Updated: Jan 15
It's so easy for me to imagine the scene in 1885: a young woman of Lynn, Massachusetts, has put in another long, hard day at the dismal factory. She runs a noisy, dangerous machine, repeatedly stitching soles to shoes as part of a large assembly line operation. She leaves the factory late in the afternoon, one of the many drained workers breathing the outside air for the first time since very early in the morning. Tired, achy, and hungry, she walks down the sidewalk, being bumped and jostled constantly by the crowd of people going in all directions, amid the additional confusion of yelling paperboys, peddlers, and sidewalk preachers, and the dizzying animation of horses, wagons, and omnibuses snorting and rumbling through the street. Worn out, she feels anything but pretty. Being noticed was frankly the last thing on her mind - she was anxious to be once again hidden away in the privacy of her home.
While trying to avoid being stepped on or tripped by the stampeding herd of feet all around her, her mind replays the upsetting memories from earlier in the day, when she had noticed spots on the backs of her hands while running shoe parts through her machine at the factory. Then when she walked by a smudged mirror on the factory wall, she had glimpsed in her reflection some more unsightly blemishes on her checks and chin as well. Life seemed to be wearing her out and making her old before her time.
She finds some space between the bodies shuffling along the sidewalk and slips herself into Bergengren's drugstore, hoping there might be some cheap and sure solution for her stained skin - something that would help her feel more feminine and less like just another defeated face in the crowd. Feeling a little overwhelmed and lost among all the bottles, boxes, and signs that glare at her everywhere she turns in Bergengren's shop, her eyes are then tenderly invited to a scene in a tall card on the counter. Rendered in soft colors, it appeals to her feeling of femininity that she had worried might be disappearing.
There was nothing dark and harsh in the picture - nothing at all that dragged her thoughts back to the miserable factory floor where she slaved away each day. The two women in the picture understand her - both of them are her: the woman she is, and the woman she wishes she could be. She doesn't have to analyze the scenes; her heart and mind quickly agree that the product advertised is worth a try. She really, really wants to be the beautiful, poised woman it promises she could be. The two hard-earned quarters in the bottom of her purse shine a little against the dark leather, as if a sign that this purchase is, indeed, the right thing to do.
She walks home with her purchase of Mrs. Soule's Moth-Tan, Freckle & Pimple Eradicator, hopeful about something in her life for the first time in weeks.
There are many pieces of Victorian advertising that have survived their century-and-a-half ephemeral passage through time, and I have seen thousands of them, but the Mrs. Soule's counter card that our young heroine saw is truly special and possibly the only surviving example. There had been a tremendous array of "before-and-after" advertisements for all sorts of products, from anti-fat pills to stove polish, and the creativity and artwork are often exemplary pieces of creativity and design. But the counter card for Mrs. Soule's Moth-Tan, Freckle & Pimple Eradicator, abbreviated on the bottle's embossing to Soule's Eradicator, is something very special and in a class of its own. The greatness of Madison Avenue advertising has never excelled this advertising masterpiece, and this blog post intends to give it the few minutes of reverent admiration that it rightly deserves.
"Subliminal advertising" was just being introduced in the early 1880s. For a century the public had been amused and, well, mesmerized by watching friends and family members become unwitting participants as hypnotists seemed to control the actions and words of their subjects without them being conscious of it. In the middle of the decade, Sigmund Freud began using hypnosis in his work to understand the subconscious and unconscious mind. This counter card had done far more than present an obvious before-and-after metaphor: the designer and artist had created an advertising piece that spoke eloquently without words, playing at depth with the potential customer’s fears and dreams. Our factory worker decided to purchase after just a cursory perusal, but let’s break it down like Dr. Freud might have been inclined to do.

The counter card image depicted two conjoined scenes apparently featuring the same woman. In the “before” scene on the left side, the young woman was still in her peignoir, looking self-consciously in her hand mirror as she tussled hopelessly with her hair, trying to figure out how she was going to overcome her real problem: the skin blemishes spotting all over her face and forearms.
She was shown in an interior part of her home, hiding behind a chair and a wall, not at all ready for the world. The “after” image on the right side shows the same young woman, beautiful and ready for any social event: she doesn't have the slightest spot of skin blemish; her skin is flawless and she confidently shows it off with a sleeveless, bustled gown and a daringly plunging décolletage.
