Job Moses Advertisement Analysis

When no newspaper advertisements prior to 1855 were identified, city directories for Rochester, New York proved more helpful in gleaning further information about Job Moses, Tuttle & Moses, I. C. Baldwin & Co., and J. Bryan, and each of their association with this product. Dewey’s Rochester City Directory for 1857-1858 contained the earliest mention of Job Moses, as a patent medicine dealer who worked at 112 & 114 State Street. The advertisement for his business, Job Moses Wholesale Dealer in Patent Medicines, listed “Sir James Clarke’s Female Pills” as one of the featured products being sold (Fig. 6). Job Moses (1815–1887) was an entrepreneur who started out his career as a teacher in Marcellus, New York and later went on to run a lucrative patent medicine business out of Auburn, Rochester, and New York City as well as Newcastle, Ontario (Fig. 7). Using the fortune he amassed in patent medicines, Moses was also responsible for opening the oil industry in western New York and creating the late nineteenth-century oil boom into Pennsylvania (Herrick 1949; Houck 2014). Described as a “as a dignified man of affairs...with highly developed sales abilities,” a New York admirer once said of him that: “he could sell the fog off the river” (Herrick 1949). Moses established his first drug store and wholesale patent medicine business with Charles N. Tuttle in Auburn, New York, in 1852 (Brigham’s General Directory 1863-1864; KENNEDY v. GOSS 38 N.Y. 330 (N.Y. 1868)). By 1854, they expanded their Auburn firm to create a branch in Newcastle,
Baldwin and Co., Chemists and Druggists (Fig. 6). The company advertisement stated that the business sold a product called “Clark’s Female Pills” (with no “e” at the end of Clark’s name) and that “Charles N. Tuttle and Job Moses” worked for Baldwin as agents for all his