Antique 1910s Nitric Acid Poison Label ✨ Drink Chalk & Wall Plaster – Pharmacy Ephemera

Drink Chalk and Wall Plaster? ✨ Antique 1910s Nitric Acid Poison Label, Pharmacy Ephemera

Size: 2 1/2" x 2 1/2"

☠️ A skull and crossbones, POISON in big red letters, and an antidote that'll make you read it twice: if you swallow it, drink chalk or wall plaster. It's an unused druggist's label for nitric acid from Graham & Wortham's Drug Store in Corvallis, Oregon, never pasted on a bottle.

🔍 What's On It

Printed all in red on cream inside a ruled border: NITRIC ACID, the skull and crossbones, POISON, and then the directions, word for word:

External—Wipe off the acid gently, immediately flood surface with water, using soap freely, then cover with moist magnesia or baking soda. Internal—Drink a teaspoonful or more of magnesia, chalk, whiting or wall plaster, or small pieces of soap softened with water, in milk, mucilage, or raw egg-white. Call Physician.

And at the bottom, GRAHAM & WORTHAM'S DRUG STORE, CORVALLIS, PHONE 48, OREGON. That two-digit phone number is from back when a town's whole telephone list was short. The back is blank.

🧪 Why Chalk and Plaster?

It sounds crazy now, but there was a method to it. Nitric acid is a powerful acid, and every item on that list was meant to fight it the same way: magnesia, chalk, whiting (powdered chalk), baking soda and old lime plaster are all alkaline, so the idea was to neutralize the acid fast with whatever was in the house, and the milk, mucilage and raw egg white were there to coat and soothe. Druggists kept labels like this on hand and pasted one on each bottle of poison they sold, with their own store's name at the bottom.

💊 Graham & Wortham's

The names at the bottom belong to two real Corvallis druggists. Henry Wortham, a Mississippi man, was in town by 1879, when he ran for city marshal and got all of 23 votes. Pharmacy suited him better: he spent 35 years in the drug business in Corvallis. His partner's side goes back even further. A Graham had a Corvallis drug store by 1872, and Thomas Graham, druggist, was the Benton County treasurer in 1879.

By the fall of 1892 the store was Graham & Wortham. That December a boot and shoe shop opened right next door, and in 1906 Graham & Wortham's was where you picked up season tickets for the Corvallis Lyceum Course. Wortham died in 1921, and the Graham & Wortham name was still on a list of Corvallis stores in 1925. Nothing on the label is dated, so the store's name is the clock: somewhere between 1892 and the mid-1920s or a little after.

🏞️ Corvallis, Heart of the Valley

Corvallis sits where the Marys River meets the Willamette. Joseph C. Avery staked his claim there in 1845 and laid out a town he called Marysville, but there was already a Marysville in California on the same stage route, so on December 20, 1853, the territorial legislature renamed it Corvallis, Latin for "heart of the valley." It was briefly the capital of Oregon Territory in 1855, it's the county seat of Benton County, and it's home to Oregon Agricultural College, today's Oregon State University.

I haven't come across another Graham & Wortham nitric acid label for sale.

📏 Details

• Antique Nitric Acid POISON label, skull and crossbones, full antidote directions
• Graham & Wortham's Drug Store, Corvallis, Oregon, Phone 48
• Red on cream, about 2 1/2" x 2 1/2", unused, New Old Stock
• You'll get one label like the ones shown

🖼️ It's a great little conversation piece for a pharmacist, a chemistry teacher, a Beaver fan or anybody from Corvallis, and it looks sharp framed with an old apothecary bottle.