nal land was
purchased in 1877 and 1882, obviously bespeaking an expansion of the
enterprise. In 1885, according to a time book, the pill factory
regularly employed about thirty persons, plus a few others on an
occasional basis.

Mr. Comstock, from his residence across the river in Brockville, was the
manager of the business; however, the operations were under the
immediate charge of E. Kingsland, former chief clerk of the Judson and
Comstock offices in New York City, who was brought up to Morristown as
superintendent of the factory. E. Kingsland was a cousin of Edward A.
Kingsland, one of the leading stationers in New York City, and
presumably because of this relationship, Kingsland supplied a large part
of Comstock's stationery requirements for many years. Kingsland in
Morristown retired from the plant in 1885 and was succeeded by Robert G.
Nicolson, who had been a foreman for a number of years. Nicolson, a
native of Glasgow, Scotland, was brought to America as a child, first
lived at Brockville, and then came to Morristown as foreman in the pill
factory shortly after it was established. He was succeeded as
superintendent by his own son, Robert Jr., early in the present century.

The great majority of the employees of the pill factory were women--or,
more properly, girls--in an era when it was not yet common-place for
members of the fair sex to leave the shelter of their homes for paid
employment. The wage rates during the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s were $3 to
$5 a week for girls and $7 to $12 a week for men; the last-named amount
was an acceptable rate at that time for a permanent and experienced
adult man. The factory management of this era was joyously unaware of
minimum wages, fair employment laws, social security, antidiscrimination
requirements, fair trade, food and drug acts, income taxes, and the
remaining panoply of legal restrictions that harass the modern
businessman. Since only a few scattered payroll records have been
recovered, Comstock's maximum employment during the Morristown period is
not known, or just when it was reached. In a brief sketch of the Indian
Root Pill business, however, Mrs. Doris Planty, former Morristown town
historian, mentions a work force of from "40 to 50" around the turn of
the century.

In 1875, twenty years after its original projection, the Utica & Black
River Railroad finally came through the village, bisecting the Comstock
property with a right-of-way thirty-six feet wide and