A Tribute to Dreaming Under a Bridge

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.”

photo courtesy: The Barbara Rusch Collection

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.

photo courtesy of Cardeology

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

Dr. Kilmer's Unforgettable Organs

Personal Note from Andy: In most of these blog posts, I've tried to entertain you with great history, solid research, and engaging writing. Sometimes, however, I will write a blog post with different goals. This post, for example, is a tribute to three great bottles that are seldom seen together and an equally prized advertising trade card for the same products. I am, after all, a collector, and sometimes I just need to pause and share some treasures from the great hobbies of bottle and ephemera collecting, whether or not I have some deep, untold story to tell about it. So please enjoy these pictures of "Dr. Kilmer's Unforgettable Organs."

When I started collecting medicine bottles and trade cards some 40 years ago, some of the first of both that I fell in love with were certain pieces put out by the extremely successful Dr. Kilmer of Binghamton, NY. Although he made a bunch of different medicines and in different sizes, collectors have always loved and lusted for three certain bottles because they each feature a different organ set in a similar, striking design. Yet few collections seem to have all three because they weren't equally popular.

As I've mentioned before, scarcity was usually the result of weaker sales; conversely, if a bottle is frequently found in collections it was a hot seller in its day. So how do the Kilmer's "organ" bottles compare?

Dr. Kilmer's Swamp-Root Kidney Liver & Bladder Cure is a fairly common bottle, but still very desireable because of its unique design, with a kidney deeply debossed into its main panel, and it has that really great product name! Let's face it: if it was just called Dr. Kilmer's Kidney, Liver & Bladder Cure, it just wouldn't be as much fun to our 21st century ears. In fact, "Swamp-Root Cure" has long been used by the popular press as synomous with "quack cure." The example of this bottle below is in my collection.

Dr. Kilmer's Ocean Weed Heart Remedy is not common but it's certainly not rare. In addition to the always popular heart shape debossed in the glass, Ocean Weed is another great name; I suspect that it was a more genteel way of saying seaweed, but that would be all the more amazing if Victorians would have been turned off by a medicine with seaweed but okay with a medicine made from swamp-root! These days it seems to sell at a cost of about ten times more than the Swamp-Root cure.

I bought mine just over 20 years ago from a digger whom I will simply call "Mike from Memphis." Whenever I purchase an antique, I like to ask the seller for the backstory about where it was found, so that I can experience the early life of the piece I'm adopting through the eyes of its previous caretaker. Mike was wonderful; he shared the whole story of how excited he and his digging buddy were when they found this bottle. The fact that a glass bottle can be found intact after being thrown into a pit and then covered with more debris, dirt, and then overgrown by nature has always been just amazing to me. I feel privileged to own dug bottles that were hidden from civilization for so long. The Ocean Weed bottle shown below is the one I bought from Mike and his engrossing digging recollection is the last part of this post.

Dr. Kilmer's Cough-Cure Consumption Oil is quite rare and getting it is still a dream, but it won't likely happen for me. These days that bottle goes in the $2,000 price range, five times more than the average Ocean Weed remedy bottle. The example shown here is found in the Virtual Museum of Historical Bottles and Glass, courtesy of the Federation of Historical Bottle Collectors. I urge you to check out this sensational museum which features 360-degree rotating views of many of the best bottles in existence, and the FOHBC website always has exciting new things of interest to bottle collectors, like news about the national event for bottle and glass enthusiasts, Houston-24!

So now you will see below something else that is seldom seen, all three of the Kilmer organ bottles in one place. Maybe you're like me, happy to at least have the privilege of seeing all three together, even if you can't own all three!

Dr. Kilmer's Cough-Cure Consumption Oil, courtesy of the FOHBC's Virtual Museum of Historical Bottles & Glass.

The rare advertising trade card below promotes Swamp-Root, Ocean-Weed, and Consumption Oil, all in one extremely detailed and colorful card. Set in a drugstore, the giant bottle looms over all other medicines, insisting on its tremendous importance. The artist figured out how to include the FOURTH organ for which there is no corresponding articulated bottle: with very Victorian modesty, the area of the female generative organs are hidden behind a golden apron-like shield, covered in nonetheless large lettering, "Complete Female Remedy." There was simply no way that a fourth bottle was ever considered to have ovaries and fallopian tubes, or even a uterus debossed into the main glass panel ... but wouldn't that have been a fabulous find for bottle collectors? I wonder if it would have been the rarest of them all?

