\nEverybody of middle age today remembers the mild children’s laxative Castoria. Many gallons of the stuff were poured down kids’ throats, not only in my own childhood, but in that of my own children. It is possible even my grand-children got doses of it. But who of my listeners recall a similar laxative, True’s Elixir? In my father’s store in Bridgton 70 years ago that medicine was a lively rival of Castoria. What is not even so well remembered is the fact that True’s Elixir was distinctly a Maine product, devised by Dr. John L. True in 1851.<\/p>\n
It started as a remedy for worms in the digestive tract, and was at first called Dr. J. L. True’s Pin Worm Elixir. As late as 1923, when it had adopted the simpler name of True’s Elixir, annual sales reached 155,000 bottles. Older persons now living, who remember Dr. True’s manufacturing laboratory on Auburn’s Drummond Street hill, recall the pungent odor of herbs and other concoctions that pervaded the atmosphere for yards around the place. Allover the United States went cases of True’s Ellxir, all bearing in big letters on the wooden cases. “Auburn, Maine”, so that the community in the Androscoggin thereby gained wider national reputation than its bigger neighbor Lewiston.<\/p>\n
The famous Elixir was not the only product of True’s plant. He also turned out True’s Headache Tablets and True’s Sore Throat Gargle, as well as a hair wash, and various powders. Some of the shipping cases had the name stamped in Spanish, because of True’s extensive sales in the<\/p>\n
Dr. True had not even come to Auburn when he worked out his formula for the famous elixir. That was done in 1851, in his home kitchen at Exeter, Maine. At first Dr. True peddled his product, house to house, in neighboring towns. In 1853, he moved to Auburn and began the shipment of his elixir to far away places. In Auburn he had the advantage of access to the new Androscoggin and Kennebec R. R., making connection at Portland for Boston and more distant points.<\/p>\n
When Dr. True died in 1900, his two sons continued the business for many years. In 1947, the True family sold to George Lane, Auburn financier, who made the business a subsidiary of a larger corporation with a laboratory in Hanover, Mass. The next producer was George Tobias of Natick, Mass., who was putting out True’s Elixir there in 1952. Its final producer, when it was abandoned only 17 years ago in 1955, was the same company that manufactured the renowned Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. At any rate, True’s Elixir was poured down children’s throats for more than a hundred years.<\/p>\n
Although medical research later persuaded the manufacturers of True’s Elixir to give up all mention of worms, it was parents’ dread of pin worms in children that accounted for the rapid growth of Dr. True’s sales in the last half of the 19th century, True advertised that he had by far the best remedy ever devised to rid the body of the dreaded worms. His ads showed pictures of curious creatures preserved in alcohol in bottles and jars, which True claimed had been expelled by his elixir. The collection included not only pin worms and tape worms, but even frogs and lizards.<\/p>\n
Just listen to a few of Dr. True’s testimonals: “A young woman in Lynn, Mass., was induced to try Dr. True’s Elixir. As a result she was relieved of a tape worm, alive, 80 feet in length. Benjamin Hill of Auburn was likewise relieved of a tapeworm upwards of 70 feet long. A child of John Ferguson of Lewiston was relieved of worm 60 feet long. A spotted lizard, 6 inches long, was expelled alive from the stomach of a woman in Bangor. From the stomach of a boy in Danville the Elixir expelled a living creature 18 inches long and two inches in circumference, a species of snake.”<\/p>\n
There are plenty more of those testimonials, but I’m sure I’ve already given you enough to turn your stomachs. Yet hold on for just a few, Dr. True used novel devices in his advertising. In one ad was a drawing of a young man carrying a sandwich board over his shoulders, which said: “A wonderful remedy. The most popular medicine of the day is Dr. John L. True’s Pin Worm Elixir. What the White Mountains of New Hampshire are to the mountains of New England, Dr. True’s Pin Worm Elixir is to all other worm remedies. A great discovery! Yes, Sir! There is no use talking, it is a fact that Dr. True’s Pin Worm Elixir is the best worm expellant on the market. Tributes to its efficacy are abundant. Sold at all druggists.”<\/p>\n
One of True’s most original ads appeared in 1860 in the Lewiston Gazette, a rival paper to the better known Lewiston Journal. That ad said: “Grand Trunk Canal. As a large amount of freight which should be used for better purposes is being consumed daily by a sponging set of loafers called worms that infest the Alimentary Canal, we would call the attention of those who see and feel the sad effects of those varmints to a safe and effective remedy called Dr. John L. True’s Justly Celebrated Pin Worm Elixir.”<\/p>\n
Another of True’s ads was worded: “As a pin worm exterminator Dr. True’s is tops. When True’s Elixir hits the worms, he knows it is useless to struggle and he must surrender. The latest capture was from a man in Melrose, Mass., from whom was ejected a worm 60 feet long in less than three hours, head and all.”<\/p>\n
