Samuel Strong: Alcohol and the Cleveland Druggist

    

During his 63 years of life, Samuel Merwin Strong built the largest wholesale drug company in Cleveland and perhaps in all of Ohio.   Like many druggists of that time Strong, shown here,  featured alcohol in his medicines and even marketed his own brand of whiskey.  Ironically, it also was alcohol that led to his untimely and horrific demise.  

Although a biographer has called him a “country boy” with “narrow” educational opportunities, Strong’s was not a rags to riches story.  His father, also Samuel, was a practicing physician in Amherst, Ohio, 35 miles west of Cleveland, and twice elected to the Ohio State legislature.  Young Samuel after graduating from local schools gained admission to Oberlln College, the oldest coeducational institution of learning in America.   The youth did not stay long, however, leaving at the age of eighteen to apprentice to an Elyria, Ohio, druggist.

There followed a series of pharmaceutical employments.  “With his first savings of $100 and a great deal of ambition he drifted to Cleveland in 1851…,”  according to a biographer.  There Strong worked for two years for J.D. Hayward, a pharmacist, until Hayward retired.  Then Strong joined the wholesale and retail drug house of Gaylord & Co.  This was an upscale business with a fancy oak paneled interior at the corner of the new four-story Hoffman Block.

In 1872 the location would become infamous for the “Hoffman Block Outrage,” in which medical students working in an upper room raided a cemetery for a newly buried cadaver and brought it back.   Drunk, the students stripped the body and tossed its garments around, only later discovering that that their plaything had died of smallpox.  Twelve people, some not at the bacchanalia, were known to contract the disease.  None apparently died. Cleveland was in a panic, however, and mass inoculations were conducted.

While working for Gaylord & Co., Strong demonstrated some of the marketing creativity that would mark his career.  He persuaded his employers to let him make and sell a nostrum called “Dr. Samuel Strong’s True Fever Destroyer,”  apparently using a recipe his father had developed.  It proved very successful as a popular remedy.   A long ad for the alcohol-laden cure appeared in an August 1858 issue of the Elyria Lorain County Eagle, one full of glowing testimonials from druggists around Ohio, Michigan and Indiana.  A bottle cost $2.50, a hefty sum when 50 cents would buy a substantial meal.

In the meantime, Samuel had been having a personal life.  At the age of 23 in 1855 he married Ohio-born Eudora P. Ingersoll, 18, in Medina, Ohio.   Eleven years later they would have twin sons,  Edwin Lee and Samuel Erwin, both of whom eventually would join their father in business.

Taking ownership of the “True Fever Destroyer,” with him, in 1858 Strong with a partner purchased a Cleveland wholesale drug company founded in 1833. The country doctor’s son now was president and co-owner of a pharmaceutical house,  Called Strong & Armstrong, the company was located at 199 Superior Street not far from Cleveland’s Public Square.  By 1867 the partners were listing a second address at 62 Frankfort Street.   They also had taken into management,  Ahira Cobb, shown above, a Connecticut Yankee druggist who had found his way to Ohio.

With Armstrong’s departure in 1873, the company underwent a reorganization that brought Ahira and his son, Lester A. Cobb, into the organization, the latter as a traveling salesman.  The firm became Strong, Cobb & Co., the name it would bear for the remainder of its existence.  The Civil War had brought enormous economic expansion to Cleveland, with considerable benefit to Strong and his associates.  Neither the post-war bank panic of 1873, nor an 1881 fire with $41,000 in damages, nor a subsequent depression in the early 1890s, impeded expansion.  By the 1890s more than 100 men were employed at Strong, Cobb, including salesmen who traveled throughout Ohio and neighboring states.

The company premises, shown above, covered 77,000 square feet and were five stories high.  The complex fronted on Superior Street, designated the sales headquarters, connected by both a tunnel and a bridge to a building of similar height on Long Street.  It held the laboratory, stock rooms, packing and shipping facilities.  A third adjacent building served as a warehouse. 