She has traded in her symbol of worry, her mirror, for a fancy, fashionable fan, and her other hand reaches not for her hair but for the drapery, purposely pulling it open to let the sunshine into the room where she had previously hidden herself; she is completely ready for a posh party or social.
Behind her were two healthy, lush green houseplants, one in full bloom with golden-colored flowers, while behind the morose “before” woman there is a vase holding only brown stems, suggesting no life, and a drab framed landscape on the wall, with vegetation also in brown.
And lest the message wasn’t clear enough, the artist superimposed three roses on top of the scene: the one on the “after” side was in perfect bloom, just like the ideal woman below it; the rose on the opposite side drooped towards the miserable woman, heavy with decay on its petals and worms on its stem. The third rose was perfectly positioned over the partition that separated the two scenes; in this neutral zone, it was still a bud, not yet bloomed, but pointing hopefully to the banner above that announced the miracle skin cure: "Soule’s Moth-Tan, Freckle & Pimple Eradicator, L. M. Brock & Co., Sole Proprietors, Lynn, Mass. U.S.A." The counter card sign left no question which woman represented the ideal Victorian lady nor could any doubt remain about which skin care product was going to help her achieve the goal.
I would like to think that my fictional customer would have had her dreams come true when she used her bottle of Soule’s Eradicator, but alas, that would not have happened. The published ingredients had no dermatological benefits but did have something sinisterly bad for the skin and body.
The manufacturer, Lemuel Brock, a very successful medicine maker and major candidate for Lynn mayor, promoted that it contained nothing dangerous:
“A great many people have the idea that all skin preparations contain either Bismuth, Arsenic, or Sugar of Lead, and are afraid to use [skin preparations for that reason]. We pledge ourselves that Mrs. Soule’s Eradicator DOES NOT contain any of the above-named ingredients, and we warrant it not to injure the skin, and that a continuation of its use will restore the same to all its youthful fairness.” [emphasis as in original]
He also assured he had further helped his customers by keeping the cost of Soule’s Eradicator way down through the use of a very simple bottle rather than some overcharged decorative container designed to sit prettily on a lady’s vanity, among her fancy perfumes:
“This preparation is not put up in a cut-glass bottle, or fancy jar or pitcher, and then the price fixed to match the glassware. Say one or two dollars per bottle or jar, as the case may be, - but a common white glass bottle that would not be out of place on any lady’s dressing table, and is for sale by all druggists and fancy good dealers for fifty cents per bottle – one-third the price of any other preparation that comes near containing the virtues of the Eradicator.” [emphasis as in original]
In 1890 Brock was taken to court for selling a bottle that contained 60 grains of corrosive sublimate, a chemical compound of mercury and chlorine that is very toxic to humans. Its toxicity is due not just to the mercury but also its corrosive properties which, according to Wikipedia, can cause ulcers to the stomach, mouth, and throat, and corrosive damage to the intestines. It accumulates in the kidneys and causes acute kidney failure. It can also cause burning in the mouth and throat, stomach pain, abdominal discomfort, lethargy, vomiting of blood, corrosive bronchitis, insomnia, excessive salivation, bleeding gums, tremors, and dental problems – even death may occur in as little as twenty-four hours, or as long as two long and lingering weeks.
Lemuel Brock had sold the mercury-laden medicine to a woman who was an undercover agent for the government. Despite the state chemist’s careful chemical analysis and the female agent’s testimony, the judge took the side of Lemuel Brock, “whom he knew[,] rather than that of the woman,” whom he didn’t know. Brock’s case was discharged and he was exonerated.
The counter card for Mrs. Soule’s Eradicator is the keystone of my collection – the quintessential piece of Victorian proprietary medicine advertising – and it was the gift of a dear friend and fellow time traveler. I never assign or measure the monetary value of pieces in my collection, but if I were asked, the answer would be easy – its priceless to me.

For more on Soule's Eradicator, see:
PROMISING CURES,
Vol.3, Chapter 9: Heroine Addiction
Vol.4, Chapter 10: Exposing the Naked Truth
Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine
Updated: Jan 15
No one was more driven than Dan Pinkham, even when the world was crashing in on all sides. His once affluent family lost everything during the years of economic depression that had started with the Panic of 1873. In desperation, they hoped to dig themselves out of their sudden poverty by selling bottles of their mother’s homemade medicine. It was a Victorian version of the fairy tale where a handful of magic beans was the solution to a family’s woes – but this time it was a bottle full of herbs.
