hey were working hard for a
sharply reduced total volume. Some stimulus was provided for the factory
during the war years by a military contract for foot powder, but the
decline became even more precipitous after the conflict. The Comstock
Hotel was destroyed by fire in 1925, never to be rebuilt. And by the
late 1940s the once-busy railroad bisecting the factory property--the
old Utica & Black River--had deteriorated to one lonely train crawling
over its track in each direction, on weekdays only, but still carrying a
New York City sleeping car. The 1950 order book reveals a business that
had withered away to almost nothing. Once again, as in 1900, both
foreign and domestic sales were recorded in a single book, but now
foreign sales greatly outstripped the domestic. In fact, a mere 18 gross
of the pills were sold--in quantities of one gross or more--in the
domestic market in that year, contrasting sadly with nearly 6,000 gross
in 1910. Even the Henry P. Gilpin Co. of Baltimore, which at one time
had been ordering 100 gross or more every month or six weeks, took only
a meager four gross during the entire year. There were a large number of
very small shipments--such as four boxes of pills here, or a bottle of
liniment there--but these did not aggregate very much and gave the
appearance of merely accommodating individual customers who could no
longer find their favorite remedies in their own local drug stores.

The foreign business--chiefly in the West Indies, Puerto Rico, and South
America--was still fairly substantial in 1950, amounting to 579 gross of
the Indian Root Pills, but this was far from compensating for the
virtual disappearance of the domestic market. At the old price of $16
per gross--which may no longer have been correct in 1950--the Morristown
factory could not have taken in a great deal more than $10,000--hardly
enough to justify its continued operation. In any case, it was obviously
only the foreign business that kept the plant operating as long as it
did; without that it would probably have closed its doors 20 years
earlier.

A number of customers were, however, faithful to the Comstock Company
for very many years. Schieffelin & Co. and McKesson & Robbins were both
important customers way back in the 1840s, and their favor had been an
object of dispute in the split between Lucius and the other brothers in
1851. Schieffelin still appeared frequently in the order books up to the
1920s; during the final yea