Strong’s biographer enthused:  “Thus it will be seen that S. M. Strong’s career…is a straight and gallant line to what he aimed at.  Its progressive stages are so well defined as to afford a subject for pleasant contemplation and a deep sense of admiration and plaudit.”

Significantly, the first floor of the main building was dedicated to liquor sales.  Like many druggists, Samuel Strong knew that alcohol was a major profit center.  He had his own brand of whiskey, called “Puritan Club.”  It likely was blended on the premises and sold to retailing druggists in distinctive gallon and larger size ceramic jugs.  Shown here are two styles of container, one with an under-glazed inked label and another with molded letters in the top.  Each would have been decanted into smaller bottles by druggists and the jugs likely return to Strong, Cobb.

The fourth floor held the patent medicine department, most of the nostrums well laced with alcohol.  “Dr. Samuel Strong’s True Fever Destroyer,”  was touted in advertising testimonials as a cure for “ague,” that is, malaria — the true cause of which was still unknown.  Another Strong nostrum was “Echitone,” sold as a remedy for diseases involving discharges of pus. It was clearly labeled as 28% alcohol, about the same as sherry or port wine. The company’s patent medicines were packaged in amber, amethyst and clear bottles.  

Meanwhile Strong was being recognized both locally and nationally and portrayed in trade and other publications.  Called “a model business man” and a “leader in society,” he was elected as a director of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce.  There, according to his biographer: “…He again proved his high character as a citizen, and a lover and promoter of all things Clevelandish.”   With a national reputation in the pharmacy community,  when the National Wholesale Druggists’ Association was formed in 1876, Strong was elected its first treasurer, a position he was to hold for the next eighteen years.

As they reached maturity Samuel Strong brought his two sons into the business.  Edwin Strong had been educated at the University of Michigan and after a stint in New Mexico experimenting with cattle raising became general manager and a full partner.  Samuel E. Strong, after serving an apprenticeship as a traveling man, was named Strong, Cobb’s managing buyer.  When Ahira Cobb died in 1882, his son, Lester, took his place as a partner.  Another son, Ralph L. Cobb, followed. Ralph was said to have “started from the bottom of the ladder,”  eventually to become head of the sundries department.  Shown below, from left to right, are the second generation:  Ralph Cobb, Samuel E. Strong, and Edwin Strong.

While the participation of Strong and Cobb family members proved a coherent management team, nothing could have prepared them for what was to occur.  In June 1895, during the middle of the night, Samuel Strong groped his way to the bathroom in the dark.  While striking a match to light a gas lamp, he accidentally knocked a large bottle of cologne off a shelf and it broke on the marble washstand.  The contents saturated part of his night clothes.   The alcohol vapor from the cologne burst into flames, enveloping Strong’s body.  Badly burned beyond recovery, the next day the man who made part of his fortune selling alcohol ironically died its victim.  He was 63 years old.

Tributes to Strong poured in from around the U.S..  The Merck Market Report called him “a forceful man, though naturally retiring in disposition, and he was held in high esteem by the drug trade throughout the country.”  Despite his wide recognition in Cleveland, his funeral was a private event at the family’s Euclid Street home.  With only his family gather around his bier, Samuel M. Strong was buried in Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery.  His gravestone is shown here.  His widow, Eudora, would join him there in 1906.

Strong, Cobb Wholesale Druggists continued in business following the founder’s demise, moving from its Superior Street headquarters to 206 Central Viaduct SE in Cleveland.   Shown here are gallon and two gallon whiskey jugs bearing that address were issued after the company relocated in 1908. With family members still involved, Strong, Cobb survived National Prohibition, advertising in 1935 that the company now sold wine along with pharmaceuticals.

Note: Several references are made in this post to Strong’s “biographer.”  They cite a full page article about Strong and his company that appeared in an 1894 issue of The Pharmaceutical Era.  No author was credited.  The item appeared only a year before Strong’s unfortunate demise.