connection with the Hamilton Hotel incident. The indictment charged they had tried to trump up against Emma false evidence of the “in flagrante delicto” act necessary to demonstrate adultery. By then, Young’s company was a shambles. In December, 1890, Young made an assignment of his business, and in early 1891, a trade journal stated that the “stock, plant and fixtures ... of Richard D. Young, the well known manufacturer of perfumes ... had lately been sold at auction by an assignee.” Young was bankrupt. That journal sympathized that “his recent troubles are a matter of profound regret to his many friends in this part of the world.”
As Young’s criminal conspiracy trial approached, the other clerk died and Young fell out with Reichardt. In May, 1891, both went on trial in New Jersey. The prosecutor introduced a love poem which Young had written to some “Loved One.” Young claimed it predated his marriage, although the document bore the date of March 4, 1890, and refused to identify the “Loved One.” The Times reported that Young and Reichardt each tried to proclaim that he had been duped by the other and that only the other should be blamed for the conspiracy. The Times, summarized the cross-purposed defenses: “This novel spectacle has excited great interest.” Naturally, both were found guilty. Young was sentenced to pay a fine of $100, plus half the court costs, which amounted to an additional $37.50. Reichardt drew a $50 fine and the other half of the costs. After that humiliation, an initial ruling setting aside Young’s conveyance of the house to Emma was reversed on appeal, with the appellate court noting that it could only conclude from the trial evidence that Young knew perfectly well what he was doing when he deeded the house to Emma. A final court decision granted Young a “partial” divorce, while recounting the circumstances of his conviction. With Young finally divorced, convicted of criminal behavior and bankrupt, the newspapers tired of both the Youngs and they disappeared from the news. A trade journal offered one last grace note: in 1894 it related that Young had brought his 36 years of experience in the perfume business to the Crown Perfumery Co as its “American agent.” In the 1900 Census, Young’s wife listed herself as a widow and the head of her household. Apparently, neither the Times nor the industry trade journals reported Young’s death or eulogized him.
By contrast with Young, the intertwined lives of John B. Ladd and Sturgis Coffin were much more “prosaic,” although the wealth that they both amassed through their perfume partnership meant that their comings and goings were chronicled in the social columns of the New York Times. Ladd was born in New York City in August 1839. When he joined with Young and Coffin, he had been a salesman for Colgate & Co (yet another company to be explored in this series). Ladd’s wealth enabled him to amass his own collection of old masters, nineteen of which he lent to an exhibition in 1897 celebrating the opening of the Brooklyn Art Institute’s new building, now the Brooklyn Museum. In 1908, he exhibited at the Union League his collection of Dutch Masters and other more modern works by such artists as the 19th Century French artists as Corot and Boudin.
The closest tie between Ladd and Coffin was that they were in-laws. Ladd married Coffin’s sister Emily, and before his own marriage, Coffin lived with the Ladds in Brooklyn. His sister, Mrs. John B. Ladd, was the one whose name appeared most frequently in the social columns through her involvement with her many charities benefitting institutions serving the then separate city of Brooklyn and their various balls, galas and “tableaus,”(live portrayals of famous old masters). One of her other significant activities was her association with a group of prominent Brooklyn women who issued a manifesto to the New York State legislature denouncing the women’s suffrage movement, They wrote: “from a studious contemplation of the governmental principles involved, came a firm conviction that woman suffrage would be against the best interests of the State, its women and the home.” Since the broadside dates from 1894, the ladies must have had their way. Despite his wife’s now seemingly retrograde views suffrage, Ladd as well as Coffin both considered themselves reformers enough in 1902 to sign a petition in support a Citizen’s Union plan for a reform mayor and refreshed government of the now united New York City.
Coffin and his wife were also linked with many charities. Coffin was born in Poughkeepsie, NY in 1845. His father, Henry, was a well-known and prominent wholesale druggist, first in Poughkeepsie, and after 1867 in Brooklyn, who served as a trustee of the Long Island Trust Company, a director of a plate glass company and an major investor in the Atlantic Avenue Railway Company. By the time Sturgis became part of Y, L & C, his mother was already a part of the Brooklyn social scene, and the younger Coffins associated with the same charities as had his parents and his sister. In 1892, he also served on the perfumers’ committee of the drug trade industry’s effort to raise money for the construction of Grant’s Tomb, and, in 1894, he and his brother-in-law Ladd were both members of the Board of the Brooklyn Homeopathic Hospital that was called upon to fire and replace the hospital’s entire professional staff to settle a festering internal quarrel. In 1894, he was listed as among the attendees at a New York City Board of Trade meeting where the principal address concerned tariff reform, and, a month later, as both and attendee and sponsor of a $25 prize awarded at the Brooklyn Horse Show. The Times described that affair as being Brooklyn’s social equivalent of the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden.
Over the next several years, Coffin’s name continued to be mentioned in connection with the Brooklyn Horse Show and many other society affairs. In 1903, the Times noted his daughter Natalie’s engagement to Johnston de Forest, the only son of an old Washington Square family, whose grandfather had been the first president of the New York Stock Exchange. Natalie married de Forest in October, 1904, but her health apparently was poor from the outset. After attempting to recuperate in Colorado Springs, CO, then her family’s summer home in New Canaan, and finally in Asheville, NC, she died in April, 1906. Shortly thereafter, Sturgis Coffin’s life ended tragically. In August, 1907, he died suddenly of a ‘cerebral hemorrhage” at age 62 in New Canaan. Several days later, when the coroner’s report was released, the papers revealed that the hemorrhage had been induced by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The speculation was that he had been distraught, never having recovered from Natalie’s death. Mrs. Coffin’s name continued to grace the social columns until her own death in 1924.
Ladd & Coffin disappeared on January 1, 1910. With Coffin dead, Ladd, who was in ill-health, retired on December 31, 1909. The company was restyled as Coffin & Price. The Coffin was T. J., a nephew of Sturgis Coffin and Mrs. Ladd. Price was a W. C. Price. Both had been long-term employees of the company, and a trade journal reporting on the re-alignment speculated: “it is safe to say they will continue the business along progressive lines.” Ladd died in November, 1910, much honored by the industry and trade associations. By 1914, the company had changed its name to the Lundborg Co. By 1917, it had become strictly a manufacturer and wholesaler and had abandoned its downtown New York City address for Fifth Avenue. Circa 1930, it was still introducing new fragrances and in 1954 the company remained on Fifth Avenue. Currently, its products do not appear to be in production, although vintage bottles and advertising abound.
While in operation, the company drew singular praise from one visitor to its establishment. During the Nineteenth Century, European travelers from de Tocqueville to Dickens delighted in exploring the brave new, raw United States, and publishing their observations to enlighten their more sophisticated brethren about their strange country cousins. In 1884, an English woman, Emily Faithfull, who was investigating the position of women in American society observed:
Keasbey & Mattison Company: September 9, 2012
Collectors of battleship cancels find those of the Keasbey & Mattison Company of Ambler, PA to be among the most frequently seen and most readily available. Moreover, for connoisseurs who hold printed cancels to be the gold standard of battleship revenue collecting (with whom this author most forcefully and grumpily disagrees), the listing of the variations and errors in its printed cancels is a treasure chest that covers seven single spaced pages in the original Chappell-Joyce compilation (a listing which this author believes emphasizes the trees at the expense of the forest). Few philatelists have explored K & M’s history to understand the energy behind this cornucopia of stamps or the greater ramifications of K & M’s existence. K & M, and the personalities behind it, may provide the most quintessential and elementary case study thus far in this series of all the elements, good and bad, which make the study of the patent medicine, as well as the broader pharmaceutical, industry in the era of the Robber Barons both piquant in itself as well as relevant to today’s world of unrestricted corporate power.
THE COMPANY
Aside from its philatelic prolificacy, the most significant fact of K & M’s long existence is it managed (if inadvertently) to successfully market products, as well as create unimaginable wealth, in two completely different and unrelated areas - patent medicine and asbestos insulation - both of which ultimately became rigorously scrutinized as generating major health hazzards. In a time when medical advertising hyperbole was unchecked, the company widely promoted its patent medicines as cures for all types of nervous exhaustion. Even if its principal product, Bromo-Caffeine, was merely a forerunner of today’s headaches remedies, it was also touted as a remedy for a “weak heart” or “sudden cardiac dropsy” (and, in fact, it may have been as good a remedy as was available at the time for heart attack relief). However, long after the patent medicine industry’s exaggerated claims were throttled and the over-the-counter narcotics barred, the company’s successors again became notorious for K & M’s second, even larger product line, asbestos insulation. Asbestos, welcomed in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries as a miraculous industrial breakthrough because of its resistance to extreme heat, electrical and chemical damage, became a nightmare for K & M’s successors as it was gradually proven to be a malign and potent carcinogen, at last fodder only for late night ads by attorneys promising rich recoveries who, even now, still endlessly trawl the air waves for victims of its poisoning.
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As Athena from Zeus, the company sprang into being as a pharmaceutical laboratory in Philadelphia in 1873, as soon as its founders, Henry Griffith Keasbey and Richard V (Van Zeelust/Vanselous) Mattison, graduated together from Philadelphia’s prestigious College of Pharmacy. It achieved almost immediate success with a headache remedy marketed initially under its chemical identity as citrate of caffeine, but sold after 1881 under the trademarked name “Bromo-Caffeine,” derived from a class of compounds known as effervescent salts. These chemical combinations of acids and bases result in the release carbon dioxide, often experienced as pleasant fizzy, bubbly sensation. While K & M also marketed Salaperient for constipation, Alkalithia for rheumatism and Cafetonique for dyspepsia, Bromo-Caffeine quickly became the first source of the wealth K & M created.
K & M also manufactured carbonate of magnesia, the common laxative milk of magnesia. Mattison soon noticed that one Hiram Hanmore was purchasing copious amounts of magnesia from the company and wondered how Hanmore was using it. Upon inquiry, Mattison learned that Hanmore was combining magnesia with hemp fiber and binding the mixture to metal as insulation. However, hemp was not durable and soon burned away when the metal was exposed to the frequent high heat generated in the newer, larger steam boilers and piping systems built in the advancing Industrial Revolution. Mattison quickly discovered that when asbestos was substituted in place of hemp in the mixture, the resulting compound was an extremely stable, malleable and durable insulating material. Asbestos, a group of silicate minerals, is characterized by long crystals able to be spun into fibers. It already had a 4,000 year history as a fire resistant novelty, but had only just begun to be available in large enough quantities to be used commercially. Mattison moved decisively. First, he convinced Hanmore of the superiority of his asbestos insulation and became his exclusive supplier. Then he began to manufacture and market asbestos to the world at large. Mattison soon became known as the “Asbestos King,” and the fortune generated by asbestos was even greater than the one from the proprietary medicines.
Asbestos was not specially taxed in the Revenue Act of 1898. Rather, it was the popularity of Bromo-Caffeine that generated the demand for the battleship revenue stamps. K & M soon operated sales offices in New York City, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and Cincinnati. It fought hard to defend its trademarked name and in more than one case successfully convinced a court that Bromo-Caffeine was a legitimate trade name or a legal trademark. In 1892, it even had a man sent to jail for criminal counterfeit and trademark infringement when he peddled his own unauthorized version of Bromo-Caffeine. The principal ruling establishing the legality of the trademark was somewhat ironic because the proof offered by K & M to establish the uniqueness of the name Bromo-Caffeine was that Mattison had created that name entirely from his imagination and the product itself, which contained, inter alia, lots of sugar, less than 2% caffeine, a great deal of bi-carbonate of soda, as well as a dash of potassium bromide, bore no resemblance to any other known chemical formula. To no avail, the challengers offered proof that there were legitimate chemical combinations of bromine and caffeine, which involved the use of the terms bromo and caffeine in some combination, and, even closer to the point, a German scientist named Schultzen denominated a certain combination of bromine, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen as Bromo-Caffeine in 1867 and had marketed it modestly as a chemical (but most definitely not as a headache remedy) both in Europe and the United States. That success in defending the Bromo-Caffeine trademark led K & M to push even harder to restrict its competition.