It may have seemed like a fool’s errand to people who looked over their shoulders and down their noses at the Pinkhams, but the gossip and ridicule of critics and naysayers didn’t get to this family. The success of their medicine business was the absolute, resolute commitment of every member of the family to do their part. The family divided up duties to make the plan work. Mother Lydia stayed at home

making batches of her vegetable compound and brother Will ordered supplies, kept track of the finances, and tried to find drugstores and wholesalers who would take some bottles. Brother Charles and sister Aroline worked other jobs and brought home their pay to help the family’s fledgling business get off the ground, and brother Dan went to New York to whip up interest for their mother’s medicine in the biggest city in the country.
He was just one Pinkham in the massive city of well over a million people, but he had the heart of a lion tamer. Alone in the enormous city, he pushed himself every day to distribute flyers about the medicine to apartment doors throughout Brooklyn and talking up the drugstore owners and drug wholesalers, trying to make them believe that women were clamoring for Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. He bought a map of Brooklyn, studied it to lay out the routes he would take through neighborhoods of Irish, Dutch, and others, then distributed pamphlets with a speed and thoroughness that would have made Johnny Appleseed jealous. His letters to Will back in Lynn resounded with repeated determination that New York was the place and the means for them to succeed or fail, “I think we had better continue to advertise in this locality [Brooklyn] till we either get it general, get rich or bust. … When [the medicine] becomes general in NY our fortune is made.”
Focusing all of his thoughts and energies on growing the business, Dan dreamed up some big ideas to improve sales and he peppered his letters to the family back home with his frequent brainstorms, like writing notes on small cards, as if from a satisfied customer, and leave them in parks and cemeteries (noting, “there all such frauds as that”); adding “kidney complaints,” to the list of problems the medicine would cure; having the Pinkham trademark picture include some New England scenery “with a humble cottage”; lowering the price, and several more. As he explained to the family back home, they had to approach this business venture with boldness, “There is no use doing business unless we do a devil of a business.” The equivalent phrase in today's parlance would be: “Go big or go home.”

In a way, Dan’s vision for the family’s medicine business was like the bridge he watched getting built over the East river from Brooklyn to Manhattan – both were grand, the stuff dreams were made of – colossal ventures that seemed impossible to everyone but those building the dream. When his busy schedule allowed, he caught glimpses of the project that was slowly becoming a bridge. By the time he had first arrived in Brooklyn, the two towers were already fixed the river like giant stone sentries that had been standing guard for a few years. Long cables were being draped between the towers and to the land beyond, and the bridge’s roadway was creeping along as well, looking from a distance like an absurdly long pirate ship plank. But it was a man-made wonder unlike anything the world had ever seen before – it would become the longest suspension bridge in the world. It was also a triumph mixed with tragedy, as at least 27 men died during its construction, falling from its terrible heights and being crushed by the pressure of its terrible depths below the river’s surface. Great achievements often come at the cost of tragic sacrifice. Dan Pinkham understood this all too well.
His letters home were fueled by drive, creativity, and poverty; in Brooklyn he lived with an abundance of all three. Pushing himself to sell and drive sales, he gave little thought to his own needs, living on scraps. He bought cheap meals and walked and walked until his shoes wore through. He stitched them up and kept on walking until it was almost impossible to keep them on his feet. He wrote his letters at the post office because the pen and ink were available there for free. Eventually, he worried about going to see key accounts he was trying to cultivate because he was “beginning to look so confounded seedy”; at one point he even suggested that he and one of his brothers should go for a trip into the country to put up posters and distribute circulars because he looked too ragged to be approaching people. He reached crisis points several times during his first two stays in Brooklyn when he was absolutely empty-plate, filthy-clothes, tattered-shoes, overdue-rent broke, leaving him hungry, embarrassed, and unable to do the work he was there to do.
While in Brooklyn during late 1879, pushing himself hard for the sake of the business, Dan Pinkham’s health was deteriorating. Despite his mother’s instructions to take her liver pills and a tea of pleurisy root and marshmallow, his health continued to sink rapidly. He came home in late December with what Lydia thought was pneumonia. What turned out to be the dreaded consumption had fastened to his lungs and, though periods of remission sparked hope of recovery, his health continued to evaporate. Consumption finally pulled him into the grave just as it had done to so many others during the century. The Pinkham family’s indefatigable 33-year-old salesman and human dynamo died on 12 October 1881. A year and a half later, the Brooklyn Bridge completed the end of its journey as well.