A slogan common in my own boyhood concerning this Maine-born remedy was itself a play on the doctor’s name. The slogan that heralded True’s Elixir was “How True!”<\/p>\n
Now let us go for a few minutes to the western part of Maine, near the New Hampshire border. A business firm in York County that, through Oak Grove School and Colby College, has ‘definite connection with the Kennebec Valley is the Hussey Manufacturing Company of North Berwick. Now enjoying an international reputation as manufacturers of both indoor and outdoor seating for large concentrations of people, the business was started nearly 150 years ago as the Hussey Plow Company by the great-grandfather of my college classmate Philip Hussey, who recently retired as, company president, placing the business in the hands of his two sons, the fifth generation of Husseys to own and manage the firm. In all of its 150 years the company has been family owned and family operated. It is certainly one of the oldest, if not the very oldest, family owned industry in Maine.<\/p>\n
A large part of the Hussey production is now in the form of rollout seats for gymnasiums and of telescopic platforms. One of their most recent contracts was for a 14,000 seat grandstand at the Indiana State Fairgrounds .<\/p>\n
Why does the home plant of this expanding company happen to be situated in North Berwick, Maine? Before the Civil War the railroad that passed through North Berwick was known as the Portland, Saco and Portsmouth Railroad. At that time all New England railroads used wood, not coal, for fuel. At North Berwick, a sidetrack led to a field where local farmers stacked the wood that they sold to the railroad, and where locomotives loaded it en route. When coal replaced wood as locomotive fuel, Phil Hussey’s grandfather Timothy bought the land with the idea of putting up a warehouse for his little plow factory then at the other end of town, thus enabling him to load his plows, harrows and cultivators directly on to the freight cars. Instead, Timothy’s sons set up a branch factory on the site, and it became the No. 1 shop of the Hussey Company.<\/p>\n
As years passed, the company added adjoining land. One piece was the former site of a small hotel that had wide reputation for its sponge cake. When trains stopped at North Berwick for wood and water, the crews filled up on Berwick sponge cake and milk.<\/p>\n
During its long history the Hussey Company has made many products, all of them chiefly of metal – iron, steel, and aluminum. The first Hussey, William began by making cast iron plows. As time went on, and sons, grandsons, and other generations took over the business, they made sewer grills, pipe hangers for sprinkler systems, steel casings for power belts, machines to saw cord wood, stone boats and drags. In Phil Hussey’s early years with the company, the big business was in steel ladders and fire escapes. During World War II, the company made millions of steel bullet cores, heavy steel fittings for torpedo nets, and thousands of porthole frames for the Navy. After the war came large contracts for specially designed structural steel and ironwork for buildings.<\/p>\n
The community of North Berwick had an enviable reputation for inventive genius. William Hussey, who revolutionized American agriculture with his cast iron plows, was not the town’s only inventor. One local man constructed a full sized pipe organ in his farmhouse. A fellow named Paul Rogers became nearly as famous as Seth Thomas as a maker of clocks. Out of Berwick bog iron, one Peter Morrill produced an ingenious logging chain. The town was also the home of Hobbs Hub Runner, a patented device by which, when winter came, wagon wheels could be simply removed from the axle and hubs attached to runners slipped on in their place. North Berwick was also the home of the widely used Sunshine Stone Polish.<\/p>\n
The Husseys have had, as I said, long connections with Central Maine. As devout Quakers, the early Husseys were interested in the founding and the continuation of the Oak Grove School in Vassalboro. Phil Hussey and his two brothers all attended Oak Grove in the first decade of this century, when it was a co-educational boarding school. All three later earned degrees at Colby College, where a generation later Phil’s two sons also graduated.<\/p>\n
Another of my classmates in the Waterville area is Jack Kennedy of Vassalboro. It was at his home that Phil Hussey and his wife Marion showed to a group of us the unique picture slides of one of their many trips abroad. Their latest venture into foreign lands was a trip around the world that took them into Afghanistan and principle cities of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n
Maine has good reason to be proud of the success of the Hussey Manufacturing Company of North Berwick.<\/p>\n
Year: 1972<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #918, Broadcast on January 30, 1972<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42945,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9222"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}