When Emerson Drug Co. (see RS 280-3, together with its own vast array of printed cancels, (a company subject to this column another day)) began have success with its headache remedy Bromo-Seltzer around 1894, K & M issued a barrage of circulars to the industry stating it was prepared to challenge Emerson’s use of the term “Bromo” as an infringement of its Bromo-Caffeine trademark. Drug associations around the country discussed the viability of K & M’s threats at their meetings. Since Bromo-Seltzer was such a good seller, the trade generated little enthusiasm for K & M’s militant position, and these meetings often turned into sessions on how to find strategies to ignore K & M’s threats. Early in 1895, a group called the United States Trademark Association published a list of some fifteen other trademarks containing the term “Bromo,” including Bromo-Seltzer, which itself had been trademarked in 1889, and asked for additions from anyone who could provide them. K & M did file its suit against Emerson, but eventually consented to settle out of court. By that time, medical reformers were already vigorously attacking Bromo-Seltzer as containing the dangerous and even deadly stimulant acetanilid in place of caffeine. K & M could always boast that Bromo-Caffeine never contained that poison.
Buoyed by the two burgeoning product lines of patent medicines and asbestos insulation, K & M soon needed to expand from its limited quarters in Philadelphia. Mattison discovered that there was a source of magnesia in the dolomite rock formations near Ambler, PA, now a suburb of Philadelphia, but then a sleepy farming village with declining prospects because its agricultural fields were played out. Ambler had one other virtue to recommend it: a connection with the local railroad. Recognizing that the combination of easy access to both raw materials and transportation suited them perfectly, Keasbey and Mattison moved the entire business to Ambler in 1882. Ambler flourished under the benign rule of K & M for the very long lifetimes of the company’s two founders.
Henry G. Keasbey
As patent medicine barons, the founders of Keasbey and Mattison could have been ordered directly from Central Casting in Hollywood. Mattison’s oversized body and personality tend to soak up most of the extant accounts about K & M. The seemingly patrician Keasbey, who has left only indirect traces of his presence, disappeared quickly from public scrutiny. Born in 1850 into the wealthy gentry, Keasbey’s family origins are now opaque because the prominent Keasbeys of the era were statesmen, attorneys and jurists from neighboring New Jersey. Since there are later claims his grandfather was a friend of Thomas Jefferson, he must have descended from a “lesser branch” of that New Jersey clan. Keasbey himself gained prominence when, at age 22, he could simply produce the $5000 to finance K & M’s founding. Between 1873 and the company’s incorporation in 1892, Keasbey stayed in the background, but must have overseen the ever expanding day to day operations of the company, since the much busier and more publicity conscious Mattison made an immediate transition from student to teacher at the College of Pharmacy, and then graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1879 from the University of Pennsylvania (although he never practiced medicine), all while, on behalf of K & M, personally selling Bromo-Caffeine one doctor at a time from coast to coast to establish it as the leader in its field, fighting the court battles to protect its name, and also developing the entire asbestos product line.
As soon as K & M incorporated (with stated capital of $2,000,000), Keasbey converted his partnership interest into stock of the new K & M, Inc. and retired from its active management, never again to take a direct role in the running of the company. He did keep tinkering for his own amusement, however, for after 1892, he patented several devices, such as improved feed-water heater, in his own name. Married in 1877 to Anna Foster, a cultivated young Philadelphian educated primarily in Paris, he became a father of four. Although he never lived in Ambler, during the years he summered there, he is remembered as the sponsor of the local baseball team and a benefactor, along with his wife, of both the Baptist Church and a mission to cater to the special needs of the Italian immigrants who worked in his factory. Rather, because of his wife’s delicate health, he and his family traveled extensively to Europe, particularly in the south of France, to find the appropriate climate to suit her precarious constitution, and she died at a villa there in 1897. After he was widowed, he continued to travel a great deal and resided in England and on the Riviera throughout his remaining years. At one time, he did establish a world renowned collection of medieval armor but sold it at auction in 1903. Thereafter, he pursued his art interests quietly, and, even now his bequests to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City are listed as the source of funds used to purchase art objects. At the end of the life, when he died just days short of his 82nd birthday in 1932, beyond noting his love of medieval armor, his New York Times obituary listed only that his principal membership was the Antiquarian Society of London.
Keasbey’s children followed in his retiring, low key manner. His son Henry Turner Keasbey (1882-1953), was a painter of pastoral scenes (or merely aspired to be a painter of such scenes, according to other less charitable sources). Henry T, a bachelor, so loved agriculture and cows that he endowed a special scholarship fund for students studying dairy farming. Today this fund is administered under the auspices of the Philadelphia Foundation, an amalgam of charitable foundations dedicated to the benefit the City of Philadelphia. Henry G’s daughter, Marguerite Anna Keasbey (1878-1960), a spinster who spent the first half of her life as her father’s traveling companion, developed such ties with England that she endowed a special scholarship to permit poor English children to be educated at English universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge. It was later modified in 1981 to allow Americans also to apply to pursue post-graduate studies in England. Like her brother, she left the remaining bulk of her fortune in the care of the Philadelphia Foundation, although it took a court order issued seventeen years after her death (with all its attendant costs paid to some of Philadelphia’s most prominent law firms) finally to sort and meld her various charitable bequests.
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Richard V. Mattison
Born in 1851, Mattison, the public face of K & M, was a bear of a man, standing six feet, four inches and weighing 220 pounds, and sporting a full, long flowing beard. Among the stories told about Mattison, it is said that he was obligated to grow the beard to cover the disfigurement of his lower jaw, because, in Philadelphia in 1882, he had fractured it in three places when, because of his huge bulk, he fell through a sidewalk elevator trap door while spying outside a rival’s pharmaceutical laboratory to see why the factory was operating so late at night. The jaw never set properly and hd could never again eat thick meat like steak. People, overwhelmed by his room-filling presence and commanding - one might even say domineering - manner, either loved or hated him.
When he had established his fortune, he let it be known that while his own origins were modest, his family’s history on his father’s side flowed back to the lairds of the Scottish Highlands, and on his maternal grandmother’s side to its migration from England to Pennsylvania along with William Penn on the second ship to land in the colony. He further averred that when he partnered with Keasbey, he declined his extended family’s offer of monetary help and borrowed his capital contribution. While trained as both a pharmacist and a doctor, he himself readily admitted that his true calling was business. In 1892, during the major Bromo-Caffeine trademark litigation, he was asked:
Q: In which branch of knowledge are your attainments more eminent; in the medical branch or the chemical branch?
A: My business is chiefly financial; I think it is about an even thing, medical and chemical.
Having established Ambler as the site of K & M, Mattison behaved in most energetic and dynamic fashion like the laird of the manor he had wrought. He constructed, and rented to his workers, tracts of specially designed houses, some 400 overall, graduated in their space, complexity and stone decoration, and made available depending on the worker’s position with the company. He erected Ambler’s Opera House and bandstand, saw to Ambler’s incorporation as a borough in 1887, installed gas, electricity including street lights, and a water system through organizing and heading the Ambler Electric Light Company and the Ambler Spring Water Company. As a cycling enthusiast, he dedicated a special well on his property for use by the cyclists. He was remembered anecdotally not only for feuding with the local postmaster about putting the local post office in one of his buildings and phoning the electric company to leave the streetlights on so he could take a late stroll, but also for providing coal and food to needy workers during hard times. Beyond being president of the two utility companies, as well as the land-related Upper Dublin Water Co., and the Real Estate and Improvement Co, he was also, after 1892, president of K & M, Inc. together with being chief executive of a string of other asbestos related companies: the mellifluous Asbestos Shingle, Slate and Sheathing Co; the Magnesia Covering Co; the Asbestos Co; the Asbestos Manufacturing Co; the Telenduron Co; as well as the Bell Asbestos Mines, which were located in Thetford, Quebec, and were the world’s largest. Beyond the world of asbestos, he also served as president of the First National Bank of Ambler and the Philadelphia Drug Exchange, while merely serving only as vice-president of his alma mater, the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, as well as maintaining memberships in a variety of other professional organizations.
Mattison moved in society’s highest circles, warranting coverage of his comings and goings in the social pages of the New York Times. In Ambler, he established “Lindenwold” a 400 plus acre estate, containing two lakes, one covering six acres itself, and in 1912, he even remodeled its manor house to resemble Windsor Castle. At its peak, his payroll for the operation of Lindenwold alone amounted to over $10,000 per week. He also purchased, decorated and staffed “Bushy Park,” named in tribute to a Royal Park in London, as his summer “cottage” in Newport, RI. In 1873, he had married one Esther Dafter of Cranbrook, NJ. Two sons, Richard V. Jr. and Royal lived to stunted maturity. In honor of a daughter, Esther, who died at age 4, he erected in Ambler, at a cost of $150,000, the Trinity Memorial Protestant Episcopal Church. Because of its beautiful stained glass windows, it became known locally as the Church of the Beautiful Windows. Mattison was known to keep his eye on his pocket watch during sermons and snap it shut when he felt the rector had spoken long enough. His firm and tight grasp of the affairs of both Ambler and Trinity Church, marked him as a benevolent autocrat he was.
Mattison was also a stern father. After Richard Jr. secretly married while traveling abroad in 1904 to the orphaned daughter of “respected and refined parents” who was then living in London with her two sisters while “fulfilling an engagement on the English stage,” he was so afraid to face his father that left his bride of three days in London when he returned home. Agnes, the young Mrs. Mattison, later testified he told her he would return to bring her to his parents after he had arranged matters with his father. After six months, when he had not made good his promise to come back, she showed her pluck by following him to the United States. Junior lovingly greeted her at the boat, insisted that she use her maiden name and admit only to being his fiancee. He registered her at a Newport boarding house under her maiden name, swearing that he still needed time to convince his father to accept the marriage. While Junior initially reported back to her that his father took the news of his union extremely badly, she alleged that ultimately she met Mattison, that Mattison behaved cordially (albeit remarking about other young men’s unsuitable marriages to women below their station), permitted her to move as his son’s fiancee into Bushy Park (where she and her husband lived in adjoining rooms as man and wife, although the servants did not know), and even made the necessary announcement and arrangements for a wedding during the second week of August, 1905 to cover Junior’s prior hasty alliance.
Fate intervened. On July 30, 1905, Junior and Agnes attended a champagne breakfast aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia anchored in Narragansett Bay. Conflicting accounts ensued concerning what transpired during their visit to the ship. Agnes asserted that she fell ill during the breakfast, was tended by Junior in a young officer’s cabin, and returned with him to Bushy Park in a weakened condition. However, within the week, Junior wrote a letter to Agnes’s sisters in Scotland and included an anonymous account of the incident stating that because of her “sporting proclivities,” Agnes had drunk herself into a stupor, and was thereafter “discovered beastly intoxicated and in an otherwise disgraceful condition in the stateroom of a young ensign ... where she had been for some considerable time without [young] Mr. Mattison’s knowledge.” In Agnes’s view, Junior sent that letter, including the anonymous report, to pressure her sisters to get her to consent to his divorce from her by threatening to make public the incident.