Companies hustled to capitalize on the crush of human interest in the technological marvel of 1883 by producing trade cards of their own design. The Royal Baking Powder Company produced a very detailed rendering of the bridge and waterfront, but the company building projected like a colossus looming over the landscape, dwarfing all the buildings, boats, and trains below; even the grand bridge was cast to the side of the picture like a feeble decoration to frame the great Royal building. Fahys' Coin Pocket Watch Cases also offered its version of commemorative bridge card, but it strangely cast the scene at night, with the bridge becoming part of the shadowy darkness against the night sky; a Fahys’ pocket watch hovers in the center, rotated to look something like a hot air balloon, but casting its own illumination from its anthropomorphic face, as if it was the moon itself. Yet another was a trade card put out by Willimantic thread manufacturers, who showed great creativity, dramatically transforming The Great East River Bridge into “The Great Willimantic Bridge,” with towers made of thread boxes and cables stringing together spools of thread. Sails and paddle-wheelers advertised the thread company and a distant factory belched out smoke that wrote the Willimantic message in sooty puffs across the clouds. The company’s factory surreally floated high in the sky over the whole frenetically busy scene.

The Pinkham company joined the fray with its own card version of The Great East River Suspension Bridge. Although it was as guilty as the other manufacturers of using the bridge as an advertising device, the Pinkham’s trade card was also a tribute to the dream of their brother Dan who had told them how grand it would be to have a banner suspended from the Brooklyn Bridge advertising Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. The card’s image was based on the Currier and Ives chromolithograph, “The Great East River Suspension Bridge.” Done in black and white, the trade card looked like a clipping from a newspaper story; while Charles had neither the money nor the permission to actually hang a banner from the bridge when it was completed in 1883, the card made it look to customers and collectors everywhere like it had really happened – and perception was reality. Trade cards were one of the least-expensive forms of advertising available and had the additional advantage that, by often being collected, they lasted longer and continued to convey their message every time they were seen.
This one magic bean of Dan’s spread further than the fabled beanstalk that stretched to the clouds. Millions of Lydia Pinkham’s Brooklyn Bridge trade cards were printed and circulated all over North America within a few weeks of their printing. People from Miami to Milwaukee and from Cincinnati to San Francisco had never seen the world’s biggest bridge, but they were seeing it on a card in their hands and, waving equally triumphant under its long span was the banner for Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. The image that documented the completion of the greatest new wonder of the world was also documenting, or at least inferring, the equally triumphant medicine from a once-impoverished family in Lynn, Massachusetts, who just needed a little magic to emerge from of their determination and dreams – and the magic happened. Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound became one of the most successful patent medicines in the 19th century. And while various authors have pointed alternately to the medicinal qualities, the business plan, the advertising saturation, and to the mystique of Lydia herself as possible reasons for the Pinkham family’s redemption from obscurity and poverty to fame and fortune, perhaps magic is the most correct explanation of all.
For more on the Pinkham's Brooklyn Bridge trade card, see:
PROMISING CURES, Vol. 3, Chapter 9: Heroine Addiction
Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine
Updated: Jan 15
I am no expert on the collectible I'm going to share with you today, but I don't know anybody that is. So what I've learned in my research may be helpful to other collectors of bottles and what they call "go-withs" — the non-bottle items that were produced to help sell the bottled product.
Tip trays are also called change trays. They are usually made of metal (I've read it is aluminum, certainly very light weight) and most are round, running about 5"-6" in diameter; small oval trays and rectangular ones with rounded corners complete the shape possibilities. Larger trays with colorful advertising are serving trays, designed to carry drinks or dishes of food to the table. I've read that their ancestors were silver trays called salvers, that were used to transport the food and drink to kings and the other wealthy elite of the seventeenth century. The beautiful silver salver was not only something that was only affordable by royalty, but its use also signified that the food and drink served on it wasn't poisoned - it had been sampled by one of the servants who was relieved to not become sickened or dead from carrying out the odd and unsettling duty.

