Warner’s Safe Cure: Some Very Rare Safe Remedies

Warner's Safe Diabetes Remedy in Green

Recently, Michael Seeliger was in San Jose giving a presentation on Warner’s to their bottle club.  He had the opportunity to see the collection of Michael and Kathy Craig, which includes some very nice Warner’s and he was kind enough to share them with me. Thanks also to the Craigs for allowing me to post these.

The photo above is an exceptionally rare Diabetes Remedy in green. How about a  3-Cities Safe Cure in green?

Warner's Safe Cure 3- Cities in Green

By any standard, the Craigs have a nice collection of Warner’s, including some rare examples including an olive Kidney & Liver Remedy, a clear Diabetes Remedy and a clear Kidney & Liver Remedy for starters. And, appropriately enough, a nice collection of Craigs cures.

Warner’s Collection of Michael & Kathy Craig

Collecting Warner’s can be kind of addicting. Once you get into them, you always want that variant that you don’t have. As with most addictions, the problem is that you just can’t stop. Thanks again to Mike and to the Craigs for allowing a peek into their collection. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Warner’s Safe Cure: The Rochester “A” List (Part II)

Although the Warner’s Safe Cures manufactured by the Chambers Works are early examples of the Safe Cure bottles, they are not the earliest.  After Warner acquired  the rights to Dr. Craig’s Kidney Cure, one of his first bottles was the shoulder-embossed Safe Cure (pictured above). While I would not consider this bottle to be rare, they have become harder to get.  The same is true for the Rochester Safe Cure. Only in Rochester was Safe Cure called “Safe Kidney & Liver Cure”. In all the other foreign offices, it was simply referred to as “Safe Cure.” For a short period, the Rochester bottle was also embossed “Safe Cure”.

While neither the shoulder-embossed Safe Cure nor the Rochester Safe Cure make the “A” List, there are some that do. For example, this aqua Kidney & Liver Remedy. While the amber is relatively common and the clear would likely be considered more scarce, aqua is down right rare.

 The same might be said of two  other Rochester variants, both of which are considered mold errors. The first is the “No Safe” Safe Remedies Company. For whatever reason, the bottle manufacturer omitted the word “Safe” from the mold leaving the bottle embossed “Warner’s Remedies Co.”  While the unlabelled Warner’s Safe Remedies Co. bottles are considered common, the Warner’s Remedies Co. are rare. The second variant is made rare, not be the omission of embossing, but by the addition of it. It is the half pint Nervine with “8 OZ” embossed just below the neck. Here again, the half pint Nervine is considered fairly common, but in this case, the glassmaker probably used a half pint Safe Cure mold and slugged out the word “Cure,” replacing it with “Nervine.” The result is a fairly rare variant.

Another very difficult Rochester find is the Warner’s Safe Remedy sample. While the Safe Cure sample appears regularly, the Safe Remedy sample comes around far less often.  Find one that’s labelled and you have a real gem. This is also true of the labeled Safe Diabetes Remedy sample.

Most discriminating bottle collectors turn their noses up a screw top bottles. However, not all screw top medicines are considered equal. Take, for example, the Warner’s Compound bottles sold by the Warner’s Remedies Company. These very late Warner’s are highly prized by Warner’s collectors due to their rarity.

The other significant category of Rochester Warner’s are the Log Cabin Remedies. They are the subject of Part III of this series.

Federation of Historical Bottle Collectors Expo 2008 in York, Pennsylvania

Beautiful weather and a really nice show, what more could you ask for? Okay, a few showers, but otherwise delightful for August. Better yet, the Warner’s Safe Cures, Tippecanoes and Log Cabin Remedies were here for the picking during the dealers set-up and early admission. Many of us who worked on the Great Warner’s Safe Cure Exhibit  (“GWSCE”) in 2001 in Rochester, including Jack Stecher, Dave Kyle, Andy Lange and Bob Sheffield had a chance to catch-up. Andy was the clear winner as far as rare Warner’s on his sales table, including two London samples, a strap sided London Compound, a half-pint aqua London Safe Cure, two Pressburg Safe Cures (Green and Aqua), a labelled  olive London Diabetes Cure (perhaps one-of-a-kind), two Frankfurt half pint Nervines (in amber and green), a Frankfurt Diabetes Cure, a grass green Rochester Diabetes Remedy and two labelled Log Cabin Remedies with the orginal boxes. Seldom will you see so many bottles on the Warner A-List in one place, at one time. Nice work Andy!

