ines have to be mixed, bottled, and packaged in cramped and dingy
quarters above a city shop; spacious buildings in an uncongested country
village were now being used. No further relocations would be necessary,
as operations exceeded their capacity, or as landlords might elect to
raise rents; the pill factory was to remain on the same site for the
following ninety years. And the bitter struggles for control, perhaps
acerbated because of the family relationship among the partners, were
now a thing of the past. William H. Comstock was in exclusive control,
and he was to retain this position, first as sole proprietor and later
as president, for the remainder of his long life.

The patent-medicine business as a whole was also entering, just at this
time, upon its golden era--the fifty-year span between the Civil War and
World War I. Improved transportation, wider circulation of newspapers
and periodicals, and cheaper and better bottles all enabled the
manufacturers of the proprietary remedies to expand distribution--the
enactment and enforcement of federal drug laws was still more than a
generation in the future. So patent medicines flourished; in hundreds of
cities and villages over the land enterprising self-proclaimed druggists
devised a livelihood for themselves by mixing some powders into pills or
bottling some secret elixir--normally containing a high alcoholic
content or some other habit-forming element--created some kind of a
legend about this concoction, and sold the nostrum as the infallible
cure for a wide variety of human (and animal) ailments. And many
conservative old ladies, each one of them a pillar of the church and an
uncompromising foe of liquor, cherished their favorite remedies to
provide comfort during the long winter evenings. But of these myriads of
patent-medicine manufacturers, only a scant few achieved the size, the
recognition, and wide distribution of Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills and
the other leading Comstock remedies.

[Illustration: FIGURE 13.--Comstock factory buildings, about 1900.]

[Illustration: FIGURE 14.--Wrapper for Longley's Great Western Panacea.]

Of course, the continued growth of the business was a gradual process;
it did not come all at once with the move to Morristown. Even in 1878,
after eleven years in this village, the Comstock factory was not yet
important enough to obtain mention in Everts' comprehensive _History of
St. Lawrence County_.[8] But, as we have seen, additio