Leaving aside the reality of events aboard the USS West Virginia, a few days after having seen her unsteadiness when she returned to Bushy Park - continued Agnes’s version of the story - Mattison peremptorily and curtly ordered Junior to permanently remove his intoxicated floozie from Mattison’s presence. She and Junior departed from Bushy Park that day. Junior related to her that his father had told him he must divorce her or be disinherited, but promised that after he settled her in a hotel in New York, he would bring his father around. Once at the “prominent” hotel, he methodically collected all her cash and then went downstairs to write some letters. The next morning she received a note saying he had already left the hotel to start making arrangements for the reconciliation, and that she should hold his bag for him when it arrived. Not only did his bag not arrive, he never returned. Her narrative proclaimed that she would have starved but for a fortuitous ten dollars she discovered at the bottom of her traveling trunk. He never resumed the marriage, and afterward dealt with her only through lawyers, who eventually arranged an extremely modest living allowance for her, but apparently also had her movements shadowed by detectives. Agnes further claimed that when the rest of her luggage was finally returned to her from Newport, the extravagant trousseau Junior had purchased for her was gone, together with all his letters to her and even their English marriage certificate.
Both parties sued for divorce in 1907, essentially trying two different cases before the court. Agnes’s argument was predicated on Junior’s harsh, cruel and abrupt abandonment of her in 1905 at his father’s behest, and the family’s machinations against her, their “consent, procurement and connivance” in obtaining evidence of adultery to support a divorce. Junior’s argument rested upon elaborate observations by a variety of detectives, bell hops and room clerks alleging a subsequent adulterous fling with a physician who treated Agnes for illness beginning six months after Junior left her. What Mattison actually knew about the formality of Junior’s liaison with Agnes, actually said to Junior about her, or ever plotted against her, was never proven, since his son’s divorce was the one litigation in which Mattison never testified. Junior, himself, never denied the 1904 English marriage nor Agnes’s account of their parting in the hotel room nor the letter to her sisters. The case of either the innocent brought low by the perfidious, heartbreaking liar goaded by his implacable father or the adulterous, gold digging hussy - depending on one’s sympathies - headlined the gossip of Newport during the 1908 season.
Although the trial judge accepted Agnes’s version of the events in 1905, he failed to find either that Junior had acted cruelly against her or that he or his father had connived to set her up for the divorce. He did find that Agnes had carried on with the doctor and granted Junior his divorce on the grounds of adultery. In 1911, the Court of Appeals (the highest appellate court in New York) reversed that ruling and remanded the case for re-trial because the trial judge had allowed into the court record, and based his ruling upon, certain evidence the Court of Appeals deemed inappropriate. A hundred years later that decision is still cited for its discussion of the rules concerning the proper use of indirect, circumstantial evidence to establish adultery. Mattison’s and Junior’s argument that adultery trumps marital cruelty was not ultimately sustained because of the higher court’s reversal of the trial judge, but since there is no report of the retrial, Junior and his father must have finally arrived at some out-of-court accommodation with Agnes. In 1914, Junior married a Philadelphia socialite named Georgette, who over her fourteen year marriage to Junior grew to share Agnes’s opinion of Mattison, since Junior, who held the title of Vice-President of K & M, was never anything more than a glorified office boy for Mattison. Junior died in 1927 at age 46, apparently of alcoholism.
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Mattison persevered in his imperious ways, and business continued to boom. He outlived his own first wife and remarried in 1920. That year, K & M featured a picture of its factory taken from an airplane on the cover of the annual catalogue, and Mattison was later acknowledged as an innovator for the earliest use of aerial photography in advertising. However, at the moment when Mattison’s empire had reached its greatest extent in 1928, Junior’s second wife Georgette, still resentful of Mattison and now a stockholder herself in K & M as Junior’s widow, apparently egged Keasbey into suing Mattison for mismanagement of K & M, alleging that he was deliberately squelching K & M’s payment of its rightful dividend, was diverting K & M’s legitimate business to his own private companies and was improperly manipulating K & M’s Board of Directors to block it from calling in over a million and a half dollars of loans Mattison had taken from K & M. Perhaps Keasbey’s suit was justified, but Keasbey, as ever had no wish to engage in a prolonged fight with Mattison and the parties soon settled for $4 million which Mattison paid to Keasbey in a lump cash sum to buy him out entirely as autumn 1929 approached. The stock market crash in October, 1929 left Mattison without any ready money at hand and the ensuing Depression completed the collapse of Mattison’s outsized fortune. By 1931, the bankers keeping K & M afloat forced him to cede day to day control of K & M, and in 1934, they sold K & M to the British company, Turner & Newall Ltd for $4 million. As the financial noose closed around him, Mattison pared and pared his expenses, even vacating his beloved Lindenwold in 1931. The manor house was promptly put on the market, but stood empty for several years. Late in 1936 at age 85, he died in Ambler in a more modest home that he wisely had deeded to his now deceased second wife in more flush times located just across the street from Lindenwold’s gates. After his death that shadow of Lindenwold was itself subdivided into an eight suite apartment house. How the mighty had fallen. Mattison merited no formal New York Times obituary and there were no bequests, charities and scholarships as Keasbey’s fortune had endowed.
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Perhaps the last word on the partners Keasbey and Mattison properly belongs to the author Gay Talese. In his book, Unto The Sons, he paints a keen portrait of them because some of his Italian immigrant relatives, including his father, worked for Mattison in Ambler. Talese uses Keasbey and Mattison as foils, intermingling their stories with the stories of his relatives. Describing Keasbey and Mattison near the beginning of their careers, when they were scouting Ambler as a possible site for their factory, he describes the “multimillionaire” Keasbey as a “mild mannered individual who considered Dr. Mattison a genius and rarely took issue with him,” and pictures the two of them “[w]earing dark suits and bowler hats, and carrying walking sticks as they stepped in and out of the cow dung in the weedy pastures. ... At six feet four, with broad shoulders, narrow hips and such disproportionately long thin legs that he seemed to be walking on stilts, the sternly spectacled Dr. Mattison towered over the five-foot-seven inch Mr. Keasbey, who had a round, ruddy face and muttonchops whiskers and nodded affirmatively at nearly everything he heard the talkative doctor say.” Talese continues that while people might have thought that it was Mattison who came from money rather than Keasbey, “[i]n deference to Keasbey’s wealth, and with the understanding that he would continue to underwrite his aspirations, Dr. Mattison placed Keasbey’s name in the primary position on their joint enterprise.”
The Aftermath: Long before Mattison’s death, K & M’s patent medicine manufacture had taken a secondary position to asbestos. Although Bromo-Caffeine’s formula never contained the poison acetanilid that Bromo-Seltzer’s did, Bromo-Seltzer, minus its poison, continued to grow in popularity while Bromo-Caffeine’s renown gradually waned. K & M still manufactured Bromo-Caffeine as late as 1927, and it appears to have lasted as long as Mattison remained at the head of the company. The asbestos business lasted much longer, but had much graver consequences. Turner and Newall operated the K & M facilities at Ambler under the K & M name until 1962, when its business was sold to Certain Teed Corporation and Nicolet Industries. Nicolet, which bought the asbestos production portion of K & M, ran the Ambler facility until the growing weight of 50,000 claims against it of personal injury caused by exposure to asbestos forced it into bankruptcy in 1987, and it was folded into Armstrong World Industries. Through a series of court decisions beginning in the 1980s, Nicolet and Armstrong and all their related and subsidiary companies which owned or operated K & M’s facilities were deemed to be responsible as K & M’s “successors-in-interest” for the injuries caused by K & M’s asbestos products. Whatever remains of K & M (as well as the rest of the entire asbestos industry) exists now, essentially, as a pool of money held in trust and administered by the federal courts to pay off these personal injury claims. One victim of asbestos poisoning was Talese’s own grandfather. At a time before the scientific study of asbestos hazzards and the litigation had unfolded, Talese suggests that his grandfather’s early death caused by respiratory problems directly resulted from his exposure to asbestos in Ambler.
K & M also left a lasting mark on the town of Ambler. On one hand, because of the asbestos, there is a legacy of contamination. Asbestos waste was piled as much as 30 feet high off the ground and 15 feet deep into the ground in some spots. A playground and park built over one former K & M waste dump were closed in the 1980s because of the danger posed by the contaminated ground. Several former K & M properties have been designated as EPA Superfund clean-up areas, and serious rehabilitation of the land began only in 2009. The positive legacy of K & M to Ambler was its governmental organization, as well as its utilities and solid, well-designed, well-crafted buildings. Some of the homes which Mattison conjured into being remain, as well as other public structures. While the Church of the Beautiful Windows burned in a fire in 1986, it has been rebuilt, and Lindenwold still exists as a 43 acre preserve. It has been utilized since just before Mattison’s death in 1936 as St Mary’s Villa for Children and Families, a Catholic charity’s orphanage. The house itself appears to be opened for public tours on some occasions. In the final analysis, as with the rest of the Nineteenth Century, the Patent Medicine Age itself together with the barons who created and lent their names to that era and gorged themselves upon it, it is probably best to remember and praise as much of the beautiful residuum as has survived while trying to learn and follow the monitory lessons instilled by the danger, ugliness, unpleasantness which accompanied and resulted from it. The lessons of corporate overreaching at the expense of the public and without check by the government have yet to be taken to heart.
*****
The Keasbey & Mattison printed cancel collection below is ex-Henry Tolman. This collection of the K&M cancel varieties is incomplete, but is still quite large.
International (Stock) Food Company, August 26, 2012
Editors Note: Malcolm A. Goldstein was a contributing blogger on 1898 Revenues. This page provides an introduction to his column on the companies that used proprietary battleships.
On Beyond Holcombe: An Introduction
An examination of the companies producing the countless variety of cancels appearing on the battleship series of proprietary revenue stamps offers a fresh opportunity to explore the contradictions of a com¬plex American society, where the fortunes of men, eventually exposed as among the most ruthless of the “robber barons,” were molded into the benevolence of philanthropic organization that today bear their names. In sanctioning battleship revenues to evidence payment of tax imposed to finance the Spanish-American War, Congress elected to tax patent medicines because they were profitable. The men who led the industry became unimaginably wealthy. As their histories unfold, strange and juicy tales emerge.
This story has been approached in two different ways. In the compilation Patent Medicine Tax Stamps, Henry Holcombe (1897-1973) created the definitive history of private die proprietary stamps and Prof. James Harvey Young (1915-2006), in his Toadstool Millionaires, recounted the social implications of the patent medicine era in American history. Yet, to a collector of battleship revenue cancels, while each book tells a unique and memorable story, it reveals only part of a vast and fascinating legacy of good and evil that patent medicines and the fortunes they created have bestowed upon society as their legacy.
Holcombe’s book dealt with companies that ordered private dies. He was not recounting the history of patent medicines per se and ignored virtually all of those companies that did not place orders for their own stamps. The taxes on proprietary medicine and cosmetics had originated during the Civil War and lasted for more than twenty years until they finally expired in 1883. The great bulk of private die proprietary stamps date from that period. Between 1880 and 1898, the drug industry expanded enormously. During the Spanish-American War period, since printing procedures had changed and the tax was repealed entirely within four years (three years for patent medicines), very few companies had time to order their own stamps, so Holcombe’s book does not cover the younger group of companies. Young was not a philatelist, and did not mention revenue stamp cancels in his cautionary tale concerning the over-reaching, death-inducing claims the patent medicine proprietors often indulged and the sinister pressures they exerted to keep their industry flourishing. Proprietary battleship cancels provide a window through which to examine the companies that Holcombe did not feature (and perhaps to amplify upon some the companies he did), while Young’s social history of the era provides the context for re-examining the contributions as well as the excesses of the patent medicine industry.
