s the W.H.
Comstock factory, better known as the home of the celebrated Dr. Morse's
Indian Root Pills. This business never grew to be more than a modest
undertaking in modern industrial terms, and amid the congestion of any
large city its few buildings straddling a branch railroad and its work
force of several dozens at most would have been little noticed, but in
its rural setting the enterprise occupied a prominent role in the
economic life of the community for over ninety years. Aside from the
omnipresent forest and dairy industries, it represented the only
manufacturing activity for miles around and was easily the largest
single employer in its village, as well as the chief recipient and
shipper of freight at the adjacent railroad station. For some years,
early in the present century, the company supplied a primitive electric
service to the community, and the Comstock Hotel, until it was destroyed
by fire, served as the principal village hostelry.

But the influence of this business was by no means strictly local. For
decades thousands of boxes of pills and bottles of elixir, together with
advertising circulars and almanacs in the millions, flowed out of this
remote village to druggists in thousands of communities in the United
States and Canada, in Latin America, and in the Orient. And Dr. Morse's
Indian Root Pills and the other remedies must have been household names
wherever people suffered aches and infirmities. Thus Morristown,
notwithstanding its placid appearance, played an active role in commerce
and industry throughout the colorful patent-medicine era.

Today, the Indian Root Pill factory stands abandoned and forlorn--its
decline and demise brought on by an age of more precise medical
diagnoses and the more stringent enforcement of various food and drug
acts. After abandonment, the factory was ransacked by vandals; and
records, documents, wrappers, advertising circulars, pills awaiting
packaging, and other effects were thrown down from the shelves and
scattered over the floors. This made it impossible to recover and
examine the records systematically. The former proprietors of the
business, however, had for some reason--perhaps sheer
inertia--apparently preserved all of their records for over a century,
storing them in the loft-like attic over the packaging building. Despite
their careless treatment, enough records were recovered to reconstruct
most of the history of the Comstock enterprise and to cast new