When I was not drooling over Andy’s selection, I did manage to make it around the rest of the show. From Jack Stecher I got one of the original Safe Cure Almanacs from 1879-1880 and the London Almanac from 1888-1889. I have never seen either of these almanacs for sale before and neither had Jack. They had been in Dave Kyle’s collection.

In addition to the GWSCE, the show included folks from down under, who brought some of their Warner’s along. Wayne and Lorna Humphries from New Zealand came with Andy as well as James and Sandy Bell from Australia. Needless to say, they get the award for the longest journey. Perhaps the best thing was that there were Warner’s at almost every level from that for the beginning collector to that for the most seasoned collector. In addition to a host of Rochester Kidney & Liver Cures, Safe Remedies Company bottles and Kidney & Liver Remedies, I saw three Safe Bitters, four Animal Cures (including a light amber London, an olive London and an amber 3 Cities),  and a slug plate Rochester half-pint Nervine. In addition to the Safe Almanacs, Jack brought along so other go-withs, including vintage photos of the Warner Mansion and the Warner Observatory, several Benton’s Hair Growers and several stereoscope slides of Warner Island.

This Expo was a delight. Thanks to the Federation for a wonderful job.

The Rise and Fall of the Warner Empire: The Warner’s Safe Remedies Co. (Part VIII)

Warner’s slide into insolvency was hastened by the Panic of 1893, which some historians compare to the Great Depression of the late 1920′s and 1930′s. However, the fact of the matter is that H. H. Warner was the architect of his own misfortune. His once great patent medicine empire could not support the weight of his wildly speculative investments and ever diminishing interest in managing his once great enterprise. His collapse surprised many, who had seen him as favorite son of Rochester. Indeed, in December, 1887, he had been elected as president of the newly formed Rochester Chamber of Commerce. Ironically, Warner’s inaugeral address to the organization highlighted the importance of reinvestment of capital to promote business growth. The Chamber later selected Warner as their Man of the Year over a lesser known camera maker named George Eastman. Clearly, the Kodak would never last.

 By 1893, however, Warner’s successes were ancient history. The British directors of the H. H. Warner & Co. Ltd. voted that his stock should be forfieted as a penalty for his mismanagement. With his last valuable asset stripped away, Warner filed for bankruptcy and spent the remaining years of his life attempting to regain his business prominence. Although he was out as the owner of the company, it continued to exist without him. Atwater reports that the American branch of the company was sold to Rochester businessmen, J. J. DeMay and S. B. Keaner, who moved it back to Rochester to occupy the Duffy Malt Whiskey warehouse and it survived on an ever diminishing scale until the mid-1940′s.

Under the management of DeMay and Keaner, the company produced remedies under the name Warner’s Safe Remedies Company, which included a Diabetes Remedy, Rheumatic Remedy, Kidney & Liver Remedy, Acute Rheumatic Compound, Compound: A Diuretic, Nervine and Sedative.  As Seeliger reports, these bottles had the same embossing with different labels to designate the specific contents. An approach similar to that used with the H. H. Warner & Co. Ltd. bottles in Melbourne. The Safe Remedies Co. bottles generally appear as amber, aqua and clear variants, although a select few may have color variations that make them more valuable.

From its beginning in 1879, Warner’s Safe Remedies had been a dramatic success growing almost exponentially and spreading out to the four corners of the globe. Perhaps in the end, its rapid success with Warner at the helm was its undoing. Perhaps he began to believe that everything he invested in was bound to produce the riches he had become accustomed to. Whatever the reason, by 1893, Warner’s intuitive skills for investing and marketing failed him. The star that had burned so brilliantly was burning itself out. Although Warner would live another 30 years, he would live them in the shadow of his former successes.