Castoria
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1868, May 12: The United States Patent Office grants patent to Dr. Samuel Pitcher of Barnstable, Massachusetts for a cathartic composed of senna, sodium bicarbonate, essence of wintergreen, taraxicum, sugar and water.
The United States Patent image is located at this link.
Castoria was initially sold under the name Pitcher's Castoria. In 1871, The Centaur Company was formed by Charles Henry Fletcher at 80 Varick Street, New York City to purchase the rights to and manufacture Pitcher's Castoria. It was renamed Fletcher's Castoria. Together with Demas Barnes and Joseph B. Rose who had purchased the formula for Centaur Liniment that same year, manufacturing began.
In the 1870s, The Centaur Company began doing significant advertising to create its brands, but primarily the advertising was for Castoria. There are some nice photographs of Castoria ads from the 1870s through 1920s on the buildings of New York that are still visible today (or at least at between the 1970s and 2005). See Forgotten-NY Ads] and see [Frank Jump's pages.
At the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, Chas. H. Fletcher put ads on virtually every blank wall in sight. They are quite visible in images of the opening of the bridge (see The Miami Herald, Nov 11, 1984)
In 1923 Sterling Drug purchased a 1/4 interest in The Centaur Company (see New York Times, Feb 9, 1923, Page 24, col 1) and eventually purchased the entire company. Between 1870 and World War II "Children cry for Chas. H. Fletcher's Castoria" was one of the best known advertising slogans.
In the 1920s, The Centaur Company was one of the earliest advertising targeted directly to women (see "Devil-may-care 1920s found papers giving women more voice and space", By Martin Kady Journal Now, 1997, Centennial, 1897-1997, Piedmont Publishing). Their advertising prior to that had targeted both men and women, but in the 1920s they began to advertise additionally in the new publications specifically targeted to women.
Some of the early advertising featured the legendary American boxer Joe Louis (the "Boxer Who Beat Hitler" when he fought Germany's Max Schmelling in 1938 after an earlier loss), from the mid 1930s. The company had been ahead of most of its competition in earlier advertising and was not afraid of any racial consequences of the ad.
In 1934 The Centaur Company Division of Sterling Products purchased Z.B.T. products from the Crystal Corporation.
There were two Fletcher's Castoria B-17 Flying Fortress bombers during World War II. The first was lost, but the crew survived. The second survived the war. They were part of the 100th Bomber Group in World War II. Its pilot was William H. Fletcher (not a descendant of Charles Henry Fletcher), hence its name.
In 1984, Sterling Drug sells Fletcher's Castoria to Mentholatum Co Inc. and in 1988 Rohto, a Japanese company, purchased Mentholatum. Fletcher's Castoria is still sold today throughout much of the world.
Charles Henry Fletcher's son-in-law Albert Bryant began working for The Centaur Company and later Sterling Products in 1899 and retired from the company November 8th, 1937.