As promised, here's the 21-year-old letter written to me by Mike from Memphis about the day they found Dr. Kilmer's Ocean-Weed Heart Remedy; I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

We dig bottles anywhere that we can find them. 99% of the bottles we find are found in Memphis, Tn. Mostly we like to probe for privys because they are older. In 1880 Memphis started getting plumbing so a lot of the privys were going away. Your bottle we found at a huge dump site that we found before anyone else. We were riding down the street when we looked over at a construction site and Bill said “look! There is black dirt right there.” I looked over and said “Lets go check it out!”

We went and seen black dirt in different spots. Their was a road partially cut and that’s where we started. At first on the side of the road. We found a few things – all blown stuff 1895 to about 1905. A few Memphis drug bottles, Hutchinson sodas, Amber Cokes from Memphis. Oh man we were in heaven! We tried another spot about 30 foot over – still more and more bottles and whiskey jugs (unmarked). It was too good to be true.

On the second trip there we decided to dig in the road. After we were there for about 10 minutes, about 6 foot into the road we dug down into a soft ashey type dirt. Our shovels just sank down. We kept digging and found a blown Memphis drug bottle, then a couple more insignificant bottles and then Bill stuck his shovel in and pryed up. Then out of the powdery dry dirt, there it was!!! I looked down and thought it was a Swamp Root, but it not being turned exactly straight up I couldn’t see it very well. But their was something different about this one. He reached down and picked it up and he said “its got a heart on the front of it” and my heart started pounding real fast and I was thinking – it couldn’t be one of those rare Dr. Kilmers, could it? I snatched it out of his hands and turned it over and there it was. I know what it is don’t you?” he said “No. What?” I said “It is one of those rare Dr Kilmers Heart bottles!!” He said “No it ain’t” and quickly snatched it back out of my hands but then said “Yea it is too!!” We looked at each other with our eyes wide open and with big smiles on our faces. I hope nobody seen us like this because I know we looked like a couple of nuts. Anyway we both rushed it to the truck and ran back to our digging spot. Then we really started digging faster after that.

We ended up digging a lot of real good stuff out of that dump site until their wasn’t any digging left. That was a very memorable experience. It was the first great bottle that we dug from there. Maybe one day we’ll get really really lucky and dig the lung bottle. I hope! Well anyway that’s the way it went about 4 months ago in the middle of October.

–Mike from Memphis, 3 February 2003

Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine

A Cure for Monsters

Please gaze at the image above and ponder it for a few moments. What kind of animal do you see – perhaps a poisonous reptile, an angered dragon, or some other monster drawn by an overactive imagination? And what does it have to do with the message, “DISEASE CURED”? Covered in red spots all over its green skin, with blood-filled eyes, a fanged growl, and sharp, extended claws, is it the personification of disease, poised to attack our health, or something more sinister that threatens our very souls?

Why did the advertiser menace with a mysterious creature instead of some well-known terror of the mid-19th century, like a rabid dog snarling through frothing teeth or a rattlesnake poised for a venomous strike? Why use some fantastical thing that had only recently been discovered and barely understood?

The cardboard sign was printed in 1864 in New York, just past mid-century, a pivotal time for Americans, when their familiar world was being torn apart and an unclear future was forcefully dawning, whether they were ready or not. The Civil War was still raging, challenging the very existence of the country as they knew it. The Industrial Revolution was propelling forward, with more inventions and increasingly faster production output; homemade was being replaced by storebought. The power of trains and guns, and the discovery of oil were all positioning the country to become a superpower. And knowledge was shredding its centuries-old cocoon of superstitions and folktales, emerging into the fact-driven flight of science. “DISEASE CURED” was a bold promise consistent with the expectations of the time, but the odd beast below those words made a curious and unsettling contrast to the certainty above it. As it turns out, that red-spotted nightmare was more than just a metaphor for disease; the previously unknown lifeform was a subliminal reminder of all the world-shaking uncertainty that was bothering the minds of Americans at that precise moment in time. Its very presence on the sign was challenging their core beliefs: did God really exist and was he in control of their world?

Footprints of Dragons instead of Angels

Discoveries in geology and paleontology challenged Earth’s timeline and the history of life upon it. Fossilized plants and birdlike footprints embedded in deep layers of stone and sediment suggested epochs of life and adaptation far different from seven days of divine creation.

