Antique 1910s In-Step Foot Remedy Free Sample Tin In-Step Laboratory Wayne NY Small Apothecary Medicine Tin 1 Inch 🥫

Size: 1 inch across ~ Lithographed lid bright and legible. They vary a little one to the next.

🦶 What's Printed On It

Round little tin, about the size of a quarter, with everything lithographed straight onto the metal - no paper label to peel or fade. Arched around the top: FOR AILING FEET / RUB WELL INTO SKIN / REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. Center, in a bold oval: IN-STEP. Arched below: PREPARED ONLY BY / IN-STEP LABORATORY / WAYNE, N.Y. / FREE SAMPLE. Zimmerman's Encyclopedia of Advertising Tins (1998) has this exact tin catalogued: a foot ointment sample, 1/4 by 1 inch, made by the American Can Company - a company that's been making tins since 1901.

🏭 The In-Step Laboratory

That REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. on the lid is a federal trademark registration notice, the kind companies started printing after a 1905 law - it means IN-STEP was a properly registered trademark, not a nod to the Pure Food and Drug Act of the following year (different law, different purpose). The company was in business for a good while: the 1939 Druggists' Circular lists "In-Step Laboratory, Wayne, New York," it's "In-Step Company" by 1940, and the name is still turning up in the drug trade books into the mid-to-late 1940s. This little tin outlasted a name change.

🏞️ Wayne, New York

Wayne sits up in Steuben County, in New York's Southern Tier, near the north end of Keuka Lake. It was first settled around 1791, organized in 1796 as Frederickstown the same year Steuben County was carved out of Ontario County, and renamed Wayne in 1808 for General Anthony Wayne - "Mad Anthony" to his own troops, the Revolutionary War officer who made his name at Stony Point and Fallen Timbers. It's a small town now, a little over a thousand people, and it was a small town then too - exactly the kind of place a local laboratory could set up shop and still get its name into the national drug directories.

🎹 The Piano at the Keuka Hotel

Local legend has it that Hoagy Carmichael played piano and sang at Wayne's Keuka Hotel for two seasons back when the town had a real resort trade running off the lake, and that his 1927 hit "Stardust" got its start at that piano. It's the story the town tells about itself, and I love that a foot-ointment tin and one of the great American songs share a hometown.

📮 A Free Sample

These never sold for a nickel. They went out free, pressed into a customer's hand across a druggist's counter so somebody with sore feet after a long day could try the real thing. That's what a free sample was for, and a little quarter-size tin like this was the whole pitch.