rs McKesson & Robbins was by far the largest
single domestic customer. A number of other firms--John L. Thompson Sons
& Co. of Troy, N.Y.; T. Sisson & Co. of Hartford, Conn.; and Gilman
Brothers of Boston, Mass.--appear both in the 1896 and the 1950 order
books, although unfortunately the quantities taken had fallen from one
or two gross at a shot in the earlier year to a mere quarter gross or a
few dozen boxes by 1950.

Toward the end, in the late 1950s, employment in the factory dropped to
only three persons--J.M. Barney (foreman), Charles Pitcher, and
Florence Cree--and they were only doing maintenance work and filling
such few orders, mostly in quantities of a few dozen boxes only, that
came to the factory unsolicited. Gone were the days of travelers
scouring the back country, visiting country druggists, and pushing the
pills, while simultaneously disparaging rival or "counterfeit"
concoctions; gone were the days when the almanacs and other advertising
circulars poured out of Morristown in the millions of copies; long since
vanished were the sweeping claims of marvelous cures for every
conceivable ailment. In these final days the Indian Root Pills, now
packaged in a flat metal box with a sliding lid, were described modestly
as the Handy Vegetable Laxative. And the ingredients were now printed on
the box; nothing more was heard of Dr. Morse's remarkable discovery
gleaned during his long sojourn with the Indians of the western plains.

[Illustration: FIGURE 27.--The pill-mixing building, about 1928
(building torn down in 1971).]

Although the records disclose nothing to this effect, it is a fair
premise that the Comstock family often must have considered closing the
Morristown plant after World War II and, more particularly, in the
decade of the 1950s. Such inclinations may, however, have been countered
by a willingness to let the plant run as long as a trickle of business
continued and it did not fall too far short of covering expenses. The
last few surviving employees were very elderly, and their jobs may have
been regarded as a partial substitute for pensions. This view is
evidenced by an injury report for George Clute, who suffered a fit of
coughing while mixing pills in January 1941; he was then 77 years old
and had been working in the factory for 34 years. The final paybooks
show deductions for Social Security and unemployment
insurance--specimens of vexatious red tape that the factory had avoided
for most of