Tip trays were most heavily used in the first third of the 20th century, but started showing up primarily in American restaurants, bars, and saloons, during the last quarter of the 19th century. This was known as the Gilded Age, when a small but very visible portion of the population were becoming ostentatiously wealthy from their investments in industry, railroads, and oil. It was the time when Newport's mansions were built, social balls and the latest fashions were a must, and travel abroad implied sophistication. Wealthy Americans returned from abroad with a penchant for tipping serving staff (which they had observed was being done by their European society counterparts) to emphasize their affluence and "superior" social status. Businesses were quick to get their name in front of those who could tip, so tip trays were mass-produced with advertisements for all sorts of businesses and products.
Based on a review of the 535 tip trays listed in the completed auctions on Morford's Antique Advertising Auctions fabulous website (https://live.antiqueadvertising.com/), I have assembled the top ten categories of tip trays, sorted by the frequency of tip trays each category. Alcoholic beverage tip trays are far and away the largest category, probably being used in saloons and bars all over the country before Prohibition. There were also many sodas promoted on tip trays; I've listed the ones most recognizable today, but there are many other brands featured that no longer exist.
Although medicine was the largest product category featured in 19th century newspaper, periodical and trade card advertising, there were relatively few medicines appearing on the largely 20th century tip trays; this reflects the impact of state and federal laws clamping down on the curative claims of medicines. None that appear on tip trays were advertising products that were promising to cure cancer, tuberculosis, or other life-threatening diseases; instead, they focused on more mundane ailments: relieving constipation, lessening aches and pain, soothing coughs, and the like. I have listed all of the medicines found on Morford's long list: there were only 13 medicine tip trays - just two percent of the entire list. By comparison, there were probably over five dozen different brands in the Alcohol category.
1. Alcohol: beer (ex: Anheuser-Busch; Schlitz); whiskey; champagne; saloons; brewing companies
2. Soda: (ex: Coca Cola, Moxie, Pepsi Cola, Dr. Pepper)
3. Tobacco: cigars; cigarettes; tobacco
4. Miscellaneous products: lumber; furniture; bookcases; gasoline; paints; metal ceiling; metal polish; furnaces; fountain pens; watches
5. Machines: New Home Sewing Machines; De Laval Cream Separator; Evinrude outboard motors; Red Cross Stoves & Ranges; manure spreader; gramophones; automobiles
6. Food: flour; bread; candy; flavorings; spices; Cottolene shortening; chocolate; cocoa; evaporated cream; milk; malted milk; ice cream; sherbet; coffee; tea; mineral waters; table waters (ex: White Rock)
7. Medicine: Royal Purple Grape Juice; Z-M-O Pain-Relieving Healing Oil; Resinol Soap & Ointment; Red Raven Splits; Heptol Splits; Hick’s Capudine; Laxol; Ricinol Grape Castor Oil; Eye-Fix; Bromo Seltzer; Po-Ca-Ta-Lo, The Indian Medicine Man; Dr. A. C. Daniels Remedies (for horses, cattle, & dogs); Mrs. Dinsmore's Cough & Croup Balsam
8. Businesses & products: Sears & Roebuck; newspapers; electric companies; ship lines; banks; loan companies; hotels
9. Clothing: suspenders; Gypsy Hosiery
10.Toiletries: deodorants; Fairy Soap
Almost all tip trays were creatively designed, full of color and, inevitably, certain ones demand high prices in the collectible market. Coca Cola trays, first made in 1897, are often sold in the hundreds of dollars and some of the rarest pieces go in the thousands, dependent on condition.
If you have been following my blog even a little bit, you've already figured out that my personal interest is in the medicine category, specifically those for medicine products made in Lynn, Massachusetts. There are two I know of and they are very hard to find; it has taken me 40 years to get an example of both!
Bubier's Laxative Salz - I may be biased, but I think it's one of the most attractive tip trays ever made; the colors and design are very pleasing to the eye. Two bottles sit on top of the scrolled banner and between them is a significant coat of arms. It is the heraldic emblem for the Burrill family, the closest to royalty that colonial Lynn had: the 17th century father and his sons were the wealthiest in town and held key positions of honor and responsibility at the local and colony levels. That coat of arms continued to be used by their descendents through the centuries, all the way to its use as the trademarked image on Burrill's Tooth Paste and Burrill's Tooth Powder in the 1920s. Bubier's Laxative Salz was co-owned by William A. Burrill and Nathan G. Bubier, PhG, at least from 1892-1898. It's quite an elegant tip tray that would have been admired even in a Newport mansion ... if it wasn't for the fact that it was advertising a medicine for constipation.