1898 is an excellent year to examine the entire drug industry in the United States for it was then at the height of its influence and power. Taking the measure of the drug trade, in preparation for a meeting of the wholesale drug dealers association in New York City in October, 1894, a reporter for the New York Times wrote: “With the possible exception of the National Bankers’ Association, there is not another organization in the country that represents as much wealth in the aggregate as the druggists.” Yet, the industry’s decline was already foreshadowed, for by the end of the century, scientific inquisitiveness had developed tests allowing for clear and certain identification of the secret compounds contained in patent medicines. Within a few years after the end of the Spanish-American War, a series of exposes printed in McClure’s Magazine (gathered into the volume The Great American Fraud by Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871-1958)), instigated the first serious examination of the patent medicine industry’s excesses. These articles, in turn, led to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. This Act made the first incursions on the industry’s outsized and unsubstantiated claims to positive cures. Nevertheless, the medical profession was still forced to relentlessly hammer for the next 30 years, with notice after notice to physicians (Nostrums & Quackery vols. 1-3: 1912, 1921 and 1936), before it successfully winnowed from the marketplace the blatant poisons, and strange decoctions (often featuring alcohol, but sometimes nothing more than plain water, as the undisclosed principal ingredient) which masqueraded as absolute cures for implacable diseases like cancer.
This column introduces a series of articles dedicated to re-examining the companies comprising the drug industry following the natural contours of the industry itself. That drug industry divides into three branches: 1) Manufacturers: 2) Wholesalers; 3) Retailers. These branches fought as often as they cooperated and the trail of lawsuits strewn in their wake is one previously unexplored source of insights into the nature of patent medicine company operations.
Philatelically, while it is not readily apparent, these divisions are subtly reflected in the cancels applied to the battleship proprietaries, and have influenced the present state of the cataloguing of proprietary battleship cancels. The re-categorizing proposed here will supplement the excellent existing cancel compilations. The Chappell-Joyce compilation - itself now in the process of revision through the columns of this blog - painstakingly focuses on the variety of printed cancels applied to these stamps. However, by constraining itself to printed cancels, it selects against important segments of the drug trade. On the other hand, the very exuberance of the listings in the Battleship Desk Reference book compiled by Robert Mustacich and Anthony Giacomelli, does not leave room for studied consideration of the nuances and variety of the histories while underlie the companies set forth in its exhaustive table. This study proposes to add anecdotal muscle to the articulate skeleton created by these two cancel compilations.
The center of the drug trade was the manufacturers. These companies produced their own goods and usually had their own networks of traveling salesmen, or “drummers,” to arrange for sales and distribution as well. Manufacturers had a natural wish to expedite the flow of their products and fairly quickly incorporated the entire collection of the tax into the process of pack¬aging their products. The most creative manufacturers, who realized (as had their Civil War predecessors) the advertising value that government mandated stamps might add to their product, immediately placed their orders for the group of stamps that became the Spanish-American War addendum to the Scott RS list. Other large manufacturers, such as J.C. Ayer, Lydia Pinkham and C.I. Hood, created printed cancels to regularize the tax collection process. Ayer was an old enough company to have created RS stamps, and, had the new tax continued longer, might have done so again. The Pinkham and Hood companies, which made extensive use of printed cancels, became a manufacturing giants too late to have needed their own Civil War private dies, and thus were not included by Holcombe. Lydia Pinkham has accounted for several books in her own right, but her story is not widely told in philatelic circles. While the Pinkham and Hood cancels are common and well known to battleship revenue collectors (and are found in the Chappell-Joyce listings), the stories of these companies also legitimately fall within the ambit of the new study proposed here.
However, there are a great many more large or influential manufacturers within the drug trade itself who relied solely on hand stamped cancels. The proprietors of these companies, some later as notorious as William Radam and Frank Cheney, and others as diverse as W.W. Gavitt, Frederick Stearns and Leslie Keeley, relied on hand stamped cancels. This study proposes to recount their stories which are as varied and interesting as any set forth in Holcombe.
Wholesale druggists tended to supply their local regional druggists, although some of them competed on a national level. The largest, like Charles Marchand, actually did produce RS stamps during the Spanish-American War period. Others, like E. Ferrett of New York, who distributed the Wright product line, opted for printed cancels. Many prominent companies, like Meyer Brothers of St. Louis and George C. Goodwin of Boston, however, stuck with hand stamped cancels, and have not been scrutinized as carefully as the others. For example, Meyer Brothers catalogues provide much information about the state of the drug business at the turn of the Twentieth Century.
Retailers tended to have a single location or a group of locations around a single city, although there were a few regional affiliations and even the first, faint stirring of a national chain. They mainly had to account for tax to be paid on pro¬ducts already in stock on the effective date of collection, July 1, 1898, or had to stamp small batches of their own generic or home-brewed products or other miscellaneous goods. For this reason, most retail cancels appear on low denominations and are virtually all hand stamped. They remain largely obscure and are most often identified only if the entire name is given or the location is identified. Armed with that information, it is generally easy to match the cancel to known drug industry outlets. While most were small town druggists, the stories of retailers as varied as R.H. Macy (a large enough operation to have invested in printed cancels), J.N. Adams, and L.O. Gale, form the tributary streams of information which ultimately lead to the vast, still largely unexplored, ocean of patent medicine knowledge.
This ocean of knowledge exists on the same Internet which makes this blog available, for just as it has made the archives of the New York Times readily researchable and readable, it has made reachable, through scanning, obscure local histories, numerous dusty trade publications and other source material such as patent medicine company catalogues. In addition to these reproductions of older written materials, websites promoting study of family genealogies, and local points of interest, as well as hobby websites in neighboring fields like bottle and postcard collecting, have also contributed to widen the field of inquiry into patent medicines. This article argues that we should all take another plunge into the vastly improved ocean of knowledge.
On Beyond Holcombe Posts:
Malena Company: September 23, 2012
MALENA CO.
JUN
12
1899
The Malena Company was the brainchild of Chauncey F. York. During the Spanish-American War, it was located in Warriors Mark, PA, a town in central western Pennsylvania. In 1910, York opened a spacious new factory in Detroit, MI and moved his whole operation there. The local Huntingdon County Pennsylvania paper, fondly recalling the history of Warriors Mark a hundred years later, noted that York “became a millionaire” only after he moved the operation to Detroit.
York was born in New York City in March, 1850. In 1876, he graduated from Penn State located in State College, PA, and by 1880 had settled with his wife and infant son, Henry, born in 1879, in Warriors Mark, not far from Penn State. The Malena Company manufactured the basic compound Malena, meant to be used either as an ointment or salve, and later added Malena Liver Pills, Pills, Worm and Blood Tablets, as well as Gu-Ma Gum - “the best chew for a cent.” The pitch for the Liver Pills, a laxative, was stark and straight forward: “Constipation leads to death. Use Malena Liver Pills and don’t die.”
Trade card: front, above; reverse, below
Trade card front and back
From its factory in Warriors Mark, as well as the “medicines” themselves, the company poured forth scads and scads of colorful trade cards in a great variety of designs ranging across the gamut of traditional Victorian subjects, such as cheerful, chubby, dewy-cheeked children, cuddly kittens and puppies, landscapes, flowers, birds and assorted combinations of the foregoing. On the back of each trade card, the products were relentlessly touted. Malena, itself was advertised to remedy catarrh, neuralgia, rheumatism, stiff joints, rough or chapped skin, cuts, burns, scalds, blister, bruises, bites, stings, sore lips, mouth and throat, corns, dandruff, and warts. The idea seemed to be to persuade people to apply as much of the compound as possible at every moment. The graver the illness, the more product ought to be applied. The company also issued short story booklets, precursors of the comic books of a later age, with product plugs and testimonials woven in among the pages of the story.
Son Henry followed in his father’s footsteps and graduated from Penn State in 1900. He received his M.D. from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City in 1904, and opened a medical practice in Warriors Mark, where he married in 1906 and began his family. Father Chauncey soon moved on from central Pennsylvania. By 1908, he had relocated to Detroit and had a new, younger wife. In the 1910 Census, he reported an infant son with his new wife. He soon acquired an estate, which he named Malena Park, in central Michigan near Clark Lake in Columbia, MI. Henry moved to Detroit in 1910 and became the manager of the relocated company. In the 1914 edition of the local Who’s Who, Henry, now called Harry, listed himself as a Democrat and a Methodist. He was a member of the Detroit Chamber of Commerce and a Mason. His hobbies were hunting and fishing.
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In 1915, Chauncey launched a new career. He became an author, publishing a book of stories called the Overlook Farm Books, which he stated “give a vivid description of the early, backwoods pioneer life and are replete with thrilling pioneer stories intensely interesting and instructive to everyone, especially the boys and girls.” A random excerpt from the book reads as follows:
“The landlord replied, ‘Over there sits your man,’ pointing toward me. ‘He is not a regular guide, but knows the north woods and has as much horse sense as anyone else around here, I reckon.’ “He engaged me at once. We were over three weeks on our way up from Augusta to the place known to the old settlers as PEG CABIN ‘Peg Town.’ As soon as Mr. Lee (that was the name of the young man) saw the amazing beauty of the surrounding country lie said, ‘Here is the place I will pitch my tent for the balance of the summer.’If you mailed in a stamp, you could receive not only a sample copy of the book, but also free samples of the Malena line of products. In 1925, Chauncey sold his Michigan estate to the local township to use as a park, and retired to Florida. He died in Tarpon Springs, Fl in 1928. Malena continued to be advertised until the end of the 1920s, and disappeared during the Depression. Harry York seems not to have returned to medicine. A last random record closes present internet knowledge of his whereabouts. In 1942, a registration card which he filed in connection with the 4th Michigan Draft for World War II, covering men “born on or after April 28, 1877 and on or before February 16, 1897," listed him as living in Detroit and employed by Rose Jewelers in Grand River, MI. Today, Malena’s principal legacy seems to lie in all of the foderol generated to sell it.
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Ladd & Coffin: September 16, 2012
LADD & COFFIN,
JAN
26
1899
NEW YORK.
Ladd & Coffin cancel on a non-proprietary, R164 2 cent documentary stamp.
Ladd & Coffin Co’s battleship cancels are not only frequently seen (at least on proprietary stamps, unlike the documentary example), but come in at least four formats: small with a year date; small with a month, day and year; large with a year date; and large with a month, day and year date. The company had started much earlier in the era of the first revenues and had even issued its own private die proprietary stamps (RT26-33). Since Holcombe’s book dealt only with the medicine companies, and it was a manufacturer of perfume, it escaped Holcombe’s scrutiny. The RT stamps were ordered and used by L & C’s predecessor, Young, Ladd and Coffin. They came in four values, from 1c to 4c, and are known perforated and imperforate, as well in the b, c and d paper varieties, accounting for 24 varieties in all, most moderately uncommon, and RT32b genuinely rare. By 1898, these private die proprietary perfume stamps themselves were already being catalogued and offered to the public by stamp dealers.
Civil War era private die of Young, Ladd & Coffin
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The company’s product was a line of Lundborg’s Perfumes, and its history predates the Civil War. Its founder was a Swede who emigrated to the United States, John Marlie Lundborg How he acquired his knowledge of perfume seems now lost in time. He is listed as a “perfumer” in the 1860 Trow’s Business Directory for New York City, but apparently lived in Hudson, NJ. By 1872, he had sold an interest in his business to Richard D. Young, and by 1873, the firm was reorganized as Young, Ladd & Coffin. Although an advertising brochure was issued in his name as late as 1876, he retired when the firm reorganized, and died of “softening of the brain” in Hudson in 1880 at age 57.
