ls was still
in progress, married a Canadian girl, Josephine Elliot, in 1864; by this
marriage he had one son, Edwin, who lived only to the age of 28. In 1893
Comstock married, for a second time, Miss Alice J. Gates, and it is a
favorable testimony to the efficacy of some of his own virility
medicines that at age 67 he sired another son, William Henry Comstock II
(or "Young Bill") on July 4, 1897. In the meanwhile, the elder Comstock
had become one of the most prominent citizens of Brockville, which he
served three terms as mayor and once represented in the Canadian
parliament. Besides his medicine factories on both sides of the river,
he was active in other business and civic organizations, helped to
promote the Brockville, Westport & Northwestern Railway, and was highly
regarded as a philanthropist. Although he lived well into the automobile
age, he always preferred his carriage, and acquired a reputation as a
connoisseur and breeder of horses. As remarked earlier, his steam yacht
was also a familiar sight in the upper reaches of the St. Lawrence
River.

The medicine business in Morristown was operated as a sole
proprietorship by Comstock from the establishment here in 1867 up until
1902, when it was succeeded by W.H. Comstock Co., Ltd., a Canadian
corporation. St. Lawrence County deeds record the transfer of the
property--still preserving the 36-foot strip for the railroad--from
personal to corporate ownership at that time.

Comstock--the same callow youth who had been charged with rifling
Lucius' mail in the primitive New York City of 1851--came to the end of
his long life in 1919. He was succeeded immediately by his son, William
Henry II, who had only recently returned from military service during
World War I. According to Mrs. Planty, former Morristown historian,
"Young Bill" had been active in the business before the war and was
making an inspection of the company's depots in the Orient, in the
summer of 1914, when he was stranded in China by the cancellation of
transpacific shipping services and was therefore obliged to cross China
and Russia by the Transiberian Railway. This story, however, strains
credulity a trifle, as the journey would have brought him closer to the
scene of conflict at that time, and he was, in any event, only 17 years
old when these events are supposed to have occurred.

The decline of the patent-medicine business was ascribed by Stewart
Holbrook in his _Golden Age of Quackery_ to three