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:

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