The discovery of fossils – teeth, femurs, ribs, and other bones – most often enormous – told stories of ancient creatures in a distant past that had once clearly dominated the earth one giant footprint at a time. Such giants had long been called dragons, but in 1842 a British scientist introduced the term dinosauria, meaning “terrible lizards.” Scaly, cold-blooded, large-toothed giant reptiles that the Bible described only loosely or allegorically, if at all. Every dinosaur bone that was discovered threatened the biblical world of the faithful.

THE UNHOLY ARK. The workshop where concrete statues of dinosaurs were being sculpted for London's 1854 Crystal Palace Exhibition.

But the scientifically-minded public was captivated. Giant, nightmarish beasts that once filled the earth were now filling their imaginations. Even one of the era’s biggest celebrities, Charles Dickens, dreamed of dinosaurs. He was the first to write about them; the first paragraph of his new 1853 book, Bleak House read:

“… Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if waters had not newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be [surprising] to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn-hill. …”

In 1854 the vaunted Crystal Palace Exhibition in London displayed the first-ever dinosaur sculptures: concrete full-size replicas of prehistoric reptiles. Attached is an illustration of the sculptures under construction in 1853. (The "DISEASE CURED" dinosaur bears some resemblance to the model in the lower left. The sculptures in this famous exhibition were almost certainly the inspiration for the creature illustrated on our sign, making it a very early interpretation of what the extinct animals looked like in that ancient time when the excavated bones had been covered in beastly flesh.) In 1855, the year following the London exhibition, the first dinosaur remains (teeth) were discovered in North America (Montana) and in 1858, the continent’s first complete skeleton was found in New Jersey. Dinosaur fever was starting to infect an enthusiastic American public; pictures of the prehistoric creatures like the one in the Herrick’s sign were sure to fascinate.

The Ungodly Origin of Man

Dinosaurs weren’t the only revelations that seemed to be trampling on deep-rooted religious beliefs; religionists hotly challenged the theories of the evolutionists, especially those of Charles Darwin, whose magnum opus, The Origin of Species, was published in 1859. Although the book made no assertion about man’s evolution from apes, his work clearly outlined the principle of natural selection, which many interpreted as a clear departure from man’s divine origin in the Garden of Eden. The next year, one of many critical reviews took aim at disparaging Darwin and his theories:

THE NEW THEORY OF CREATION

      On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin, M.A. … Man himself is not, we are told, an emanation from the Divine mind, the culmination of the grand scheme of organized life … but an accumulation of accidental results, descended from some monster swimming in the ocean of the early world!

      The common instinct of humanity revolts at the idea. …

Such rebuke didn’t slow down the roll of scientists and their convinced followers; in 1863, Thomas Henry Huxley published Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, which unequivocally argued that humans had evolved from apes. Then, in 1864, William Murphy, the printer at 438 Canal Street, New York, printed the store sign for Herrick’s Pills and Plasters. It boldly promised “DISEASE CURED” by using Herrick’s products, but no traditional illustrations of before-and-after, sick and cured versions of the same person were used; they had been  replaced by an odd but striking image of the unique, green scary thing.

Standing out even more than the large red letters forming the brash claim was the hairy, hungry, sawbacked monster. The mythical dragon had evolved into a flesh-and-bones dinosaur, but it was also portrayed as the incarnation of evil, living among other slimy denizens of the fetid primeval ooze from which it had emerged, covered with disease spots and propelled by relentless animal instinct to attack and kill with fevered viciousness.

The public had been conditioned decades earlier to consider the concept of the dead coming back to life. Early-century horror stories, like Frankenstein and The Vampyre, had enticed a frightened but thrilled public to form terrifying creatures in their imagination, like Frankenstein’s monster and blood-sucking revenants. Herrick’s monster was now coaxing them to expand their minds to see a world before the Flood, where behemoths foraged through a primordial Eden that was devoid of Adam and Eve but full of apes. Under the “DISEASE CURED” banner, the excavated symbol of scriptural revision had been reanimated by the artist to represent mankind’s worst nightmare: although apparently susceptible to the advertised medicines, its kind had tried to kill God.

Stop this evolving monster, the banner’s subliminal message promised, and you may save not just a sick life, but Heaven itself.

 

For more on the Herrick’s medicine sign, see:

PROMISING CURES, Vol.3, Chapter 7: Reconstructive Surgery

Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine