Trademarks: Playing Possum?

It was one of the earliest trademarks registered in the United States - Number 247 - and the very first for a business in Lynn, Massachusetts. It's hard to imagine what inspired 22-year-old George B. Thurston to come up with the design. It was a distinctive symbol, to be sure, but what exactly was it and what was its message?

Maybe that was the whole point: to make the potential buyer be curious and wonder - capture the customer's attention.

Just 15 years old in 1864, George Thurston went down to New Bern, North Carolina, with his father to help sell food, medicine, tobacco, whiskey, and other goods to the Lynn soldiers of the 8th Massachusetts Infantry. During this time, the young teenager caught a young opossum and made him his pet. For the next year, the pet possum was probably a source of curiosity and amusement for the soldiers of the 8th, many of whom weren't much older than George. They needed something to take their mind off the war and help them pass the time.

When the war was over and the Thurstons came back to Lynn, George's pet possum came with them. In 1868, George loaned his "southern critter," as they called it, to Lynn's Post 5 GAR to have the 8th's mascot on exhibition at the veteran's fair, raising funds for the widows and orphans of departed comrades.

George's possum was a local celebrity. It was probably the critter featured on his first medicine trademark three years later.

Starting out in the patent medicine business at just 22 years old, George wanted something striking and memorable to represent the worm syrup he was selling, made from his mother's recipe. The cartoonish drawing could have been a bear cub dancing in a hoop, and I originally thought it was, but now I'm convinced it represented his pet possum. The skull shape is carefully drawn, rounded and sloping down to the nose, with whitish fur and a hint of pointed teeth, a characteristic feature in a possum's wide mouth. The fingers and toes are distinctively long and humanesque, again just like a possum, and grasping the hoop with prehensile ease. The rest of the animal's coat is darker, suggesting a light gray, a frequent contrast to the light-colored head of the North American Opossum. And, if you look really close, you will make out what may be its tail, wrapped along the front of the belly and up to the chest. Perhaps George had kept his pet in a cage designed for a large bird, like a parrot or cockatoo, with a large hoop suspended in the middle, and his possum frequently climbed into it, like in the trademark.

Was George inspired with cause to use his possum as the poster-pet for his worm medicine trademark? Very possibly. Possums do get infested with worms from the foods they scavenge. Maybe young George tried his mom's worm syrup on his pet, making it a sort of guinea-pig-possum. It's even possible that George and his father were selling his mother's worm syrup to the soldiers in camp who might have made some of the same bad food choices while foraging in the North Carolina wilderness that George's possum had made.

Possibly the worm syrup customer was just supposed to feel all warm and fuzzy about the cute, playful animal on the trademark (come on, Sandra Boynton fans, you know that feeling). Maybe the playful possum had been designed for customers to convince themselves that the critter was happy and dancing because it had been cured by the medicine, subliminally prompting them to buy a bottle for their sick and lethargic child back home who was suffering with worms. Or perhaps the unofficial regimental mascot was designed to be a locally patriotic symbol, encouraging all the returned veterans and their families to support their well-known townsmen, much like the Thurstons had been there for them during the war. Buy a bottle of Mrs. Thurston's Celebrated Worm Syrup and help out your friends, the Thurstons.

Whatever the trademark was supposed to convey, it helped the medicine survive for almost four decades, which in patent medicine years is a very, very long time, and in possum years, well, it's almost forever.

While George's possum helped the time pass, Mrs. Thurston's Worm Syrup helped everything else pass, or so George's trademark would lead us to believe.

For more on the career of George Thurston & Mrs. Thurston's Syrup, see:

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

& Chapter 8: Heroine Addiction

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