dividing it
thereafter into a "lower shop," where the pills and tonics were made,
and the "upper shop," where the medicines were packaged and clerical
duties performed. The superintendent and his family lived above the
upper shop in an apartment; it was in the spacious attic above this
apartment that the records of the business, in a scattered and ransacked
condition, were found. Inasmuch as the first recorded sale of land to
Comstock occurred in March 1876, almost simultaneously with the arrival
of the railroad, it is a fair surmise that the second building was put
up about this time.

The coming of the railroad also put a station almost at the doorstep of
the factory, and thereafter many shipments came and went by rail. The
company's huge volume of mailings, often ten or fifteen bags a day, was
also delivered directly to the trains, without going through the local
post office. For some years, however, heavy shipments, including coal
for the factory's boilers, continued to come by ship. The Brockville
ferry also operated from a dock immediately adjacent to the railroad
station; one end of the station was occupied by the United States
Customs House.

Almost from the time of its arrival in Morristown, the Black River
Railroad operated a daily through Wagner Palace Sleeping Car from New
York City via Utica and Carthage, and service over the same route was
continued by the New York Central after it took over the North Country
railroads in 1891. This meant that Mr. Comstock, when he had business in
New York City, could linger in his factory until the evening train
paused at the station to load the afternoon's outpouring of pills and
almanacs, swing aboard the waiting Pullman, and ensconce himself
comfortably in his berth, to awaken in the morning within the cavernous
precincts of Grand Central Station--an ease and convenience of travel
which residents of the North Country in the 1970s cannot help but envy.
The daily sleeping car through Morristown to and from New York City
survived as long as the railroad itself, into the early 1960s, thus
outlasting both of the Comstocks--father and son.

[Footnotes 8: Or perhaps Mr. Comstock merely failed to pay for an
engraved plate and to order a book; these county histories were
apparently very largely written and edited with an eye to their
subscribers.]

The pills were originally mixed by hand. In the summer of 1880 the
factory installed a steam engine and belt-driven pill-mixi