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Richard D. Young took the premier spot in the new partnership because he was already an established businessman. Born in Pennsylvania in 1840, by 1876 he was influential enough to be a member of the New York City Board of Trade. He remained associated with Y, L & C from 1872 to 1887 when that company dissolved by “mutual consent.” He then established his own perfume manufacturing business, the R. D. Young Perfumery Co. It did not fare well, for reasons which will become readily apparent.
The bland explanation for the undoing of Y, L & C may have concealed more profound difficulties Young was experiencing. He had married Emma Bushnell, who came from an old New York City family, but after their five children had begun to mature, the marriage had gone stale. Emma had filed for a separation in 1885. Apparently, since the two were already pursuing their separate lives, she did not force him to litigate to divorce, perhaps because blatant evidence of adultery was the only acceptable proof to obtain a divorce. In 1888, Young later declared, his business difficulties caused him to go temporarily insane. He suffered from “melancholia” and was hospitalized in three different sanitariums. During this period, in the Spring of 1888, while she was exercising “undue influence” over him (according to his later account), he deeded to Emma their house together with several perfume formulas. However, by 1889, he had recovered his health. Now robust and reinvigorated, he not only sued Emma to recover the deed to the house, but also persuaded her to withdraw her separation action.
Peace did not ensue. In 1890, Emma decamped to her mother’s house in Montclair, NJ. A strange event then transpired. One of Young’s clerks, Melano Reichardt, who, coincidently, was boarding with Emma’s mother, accompanied Emma to the Hamilton Hotel in Patterson, NJ. She said Reichardt was “attentive to” her and they stopped during a normal Sunday drive merely to have dinner. Out of the same circumstances, Young shaped a different narrative. He charged that he and another of his clerks had discovered Emma at the hotel in a “compromising position” with Reichardt. She renewed her suit for separation and he cross-sued for divorce. By November, 1889, Emma was being shadowed by Young’s “private Hawkshaws,” as she called them (“Hawkshaw” was then a popular detective cartoon strip). She averred they had tried to break into her quarters and so harassed her that, in the supercharged words of the New York Times reporter, “she began to feel that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were but a hollow mockery.” After one detective so menaced her as she made her way to the Astor House hotel (where, she stated she was merely picking up a left umbrella), she had him arrested. The same New York Times reporter cynically concluded his article on the incident with the aside that the detective posted $300 bail “and left apparently delighted at the leniency of the court.”
When the marital cross-suits of the Youngs came to trial, Emma testified that the deed to the house was Young’s birthday present to her that year, and, further, she had abandoned the family home only after Young tried to shoot her. Young testified his “melancholia”prevented his even remembering his conveyance of the house to Emma. But the tale of Young’s degradation grew even juicier. During the divorce trial, a Grand Jury in New Jersey indicted Young and his two clerks for the crime of “conspiracy” in connection with the Hamilton Hotel incident. The indictment charged they had tried to trump up against Emma false evidence of the “in flagrante delicto” act necessary to demonstrate adultery. By then, Young’s company was a shambles. In December, 1890, Young made an assignment of his business, and in early 1891, a trade journal stated that the “stock, plant and fixtures ... of Richard D. Young, the well known manufacturer of perfumes ... had lately been sold at auction by an assignee.” Young was bankrupt. That journal sympathized that “his recent troubles are a matter of profound regret to his many friends in this part of the world.”
As Young’s criminal conspiracy trial approached, the other clerk died and Young fell out with Reichardt. In May, 1891, both went on trial in New Jersey. The prosecutor introduced a love poem which Young had written to some “Loved One.” Young claimed it predated his marriage, although the document bore the date of March 4, 1890, and refused to identify the “Loved One.” The Times reported that Young and Reichardt each tried to proclaim that he had been duped by the other and that only the other should be blamed for the conspiracy. The Times, summarized the cross-purposed defenses: “This novel spectacle has excited great interest.” Naturally, both were found guilty. Young was sentenced to pay a fine of $100, plus half the court costs, which amounted to an additional $37.50. Reichardt drew a $50 fine and the other half of the costs. After that humiliation, an initial ruling setting aside Young’s conveyance of the house to Emma was reversed on appeal, with the appellate court noting that it could only conclude from the trial evidence that Young knew perfectly well what he was doing when he deeded the house to Emma. A final court decision granted Young a “partial” divorce, while recounting the circumstances of his conviction. With Young finally divorced, convicted of criminal behavior and bankrupt, the newspapers tired of both the Youngs and they disappeared from the news. A trade journal offered one last grace note: in 1894 it related that Young had brought his 36 years of experience in the perfume business to the Crown Perfumery Co as its “American agent.” In the 1900 Census, Young’s wife listed herself as a widow and the head of her household. Apparently, neither the Times nor the industry trade journals reported Young’s death or eulogized him.
By contrast with Young, the intertwined lives of John B. Ladd and Sturgis Coffin were much more “prosaic,” although the wealth that they both amassed through their perfume partnership meant that their comings and goings were chronicled in the social columns of the New York Times. Ladd was born in New York City in August 1839. When he joined with Young and Coffin, he had been a salesman for Colgate & Co (yet another company to be explored in this series). Ladd’s wealth enabled him to amass his own collection of old masters, nineteen of which he lent to an exhibition in 1897 celebrating the opening of the Brooklyn Art Institute’s new building, now the Brooklyn Museum. In 1908, he exhibited at the Union League his collection of Dutch Masters and other more modern works by such artists as the 19th Century French artists as Corot and Boudin.
The closest tie between Ladd and Coffin was that they were in-laws. Ladd married Coffin’s sister Emily, and before his own marriage, Coffin lived with the Ladds in Brooklyn. His sister, Mrs. John B. Ladd, was the one whose name appeared most frequently in the social columns through her involvement with her many charities benefitting institutions serving the then separate city of Brooklyn and their various balls, galas and “tableaus,”(live portrayals of famous old masters). One of her other significant activities was her association with a group of prominent Brooklyn women who issued a manifesto to the New York State legislature denouncing the women’s suffrage movement, They wrote: “from a studious contemplation of the governmental principles involved, came a firm conviction that woman suffrage would be against the best interests of the State, its women and the home.” Since the broadside dates from 1894, the ladies must have had their way. Despite his wife’s now seemingly retrograde views suffrage, Ladd as well as Coffin both considered themselves reformers enough in 1902 to sign a petition in support a Citizen’s Union plan for a reform mayor and refreshed government of the now united New York City.
Coffin and his wife were also linked with many charities. Coffin was born in Poughkeepsie, NY in 1845. His father, Henry, was a well-known and prominent wholesale druggist, first in Poughkeepsie, and after 1867 in Brooklyn, who served as a trustee of the Long Island Trust Company, a director of a plate glass company and an major investor in the Atlantic Avenue Railway Company. By the time Sturgis became part of Y, L & C, his mother was already a part of the Brooklyn social scene, and the younger Coffins associated with the same charities as had his parents and his sister. In 1892, he also served on the perfumers’ committee of the drug trade industry’s effort to raise money for the construction of Grant’s Tomb, and, in 1894, he and his brother-in-law Ladd were both members of the Board of the Brooklyn Homeopathic Hospital that was called upon to fire and replace the hospital’s entire professional staff to settle a festering internal quarrel. In 1894, he was listed as among the attendees at a New York City Board of Trade meeting where the principal address concerned tariff reform, and, a month later, as both and attendee and sponsor of a $25 prize awarded at the Brooklyn Horse Show. The Times described that affair as being Brooklyn’s social equivalent of the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden.
Over the next several years, Coffin’s name continued to be mentioned in connection with the Brooklyn Horse Show and many other society affairs. In 1903, the Times noted his daughter Natalie’s engagement to Johnston de Forest, the only son of an old Washington Square family, whose grandfather had been the first president of the New York Stock Exchange. Natalie married de Forest in October, 1904, but her health apparently was poor from the outset. After attempting to recuperate in Colorado Springs, CO, then her family’s summer home in New Canaan, and finally in Asheville, NC, she died in April, 1906. Shortly thereafter, Sturgis Coffin’s life ended tragically. In August, 1907, he died suddenly of a ‘cerebral hemorrhage” at age 62 in New Canaan. Several days later, when the coroner’s report was released, the papers revealed that the hemorrhage had been induced by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The speculation was that he had been distraught, never having recovered from Natalie’s death. Mrs. Coffin’s name continued to grace the social columns until her own death in 1924.
Ladd & Coffin disappeared on January 1, 1910. With Coffin dead, Ladd, who was in ill-health, retired on December 31, 1909. The company was restyled as Coffin & Price. The Coffin was T. J., a nephew of Sturgis Coffin and Mrs. Ladd. Price was a W. C. Price. Both had been long-term employees of the company, and a trade journal reporting on the re-alignment speculated: “it is safe to say they will continue the business along progressive lines.” Ladd died in November, 1910, much honored by the industry and trade associations. By 1914, the company had changed its name to the Lundborg Co. By 1917, it had become strictly a manufacturer and wholesaler and had abandoned its downtown New York City address for Fifth Avenue. Circa 1930, it was still introducing new fragrances and in 1954 the company remained on Fifth Avenue. Currently, its products do not appear to be in production, although vintage bottles and advertising abound.
While in operation, the company drew singular praise from one visitor to its establishment. During the Nineteenth Century, European travelers from de Tocqueville to Dickens delighted in exploring the brave new, raw United States, and publishing their observations to enlighten their more sophisticated brethren about their strange country cousins. In 1884, an English woman, Emily Faithfull, who was investigating the position of women in American society observed:
“Another scene of female industry interested me greatly in New York. Mr. Rimmel [Eugene, 1820-1887, born French, but operated a world famous and still extant business in London after 1834] claims to have been the first have employed women in England on a large scale in the manufacture of perfumes, and Messrs. Young, Ladd & Coffin, the makers of Lundborg’s exquisite perfumes and Rhenish Colognes, are entitled to the same honour [sic] in America. ‘The rich man’s luxury is the poor man’s bread;” if scent must rank as a luxury, it certainly is one which affords work for thousands. But it is more than that, it is a sanitary agent as well, and an adjunct to the refinements of life with which high civilisation [sic] cannot dispense.”
Keasbey & Mattison Company: September 9, 2012
K. & M. Co.
Ambler,
June 15, 1901
RB20 block of 4 with printed cancels in selvage, ex-Tolman
Collectors of battleship cancels find those of the Keasbey & Mattison Company of Ambler, PA to be among the most frequently seen and most readily available. Moreover, for connoisseurs who hold printed cancels to be the gold standard of battleship revenue collecting (with whom this author most forcefully and grumpily disagrees), the listing of the variations and errors in its printed cancels is a treasure chest that covers seven single spaced pages in the original Chappell-Joyce compilation (a listing which this author believes emphasizes the trees at the expense of the forest). Few philatelists have explored K & M’s history to understand the energy behind this cornucopia of stamps or the greater ramifications of K & M’s existence. K & M, and the personalities behind it, may provide the most quintessential and elementary case study thus far in this series of all the elements, good and bad, which make the study of the patent medicine, as well as the broader pharmaceutical, industry in the era of the Robber Barons both piquant in itself as well as relevant to today’s world of unrestricted corporate power.
THE COMPANY
Aside from its philatelic prolificacy, the most significant fact of K & M’s long existence is it managed (if inadvertently) to successfully market products, as well as create unimaginable wealth, in two completely different and unrelated areas - patent medicine and asbestos insulation - both of which ultimately became rigorously scrutinized as generating major health hazzards. In a time when medical advertising hyperbole was unchecked, the company widely promoted its patent medicines as cures for all types of nervous exhaustion. Even if its principal product, Bromo-Caffeine, was merely a forerunner of today’s headaches remedies, it was also touted as a remedy for a “weak heart” or “sudden cardiac dropsy” (and, in fact, it may have been as good a remedy as was available at the time for heart attack relief). However, long after the patent medicine industry’s exaggerated claims were throttled and the over-the-counter narcotics barred, the company’s successors again became notorious for K & M’s second, even larger product line, asbestos insulation. Asbestos, welcomed in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries as a miraculous industrial breakthrough because of its resistance to extreme heat, electrical and chemical damage, became a nightmare for K & M’s successors as it was gradually proven to be a malign and potent carcinogen, at last fodder only for late night ads by attorneys promising rich recoveries who, even now, still endlessly trawl the air waves for victims of its poisoning.
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As Athena from Zeus, the company sprang into being as a pharmaceutical laboratory in Philadelphia in 1873, as soon as its founders, Henry Griffith Keasbey and Richard V (Van Zeelust/Vanselous) Mattison, graduated together from Philadelphia’s prestigious College of Pharmacy. It achieved almost immediate success with a headache remedy marketed initially under its chemical identity as citrate of caffeine, but sold after 1881 under the trademarked name “Bromo-Caffeine,” derived from a class of compounds known as effervescent salts. These chemical combinations of acids and bases result in the release carbon dioxide, often experienced as pleasant fizzy, bubbly sensation. While K & M also marketed Salaperient for constipation, Alkalithia for rheumatism and Cafetonique for dyspepsia, Bromo-Caffeine quickly became the first source of the wealth K & M created.
K & M also manufactured carbonate of magnesia, the common laxative milk of magnesia. Mattison soon noticed that one Hiram Hanmore was purchasing copious amounts of magnesia from the company and wondered how Hanmore was using it. Upon inquiry, Mattison learned that Hanmore was combining magnesia with hemp fiber and binding the mixture to metal as insulation. However, hemp was not durable and soon burned away when the metal was exposed to the frequent high heat generated in the newer, larger steam boilers and piping systems built in the advancing Industrial Revolution. Mattison quickly discovered that when asbestos was substituted in place of hemp in the mixture, the resulting compound was an extremely stable, malleable and durable insulating material. Asbestos, a group of silicate minerals, is characterized by long crystals able to be spun into fibers. It already had a 4,000 year history as a fire resistant novelty, but had only just begun to be available in large enough quantities to be used commercially. Mattison moved decisively. First, he convinced Hanmore of the superiority of his asbestos insulation and became his exclusive supplier. Then he began to manufacture and market asbestos to the world at large. Mattison soon became known as the “Asbestos King,” and the fortune generated by asbestos was even greater than the one from the proprietary medicines.
Asbestos was not specially taxed in the Revenue Act of 1898. Rather, it was the popularity of Bromo-Caffeine that generated the demand for the battleship revenue stamps. K & M soon operated sales offices in New York City, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and Cincinnati. It fought hard to defend its trademarked name and in more than one case successfully convinced a court that Bromo-Caffeine was a legitimate trade name or a legal trademark. In 1892, it even had a man sent to jail for criminal counterfeit and trademark infringement when he peddled his own unauthorized version of Bromo-Caffeine. The principal ruling establishing the legality of the trademark was somewhat ironic because the proof offered by K & M to establish the uniqueness of the name Bromo-Caffeine was that Mattison had created that name entirely from his imagination and the product itself, which contained, inter alia, lots of sugar, less than 2% caffeine, a great deal of bi-carbonate of soda, as well as a dash of potassium bromide, bore no resemblance to any other known chemical formula. To no avail, the challengers offered proof that there were legitimate chemical combinations of bromine and caffeine, which involved the use of the terms bromo and caffeine in some combination, and, even closer to the point, a German scientist named Schultzen denominated a certain combination of bromine, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen as Bromo-Caffeine in 1867 and had marketed it modestly as a chemical (but most definitely not as a headache remedy) both in Europe and the United States. That success in defending the Bromo-Caffeine trademark led K & M to push even harder to restrict its competition.
When Emerson Drug Co. (see RS 280-3, together with its own vast array of printed cancels, (a company subject to this column another day)) began have success with its headache remedy Bromo-Seltzer around 1894, K & M issued a barrage of circulars to the industry stating it was prepared to challenge Emerson’s use of the term “Bromo” as an infringement of its Bromo-Caffeine trademark. Drug associations around the country discussed the viability of K & M’s threats at their meetings. Since Bromo-Seltzer was such a good seller, the trade generated little enthusiasm for K & M’s militant position, and these meetings often turned into sessions on how to find strategies to ignore K & M’s threats. Early in 1895, a group called the United States Trademark Association published a list of some fifteen other trademarks containing the term “Bromo,” including Bromo-Seltzer, which itself had been trademarked in 1889, and asked for additions from anyone who could provide them. K & M did file its suit against Emerson, but eventually consented to settle out of court. By that time, medical reformers were already vigorously attacking Bromo-Seltzer as containing the dangerous and even deadly stimulant acetanilid in place of caffeine. K & M could always boast that Bromo-Caffeine never contained that poison.
Buoyed by the two burgeoning product lines of patent medicines and asbestos insulation, K & M soon needed to expand from its limited quarters in Philadelphia. Mattison discovered that there was a source of magnesia in the dolomite rock formations near Ambler, PA, now a suburb of Philadelphia, but then a sleepy farming village with declining prospects because its agricultural fields were played out. Ambler had one other virtue to recommend it: a connection with the local railroad. Recognizing that the combination of easy access to both raw materials and transportation suited them perfectly, Keasbey and Mattison moved the entire business to Ambler in 1882. Ambler flourished under the benign rule of K & M for the very long lifetimes of the company’s two founders.
Henry G. Keasbey
As patent medicine barons, the founders of Keasbey and Mattison could have been ordered directly from Central Casting in Hollywood. Mattison’s oversized body and personality tend to soak up most of the extant accounts about K & M. The seemingly patrician Keasbey, who has left only indirect traces of his presence, disappeared quickly from public scrutiny. Born in 1850 into the wealthy gentry, Keasbey’s family origins are now opaque because the prominent Keasbeys of the era were statesmen, attorneys and jurists from neighboring New Jersey. Since there are later claims his grandfather was a friend of Thomas Jefferson, he must have descended from a “lesser branch” of that New Jersey clan. Keasbey himself gained prominence when, at age 22, he could simply produce the $5000 to finance K & M’s founding. Between 1873 and the company’s incorporation in 1892, Keasbey stayed in the background, but must have overseen the ever expanding day to day operations of the company, since the much busier and more publicity conscious Mattison made an immediate transition from student to teacher at the College of Pharmacy, and then graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1879 from the University of Pennsylvania (although he never practiced medicine), all while, on behalf of K & M, personally selling Bromo-Caffeine one doctor at a time from coast to coast to establish it as the leader in its field, fighting the court battles to protect its name, and also developing the entire asbestos product line.
As soon as K & M incorporated (with stated capital of $2,000,000), Keasbey converted his partnership interest into stock of the new K & M, Inc. and retired from its active management, never again to take a direct role in the running of the company. He did keep tinkering for his own amusement, however, for after 1892, he patented several devices, such as improved feed-water heater, in his own name. Married in 1877 to Anna Foster, a cultivated young Philadelphian educated primarily in Paris, he became a father of four. Although he never lived in Ambler, during the years he summered there, he is remembered as the sponsor of the local baseball team and a benefactor, along with his wife, of both the Baptist Church and a mission to cater to the special needs of the Italian immigrants who worked in his factory. Rather, because of his wife’s delicate health, he and his family traveled extensively to Europe, particularly in the south of France, to find the appropriate climate to suit her precarious constitution, and she died at a villa there in 1897. After he was widowed, he continued to travel a great deal and resided in England and on the Riviera throughout his remaining years. At one time, he did establish a world renowned collection of medieval armor but sold it at auction in 1903. Thereafter, he pursued his art interests quietly, and, even now his bequests to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City are listed as the source of funds used to purchase art objects. At the end of the life, when he died just days short of his 82nd birthday in 1932, beyond noting his love of medieval armor, his New York Times obituary listed only that his principal membership was the Antiquarian Society of London.
Keasbey’s children followed in his retiring, low key manner. His son Henry Turner Keasbey (1882-1953), was a painter of pastoral scenes (or merely aspired to be a painter of such scenes, according to other less charitable sources). Henry T, a bachelor, so loved agriculture and cows that he endowed a special scholarship fund for students studying dairy farming. Today this fund is administered under the auspices of the Philadelphia Foundation, an amalgam of charitable foundations dedicated to the benefit the City of Philadelphia. Henry G’s daughter, Marguerite Anna Keasbey (1878-1960), a spinster who spent the first half of her life as her father’s traveling companion, developed such ties with England that she endowed a special scholarship to permit poor English children to be educated at English universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge. It was later modified in 1981 to allow Americans also to apply to pursue post-graduate studies in England. Like her brother, she left the remaining bulk of her fortune in the care of the Philadelphia Foundation, although it took a court order issued seventeen years after her death (with all its attendant costs paid to some of Philadelphia’s most prominent law firms) finally to sort and meld her various charitable bequests.
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Richard V. Mattison
Born in 1851, Mattison, the public face of K & M, was a bear of a man, standing six feet, four inches and weighing 220 pounds, and sporting a full, long flowing beard. Among the stories told about Mattison, it is said that he was obligated to grow the beard to cover the disfigurement of his lower jaw, because, in Philadelphia in 1882, he had fractured it in three places when, because of his huge bulk, he fell through a sidewalk elevator trap door while spying outside a rival’s pharmaceutical laboratory to see why the factory was operating so late at night. The jaw never set properly and hd could never again eat thick meat like steak. People, overwhelmed by his room-filling presence and commanding - one might even say domineering - manner, either loved or hated him.
When he had established his fortune, he let it be known that while his own origins were modest, his family’s history on his father’s side flowed back to the lairds of the Scottish Highlands, and on his maternal grandmother’s side to its migration from England to Pennsylvania along with William Penn on the second ship to land in the colony. He further averred that when he partnered with Keasbey, he declined his extended family’s offer of monetary help and borrowed his capital contribution. While trained as both a pharmacist and a doctor, he himself readily admitted that his true calling was business. In 1892, during the major Bromo-Caffeine trademark litigation, he was asked:
Q: In which branch of knowledge are your attainments more eminent; in the medical branch or the chemical branch?
A: My business is chiefly financial; I think it is about an even thing, medical and chemical.
Having established Ambler as the site of K & M, Mattison behaved in most energetic and dynamic fashion like the laird of the manor he had wrought. He constructed, and rented to his workers, tracts of specially designed houses, some 400 overall, graduated in their space, complexity and stone decoration, and made available depending on the worker’s position with the company. He erected Ambler’s Opera House and bandstand, saw to Ambler’s incorporation as a borough in 1887, installed gas, electricity including street lights, and a water system through organizing and heading the Ambler Electric Light Company and the Ambler Spring Water Company. As a cycling enthusiast, he dedicated a special well on his property for use by the cyclists. He was remembered anecdotally not only for feuding with the local postmaster about putting the local post office in one of his buildings and phoning the electric company to leave the streetlights on so he could take a late stroll, but also for providing coal and food to needy workers during hard times. Beyond being president of the two utility companies, as well as the land-related Upper Dublin Water Co., and the Real Estate and Improvement Co, he was also, after 1892, president of K & M, Inc. together with being chief executive of a string of other asbestos related companies: the mellifluous Asbestos Shingle, Slate and Sheathing Co; the Magnesia Covering Co; the Asbestos Co; the Asbestos Manufacturing Co; the Telenduron Co; as well as the Bell Asbestos Mines, which were located in Thetford, Quebec, and were the world’s largest. Beyond the world of asbestos, he also served as president of the First National Bank of Ambler and the Philadelphia Drug Exchange, while merely serving only as vice-president of his alma mater, the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, as well as maintaining memberships in a variety of other professional organizations.
Mattison moved in society’s highest circles, warranting coverage of his comings and goings in the social pages of the New York Times. In Ambler, he established “Lindenwold” a 400 plus acre estate, containing two lakes, one covering six acres itself, and in 1912, he even remodeled its manor house to resemble Windsor Castle. At its peak, his payroll for the operation of Lindenwold alone amounted to over $10,000 per week. He also purchased, decorated and staffed “Bushy Park,” named in tribute to a Royal Park in London, as his summer “cottage” in Newport, RI. In 1873, he had married one Esther Dafter of Cranbrook, NJ. Two sons, Richard V. Jr. and Royal lived to stunted maturity. In honor of a daughter, Esther, who died at age 4, he erected in Ambler, at a cost of $150,000, the Trinity Memorial Protestant Episcopal Church. Because of its beautiful stained glass windows, it became known locally as the Church of the Beautiful Windows. Mattison was known to keep his eye on his pocket watch during sermons and snap it shut when he felt the rector had spoken long enough. His firm and tight grasp of the affairs of both Ambler and Trinity Church, marked him as a benevolent autocrat he was.
Mattison was also a stern father. After Richard Jr. secretly married while traveling abroad in 1904 to the orphaned daughter of “respected and refined parents” who was then living in London with her two sisters while “fulfilling an engagement on the English stage,” he was so afraid to face his father that left his bride of three days in London when he returned home. Agnes, the young Mrs. Mattison, later testified he told her he would return to bring her to his parents after he had arranged matters with his father. After six months, when he had not made good his promise to come back, she showed her pluck by following him to the United States. Junior lovingly greeted her at the boat, insisted that she use her maiden name and admit only to being his fiancee. He registered her at a Newport boarding house under her maiden name, swearing that he still needed time to convince his father to accept the marriage. While Junior initially reported back to her that his father took the news of his union extremely badly, she alleged that ultimately she met Mattison, that Mattison behaved cordially (albeit remarking about other young men’s unsuitable marriages to women below their station), permitted her to move as his son’s fiancee into Bushy Park (where she and her husband lived in adjoining rooms as man and wife, although the servants did not know), and even made the necessary announcement and arrangements for a wedding during the second week of August, 1905 to cover Junior’s prior hasty alliance.
Fate intervened. On July 30, 1905, Junior and Agnes attended a champagne breakfast aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia anchored in Narragansett Bay. Conflicting accounts ensued concerning what transpired during their visit to the ship. Agnes asserted that she fell ill during the breakfast, was tended by Junior in a young officer’s cabin, and returned with him to Bushy Park in a weakened condition. However, within the week, Junior wrote a letter to Agnes’s sisters in Scotland and included an anonymous account of the incident stating that because of her “sporting proclivities,” Agnes had drunk herself into a stupor, and was thereafter “discovered beastly intoxicated and in an otherwise disgraceful condition in the stateroom of a young ensign ... where she had been for some considerable time without [young] Mr. Mattison’s knowledge.” In Agnes’s view, Junior sent that letter, including the anonymous report, to pressure her sisters to get her to consent to his divorce from her by threatening to make public the incident.
Leaving aside the reality of events aboard the USS West Virginia, a few days after having seen her unsteadiness when she returned to Bushy Park - continued Agnes’s version of the story - Mattison peremptorily and curtly ordered Junior to permanently remove his intoxicated floozie from Mattison’s presence. She and Junior departed from Bushy Park that day. Junior related to her that his father had told him he must divorce her or be disinherited, but promised that after he settled her in a hotel in New York, he would bring his father around. Once at the “prominent” hotel, he methodically collected all her cash and then went downstairs to write some letters. The next morning she received a note saying he had already left the hotel to start making arrangements for the reconciliation, and that she should hold his bag for him when it arrived. Not only did his bag not arrive, he never returned. Her narrative proclaimed that she would have starved but for a fortuitous ten dollars she discovered at the bottom of her traveling trunk. He never resumed the marriage, and afterward dealt with her only through lawyers, who eventually arranged an extremely modest living allowance for her, but apparently also had her movements shadowed by detectives. Agnes further claimed that when the rest of her luggage was finally returned to her from Newport, the extravagant trousseau Junior had purchased for her was gone, together with all his letters to her and even their English marriage certificate.
Both parties sued for divorce in 1907, essentially trying two different cases before the court. Agnes’s argument was predicated on Junior’s harsh, cruel and abrupt abandonment of her in 1905 at his father’s behest, and the family’s machinations against her, their “consent, procurement and connivance” in obtaining evidence of adultery to support a divorce. Junior’s argument rested upon elaborate observations by a variety of detectives, bell hops and room clerks alleging a subsequent adulterous fling with a physician who treated Agnes for illness beginning six months after Junior left her. What Mattison actually knew about the formality of Junior’s liaison with Agnes, actually said to Junior about her, or ever plotted against her, was never proven, since his son’s divorce was the one litigation in which Mattison never testified. Junior, himself, never denied the 1904 English marriage nor Agnes’s account of their parting in the hotel room nor the letter to her sisters. The case of either the innocent brought low by the perfidious, heartbreaking liar goaded by his implacable father or the adulterous, gold digging hussy - depending on one’s sympathies - headlined the gossip of Newport during the 1908 season.
Although the trial judge accepted Agnes’s version of the events in 1905, he failed to find either that Junior had acted cruelly against her or that he or his father had connived to set her up for the divorce. He did find that Agnes had carried on with the doctor and granted Junior his divorce on the grounds of adultery. In 1911, the Court of Appeals (the highest appellate court in New York) reversed that ruling and remanded the case for re-trial because the trial judge had allowed into the court record, and based his ruling upon, certain evidence the Court of Appeals deemed inappropriate. A hundred years later that decision is still cited for its discussion of the rules concerning the proper use of indirect, circumstantial evidence to establish adultery. Mattison’s and Junior’s argument that adultery trumps marital cruelty was not ultimately sustained because of the higher court’s reversal of the trial judge, but since there is no report of the retrial, Junior and his father must have finally arrived at some out-of-court accommodation with Agnes. In 1914, Junior married a Philadelphia socialite named Georgette, who over her fourteen year marriage to Junior grew to share Agnes’s opinion of Mattison, since Junior, who held the title of Vice-President of K & M, was never anything more than a glorified office boy for Mattison. Junior died in 1927 at age 46, apparently of alcoholism.
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Mattison persevered in his imperious ways, and business continued to boom. He outlived his own first wife and remarried in 1920. That year, K & M featured a picture of its factory taken from an airplane on the cover of the annual catalogue, and Mattison was later acknowledged as an innovator for the earliest use of aerial photography in advertising. However, at the moment when Mattison’s empire had reached its greatest extent in 1928, Junior’s second wife Georgette, still resentful of Mattison and now a stockholder herself in K & M as Junior’s widow, apparently egged Keasbey into suing Mattison for mismanagement of K & M, alleging that he was deliberately squelching K & M’s payment of its rightful dividend, was diverting K & M’s legitimate business to his own private companies and was improperly manipulating K & M’s Board of Directors to block it from calling in over a million and a half dollars of loans Mattison had taken from K & M. Perhaps Keasbey’s suit was justified, but Keasbey, as ever had no wish to engage in a prolonged fight with Mattison and the parties soon settled for $4 million which Mattison paid to Keasbey in a lump cash sum to buy him out entirely as autumn 1929 approached. The stock market crash in October, 1929 left Mattison without any ready money at hand and the ensuing Depression completed the collapse of Mattison’s outsized fortune. By 1931, the bankers keeping K & M afloat forced him to cede day to day control of K & M, and in 1934, they sold K & M to the British company, Turner & Newall Ltd for $4 million. As the financial noose closed around him, Mattison pared and pared his expenses, even vacating his beloved Lindenwold in 1931. The manor house was promptly put on the market, but stood empty for several years. Late in 1936 at age 85, he died in Ambler in a more modest home that he wisely had deeded to his now deceased second wife in more flush times located just across the street from Lindenwold’s gates. After his death that shadow of Lindenwold was itself subdivided into an eight suite apartment house. How the mighty had fallen. Mattison merited no formal New York Times obituary and there were no bequests, charities and scholarships as Keasbey’s fortune had endowed.
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Perhaps the last word on the partners Keasbey and Mattison properly belongs to the author Gay Talese. In his book, Unto The Sons, he paints a keen portrait of them because some of his Italian immigrant relatives, including his father, worked for Mattison in Ambler. Talese uses Keasbey and Mattison as foils, intermingling their stories with the stories of his relatives. Describing Keasbey and Mattison near the beginning of their careers, when they were scouting Ambler as a possible site for their factory, he describes the “multimillionaire” Keasbey as a “mild mannered individual who considered Dr. Mattison a genius and rarely took issue with him,” and pictures the two of them “[w]earing dark suits and bowler hats, and carrying walking sticks as they stepped in and out of the cow dung in the weedy pastures. ... At six feet four, with broad shoulders, narrow hips and such disproportionately long thin legs that he seemed to be walking on stilts, the sternly spectacled Dr. Mattison towered over the five-foot-seven inch Mr. Keasbey, who had a round, ruddy face and muttonchops whiskers and nodded affirmatively at nearly everything he heard the talkative doctor say.” Talese continues that while people might have thought that it was Mattison who came from money rather than Keasbey, “[i]n deference to Keasbey’s wealth, and with the understanding that he would continue to underwrite his aspirations, Dr. Mattison placed Keasbey’s name in the primary position on their joint enterprise.”
The Aftermath: Long before Mattison’s death, K & M’s patent medicine manufacture had taken a secondary position to asbestos. Although Bromo-Caffeine’s formula never contained the poison acetanilid that Bromo-Seltzer’s did, Bromo-Seltzer, minus its poison, continued to grow in popularity while Bromo-Caffeine’s renown gradually waned. K & M still manufactured Bromo-Caffeine as late as 1927, and it appears to have lasted as long as Mattison remained at the head of the company. The asbestos business lasted much longer, but had much graver consequences. Turner and Newall operated the K & M facilities at Ambler under the K & M name until 1962, when its business was sold to Certain Teed Corporation and Nicolet Industries. Nicolet, which bought the asbestos production portion of K & M, ran the Ambler facility until the growing weight of 50,000 claims against it of personal injury caused by exposure to asbestos forced it into bankruptcy in 1987, and it was folded into Armstrong World Industries. Through a series of court decisions beginning in the 1980s, Nicolet and Armstrong and all their related and subsidiary companies which owned or operated K & M’s facilities were deemed to be responsible as K & M’s “successors-in-interest” for the injuries caused by K & M’s asbestos products. Whatever remains of K & M (as well as the rest of the entire asbestos industry) exists now, essentially, as a pool of money held in trust and administered by the federal courts to pay off these personal injury claims. One victim of asbestos poisoning was Talese’s own grandfather. At a time before the scientific study of asbestos hazzards and the litigation had unfolded, Talese suggests that his grandfather’s early death caused by respiratory problems directly resulted from his exposure to asbestos in Ambler.
