e-bay listing photos Perhaps the best source of photographs of The Piso Company are items listed on ebay – bottles, post-cards, labels...

Snake oil: A substance with no real medicinal value sold as a remedy for all diseases.

For 70 years, one of the nation’s snake oil producers doubled as one of the most prominent businesses in Warren.

Articles from the Federation of Historical Bottle Collectors and antiquecannabisbook.com and a museum in British Columbia tell that story.

It all started with Ezra T. Hazeltine, who the Collectors article brands a “marketeer,” was born in 1836 in Busti, moving to Warren in 1859 after getting married.

He then started selling his own medications here in town.

“Hazeltine soon joined up with Dr. Macajah C. Talbott, a medic who also was new in Warren,” the Collectors article states. “Talbott was the product of a hit-and-miss medical education.” He had taken a few medical courses and finished training at the Buffalo Medical School.

But a doctor and a wanna-be doctor weren’t enough to launch a massive snake oil enterprise on their own.

That would take money.

Fortunately, the 19th century created wealth for many in Warren.

Myron Waters was one of those men.

When Waters first came to Warren, he worked in lumber, opened a “raftmen’s” store in Glade, was among the first to strike oil and proceeded to built a refinery.

He was the organizer of three railroads, one of the first stockholders of the First National Bank and a charter member of the Board of Directors of the Citizens National Bank, serving as its president from 1873 until 1900. He was also president of the Warren Mills Company.

Bottom line? The man was loaded.

Talbott had invented a “cure,” the Collectors article explains, for tuberculosis, an illness known at the time as “consumption.”

So Hazeltine & Company was born – bankrolled by Waters – to sell the formula.

But like all snake oils, it needed a catchy name.

Hazeltine took care of that – “Piso’s Cure for Consumption” (pronounced pie-soz) was born.

Antiquecannabisbook.com points out that in that era the term “treatment” and “cure… could have been seen linguistically as synonymous.”

But it wasn’t even really a treatment.

The BC museum that wrote on Piso’s noted that “it was really only a cough remedy and the jury is still out on that.”

They note that the “Cure” was “poisonous and caused many deaths, especially in children.”

Given its contents that isn’t particularly surprising.

Labels on existing bottles indicate chloroform, cannabis indica and “other valuable ingredients” were included as well as, initially, opiates (though those drugs became reviled in the post-Civil War era as many veterans were found to be addicted, the Collectors article notes).

It also included alcohol.

And who knows what else.

The Collectors article said that the company moved in 1870 to “a factory on a piece of lane in the middle of the Allegheny River that flows by Warren. Known locally simple as ‘The Island,” the site was connected by a short bridge to the town.”

So the general area is what we now know as the base of Liberty St.

“Ezra set the cost at 25 cents a bottle and maintained it there for decades while many patent medicines sold for much more. Whether because of price or advertising, sales of the nostrum rose rapidly and attracted a national customer base.”

The“Cure for Consumption” wasn’t the only product that Piso produced, though it was definitely the most successful.

The Collectors article details the myriad ways that Hazeltine marketed the sham product.

In 1879, that included a series of annual almanacs… that were the size of a postage stamp and required a magnifying glass to read.

Other marketing tools included a United States wooden puzzle, photos and post cards.

Business boomed.

The company expanded in 1886 and was re-named The Piso Company in 1895, eventually becoming the town’s largest employer.

But people – and the government – couldn’t be fooled forever

Pressure started to be applied, outlined in the Collectors article.

“In 1883, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union created a unit designed to identify highly alcoholic tonics and cures. The next year the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists began producing reports about false proprietary medicine claims.”

The government got involved, prohibiting the use of the mail system to defraud while turning an eye toward “cures.”

“In 1900, J.C. O’Day, a physician, wrote a popular article in which he claimed that earlier in his life, as a locomotive engineer, after freely imbibing Piso’s Cure for Consumption, he had hallucinated and nearly wrecked a train. Dr. O’Day blamed cannabis indicta poisoning.”

But Piso wouldn’t go quietly.

“Although its advertising oozed with sincerity, Piso’s continued to be assertive in its claims to cure the often fatal disease. One piece of its literature states “We have not promised great things nor have we claimed to have a specific or a cure-all. We have merely said that Piso’s Cure for Consumption will cure consumption,” also arguing that “it cannot be asserted that every case of consumption may be cured by this medicine but it is true that thousands of lives will be saved if they do not delay too long.”

The brand also became famous, according to autiquecannabisbook.com, for its inclusion in Samuel Adams’ “The Great American Fraud,” whose sole focus was shedding light on quack medicine.

From the Collectors article: “Adams singled our Piso’s Cure for Consumption. Of it he said: ‘Analysis shows the ‘cure’ contains chloroform, alcohol and apparently cannabis indica… It is therefore another of the remedies which cannot possibly cure consumption, but on the contrary, tend by their poisonous and debilitating drugs to undermine the victim’s stamina.”

Antiquecannabisbook.com notes that “it took the 1906 Pure Food & Drug Act before Piso’s was forced to change its name from ‘Piso’s Cure for Consumption’ to the more truthful ‘Piso’s Cure,’ and still later on tot he more accurate ‘Piso’s Remedy’ for coughs and colds.”

Marketing then shifted to patriotic notions, including the use of a commissioned Norman Rockwell painting.

The company fizzled out prior to World War II through a local pharmacist tried to keep the brand alive here, according to the Collectors piece, which notes that the abandoned factory was sold in 1951 and is now the site of a parking garage.