Antique 1910s Sulphuric Acid Poison Label ✨ Pharmacy Ephemera – Corvallis Oregon

How Did a Pharmacy Warn You About Sulphuric Acid? ✨ Antique 1910s Poison Label, Corvallis Oregon

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

☠️ SULPHURIC ACID, spelled the old way with a "ph," a grinning skull and crossbones, and POISON in big red capitals. This little druggist's label came from Graham & Wortham's Drug Store in Corvallis, Oregon, phone number 48, and it was never pasted on a bottle.

🔍 What's On It

Red-orange on cream inside a ruled border: SULPHURIC ACID, the skull and crossbones beside POISON, and the treatment in fine print. For the skin, wipe the acid off gently, flood it with water and plenty of soap, then cover it with moist magnesia or baking soda. If it was swallowed, take a teaspoonful or more of magnesia, chalk, whiting or wall plaster, or a little soap softened with water, in milk, mucilage or raw egg white, and Call Physician. At the bottom: GRAHAM & WORTHAM'S DRUG STORE, CORVALLIS, PHONE 48, OREGON. The back is blank.

Every remedy on it is something alkaline or soothing that a household would have on hand, the thinking being to neutralize the acid as fast as possible until the doctor got there.

⚗️ Oil of Vitriol

Sulphuric acid is one of the oldest chemicals there is. Medieval alchemists called it "oil of vitriol," because they made it by roasting green vitriol, an iron sulfate, in an iron retort. In 1746 John Roebuck worked out how to make it in big lead-lined chambers, and that lead chamber process ran the business for nearly two centuries. By the time this label was printed, sulphuric acid was everywhere, in fertilizer, in metal work and in the lead-acid batteries in the new automobiles, and a small-town drugstore sold it by the bottle with a label just like this one.

💊 Who Were Graham & Wortham?

Two real Corvallis druggists, and the old Corvallis papers are full of them. Graham was the senior name: a Graham was running a Corvallis drug store by 1872, and in 1879 Thomas Graham, druggist, was trading as Graham, Hamilton & Co. while he served as Benton County treasurer. Henry Wortham came from Mississippi and was in town by 1879. The Graham & Wortham name turns up in the fall of 1892, and from then on it sits under ad after ad in the Corvallis Gazette and Times for every patent cure of the day.

Wortham gave the firm 35 years, and when he died in March 1921, at 64, the Portland paper noted he'd never married. Two years before that, a smooth-talking stranger stung the store for $10 with a bad check, even though the police had warned every drug store in town to watch for him. The store was still on a list of Corvallis businesses in 1925.

No date is printed on the label, but with the store trading as Graham & Wortham from 1892 into at least the mid-1920s, it comes from somewhere in those years.

🏞️ Corvallis

Corvallis is the Benton County seat, where the Marys River runs into the Willamette, and its name is Latin for "heart of the valley." It was the capital of Oregon Territory for a short stretch in 1855, and it's the home of Oregon Agricultural College, now Oregon State University.

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

📏 Details

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

🖼️ Pair it with its nitric acid cousin from the same drugstore, or frame it for a pharmacy, a chemistry classroom or a mad scientist's lab.