Mary McMath's Medicine

 Today a little artifact that is certainly rare and probably unique.

It is a patent medicine bottle, paper label only, the bottle style suggests circa 1890 give or take a few years.  Here's the other two sections of the label.

As you can see it comes from Saint Paul Minnesota, and has a female proprietor.

Women's names do turn up on patent medicine bottles with some regularity, but the companies were in almost all cases run by men.  The women, Lydia Pinkham comes to mind, were just fronts.  This worked especially well in nostrums for "female complaints".

But Mary A. McMath seems to have been a genuine small time patent medicine manufacturer.  So what can we learn about her?

This is a tough one.  Usually I can zip through census information and archived newspapers and get the rough outlines of someone's life.  But for Mary McMath the pickings are slim.

In 1878 she was embroiled in a lawsuit against a certain William Parsons.  The details are sketchy but it is described as an "action for rent", suggesting she was a land lord.  It took a year but she won $30, costs and interest.  In 1882 I find mention of her paying for sidewalk assessments in the Woodland Park Addition to St. Paul.  And in 1888 a list of undelivered letters includes one to "Dr. Mary A. McMath".

I have a fairly comprehensive listing of pharmacists from St. Paul in that era, she does not appear on it.  Patent medicine companies ran from the gigantic to the one person operators.  She is unknown in that list as well.  Shortly before his untimely death I asked my old friend Boyd Beccue about Ms. McMath.  He'd never heard of her.  And between Boyd and I we knew most of what there was to know about the arcane world of Minnesota patent medicines.

Next I scanned digital copies of St. Paul City Directories from 1880 to 1896.  No mention of Mary McMath at all.  That's unusual.  Similarly the Minnesota State Historical Society has no mention of her in their online catalog.

Casting a wider net of locations for searches only gave me a few crumbs.  An obituary for a Betty Laura McMath (born 1926) said she was the 5th daughter of Thomas and Mary McMath.  Although this was in a suburb of St. Paul I can't make the, er, math work.  If you were a property owner in 1879 you were not having babies 50 years later!

Somewhat more definitively I ran across a reference in a San Francisco paper from 1884.  It was a list of people enjoying nearby summer resorts.  At "The Geysers" we find Dr. Mary A. McMath of St. Paul.  Most of the other leisure seekers were married couples and families.  Dr. Mary is listed alone.

I tried a few other long shots.  I have a trade journal for upper midwest pharmacists from the late 1890's that lists an extensive compendium of all patent medicines wholesaled by the biggest supply house in Minnesota.  All manner of odd and obscure things turn up there including some much older patent medicines that were still being made on a small scale by somebody.  No McMath products.

I could dredge up US Census information or perhaps pursue one of the various Genealogy web sites (they all promise a free trial but sure want your credit card!) but I doubt I would find more.

So we are left with an enigmatic woman.  Apparently single.  Evidently of sufficient means to travel across the country for leisure.  But also it seems a one woman patent medicine business.  It is a curious and incomplete tale.  If I find more I'll publish an update.