K & M also left a lasting mark on the town of Ambler. On one hand, because of the asbestos, there is a legacy of contamination. Asbestos waste was piled as much as 30 feet high off the ground and 15 feet deep into the ground in some spots. A playground and park built over one former K & M waste dump were closed in the 1980s because of the danger posed by the contaminated ground. Several former K & M properties have been designated as EPA Superfund clean-up areas, and serious rehabilitation of the land began only in 2009. The positive legacy of K & M to Ambler was its governmental organization, as well as its utilities and solid, well-designed, well-crafted buildings. Some of the homes which Mattison conjured into being remain, as well as other public structures. While the Church of the Beautiful Windows burned in a fire in 1986, it has been rebuilt, and Lindenwold still exists as a 43 acre preserve. It has been utilized since just before Mattison’s death in 1936 as St Mary’s Villa for Children and Families, a Catholic charity’s orphanage. The house itself appears to be opened for public tours on some occasions. In the final analysis, as with the rest of the Nineteenth Century, the Patent Medicine Age itself together with the barons who created and lent their names to that era and gorged themselves upon it, it is probably best to remember and praise as much of the beautiful residuum as has survived while trying to learn and follow the monitory lessons instilled by the danger, ugliness, unpleasantness which accompanied and resulted from it. The lessons of corporate overreaching at the expense of the public and without check by the government have yet to be taken to heart.
*****
The Keasbey & Mattison printed cancel collection below is ex-Henry Tolman. This collection of the K&M cancel varieties is incomplete, but is still quite large.
International (Stock) Food Company, August 26, 2012
The International Food Co, a manufacturer of animal feed whose name was changed to International Stock Food Co about 1902, is known in philatelic circles both for its elaborate cancels on several values of the battleship revenue issue and its intricate and multicolored envelopes, now prized as advertising covers. The fronts of these envelopes sported the company logo, essentially variations on a picture of a merry pig, watched by a smiling horse and a cow, about to dig into a box or bucket of the company’s three-in-one feed. The backs of the envelopes showed the manufacturing plant in Minneapolis, MN, sometimes pitched at an angle highlighting the spires (calling to mind the English Parliament buildings), and sometimes focused on the massive building itself towering over a busy street. The accompanying legend boasted that the plant was the largest of its kind in the world and contained eighteen acres of floor space, sustained by a company capitalized successively at $1,000,000, $2,000,000 or, even later, $5,000,000. An ad mailed in one of the company’s fancy envelopes around 1902 explained why the company chose to use revenue stamps on its products during the Spanish-American War, thus subjecting itself to the tax assessed on proprietary medicines:
"At the time of our last war nearly every ‘Stock Food manufacturer’ made a sworn statement to the government that they did not use any medicinal ingredients in their ‘Stock Foods’ and did not claim any medicinal results. The government then allowed them to sell their ‘Stock Foods’ without paying the war tax and on the same basis as ‘common foods’ like corn and oats. A preparation of this kind that does not contain medicinal ingredients is of no more value to you than common ‘mill feeds’... These people either fooled the government or are trying to fool you by asking a ‘medicinal price’ for something that does not contain medicinal ingredients. Are such business methods honest? .... We paid $40,000 War Tax because ‘International Stock Food’ was a High-Class Medicinal preparation...”
Chappell/Joyce International Food Co. Type 1 cancel, 1898; Type 2s follow with full dates:
1899
1900
1901
However, the real color in the International Food Company was its dynamic sole proprietor, Marion Willis Savage. Born in 1859 in Ohio, he grew up in West Liberty, Iowa, the son of a country doctor. Savage began his career as a farmer, but was flooded out. He then took a position as a clerk in a local drug store. From observing the local farmers, he concluded that there was a fortune to be made by manufacturing a cheap, reliable livestock feed. After an early manufacturing venture with a so-called friend who absconded leaving him broke, he moved to Minneapolis and started over in 1886. Finding the right advertising pitch in thriftiness, he always stressed that his feed was really “3 feeds for 1 cent.” By 1895, utilizing the know-how of experts working at the state agricultural school, Savage had constructed a large enough business to support his purchase of the grand Exhibition Building in Minneapolis, which he thereafter pictured on his advertising, and had affiliated plants not only in Toronto and Memphis, but also in England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany and Russia. Because of his great showmanship and energetic promotion efforts, Savage was identified by his contemporaries as “the second P.T. Barnum.”
Savage had now amassed enough of a personal fortune to begin building his dream estate. He chose a location eighteen miles south and west of Minneapolis on the Minnesota River at a town called Hamilton, renamed Savage in 1904 in his honor. Here he began to nurture his true love which was horse racing and horse breeding. On one side of the river, he built an enormous and elaborate horse farm, known locally as the Taj Mahal, consisting of a barn with an octagonal rotunda 90 feet high and 100 feet long, from which protruded huge wings of stalls housing a capacity of 130 horses, together with a mile race track and a half mile race track, which was entirely enclosed and lit by 1400 windows. On the bluff on the other side of the river, he built his country house situated so that he could stand on his front porch and time the horses as they went around the track.
The horses with which Savage populated the farm assured that the crowds would come, for he purchased, as its centerpiece, Dan Patch. In an age when proper jockeys still rode in sulkies behind the horses, Dan Patch, at age 4, stood 16 hands tall (5'4'’) and weighed 1,165 pounds. He was a pacer (as opposed to a trotter which had a different style of gait) who had never lost a race and had already garnered over $13,000 in winnings for his prior owners. In fact, by 1902, no other owner would even race horses against him. Yet, Savage paid the princely sum of $60,000 for Dan Patch in 1902, and later bragged that the price was the cheapest he ever paid for one of his champions, since Dan Patch is thought to have earned well over $250,000 for Savage in many, many different ways. For example, the farm itself became a tourist attraction, accessible by a river boat plying the river, or, after 1907, on Savage’s railroad, the Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rochester and Dubuque Electric Traction Company. That railroad quickly took on another name, the Dan Patch line.
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Through canny and lavish promotion, including Dan Patch’s own private railroad car painted white and decorated on either side with his framed portrait, Savage built Dan Patch into the preeminent pacer and harness racing champion of the first decade of the Twentieth Century, as famous in his time as Sea Biscuit or Secretariat. One writer has since described Dan Patch as: “the epitome of excellence, the superlative of greatness and the zenith of equine superiority.” First and foremost, Savage used Dan Patch to endorse International Stock Food’s products, credited with saving the horse’s life during grave illness in 1904, but also lent his name to endorse everything from automobiles to tobacco. Crowds of 40,000 and 50,000 regularly attended his appearances at state fairs and exhibition horse races, done only against the clock. Savage even re-named the farm the International 1:55 Stock Food Farm in 1906 after the racing association would not accept Dan Patch’s latest pacing mile time as the official world record (breaking his own record set the year before) because of a rule change .
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Whole articles could be devoted to Dan Patch. In the Internet era, entire web pages are dedicated to him, following in the path of books previously written about him. In 1949 a fictionalized movie, The Great Dan Patch, ostensibly recounted his story. After suffering from lameness, Dan Patch retired from racing in 1909. Put out to stud, he did not prove to be a great sire and his heirs never shone as brightly as he did. Even as Savage fielded champion after champion attempting to supercede Dan Patch’s records in racing circles, he never lost his attachment to Dan Patch, who continued to live on Savage’s farm. Both fell ill on July 4, 1916. Dan Patch died of an enlarged heart on July 11. Savage, hospitalized for minor surgery, was deeply upset to hear of Dan Patch’s death, but quickly recovered enough to order Dan Patch stuffed. However, before his order could be executed, Savage himself suddenly died. Most attributed Savage’s death to a broken heart. Possibly giving credence to these stories, his widow, Marietta, quickly countermanded the order and had Dan Patch buried quietly and privately somewhere unknown to this day on the farm grounds. Savage’s son Harold took control of the International Stock Food Company, and it continued to exist into the 1930s. Fisher’s Manual of Valuable and Worthless Securities lists the company as dissolved in 1935. Although the farmland has been in continuous cultivation since Savage’s death, the farm buildings fell into disrepair just after Savage’s death, and have all disappeared. The country house on the other side of the river passed to the Minnesota Masonic Home, which used the building as its headquarters for a number of years, but ultimately demolished the structure in 1950. Nothing remains of either Savage’s original farm or country home. Only the memory of Dan Patch lingers.
Fairchild Brothers and Foster was another of a group of specialty drug manufacturing and supply companies that flourished in New York City around the turn of the Twentieth Century. It took its name in 1881, when the Fairchild Brothers, Benjamin and Samuel, brought Malcomb Foster into their partnership. The Fairchild brothers were born in Stratford, CT, Benjamin in 1850 and Samuel in 1852. They both studied at the famed Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, and trained as pharmacists at the older New York City pharmacy firm, Caswell, Hazard & Co. Samuel, the younger brother, also served a stint as a pharmacist with McKesson & Robbins. (These two long-lived and well-known companies also applied cancels to battleship revenues and will appear again in due course in this extended study).
Benjamin Fairchild, Samuel Fairchild, and Macomb Foster
In 1878, the two brothers launched their own partnership as Fairchild Bros. Foster, born in 1860 and another alumnus of McKesson & Robbins, although quite young, apparently made a significant contribution of capital to the firm when he joined it. The firm concentrated early in products to aid digestion, specializing in the production of the digestive enzyme, pepsin, and the entire peptonizing process. In the pre-analytic chemistry era of medicine, such pepsin fortified products were then considered by established medical authority to be particularly helpful to infants in developing proper digestive systems, to ill people in maintaining proper digestion against the ravages of disease and to old people in keeping their digestive systems strong into their dotage. Similar claims - probably based upon the same kind of “correct-hunch” (i.e. sounds right) but ultimately dubious science - are advanced today for iron-fortified or omega 3-fortified products. In support of its peptinized products, F B & F published several editions of its pamphlet “Handbook of Digestive Ferments.”
The company was often praised within the trade as a well organized and supervised, and it too escaped the scrutiny of the genuine quack medicine chasing reformers. For that reason, rather than concentrating on the specifics of its business, it might be more instructive to examine the sumptuous style of life a fairly small but specialized business like F B & F produced for its principals. In 1908, the Pharmaceutical Era, an industry publication, portrayed and described the offices of F B & F in the following manner:
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Because of their wealth, the Fairchilds traveled in fashionable circles and mixed with others who had attained the rarified sphere of high society. In a 1914 compendium of lives of prominent Americans, Samuel Fairchild’s achievements and connections were listed as follows:
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Samuel passed away at the age of 75 in 1927, and his older brother, Benjamin at the venerable age of 88 in 1939. Forbes, the youngest member of partnership died a year before Benjamin at age 78. The company itself, as often the case, did not survive the last of its founders for very long. It continued as an independent company only until 1946, when it was acquired by Sterling Drug Company, itself the survivor from among an amalgam of companies also launched in this period. By that time, the most well-known of F B & F’s products was Phisoderm, an acne fighting product still available today, although ownership of the product has changed a number of times since 1946, and the make-up of the product itself was altered in the 1970s after the Federal Drug Administration banned products which contained more than 1% hexachloraphene, then its principal active chemical agent.
Andrew Jergens & Company: August 12, 2012
