Antique JBL Toilet Articles Box 🧴 Dr. J.B. Lynas & Son Logansport Indiana Advertising Carton

Who Was Dr. J.B. Lynas of Logansport, Indiana? 🧴 An Antique JBL Toilet Articles Box, Dr. J.B. Lynas & Son, Logansport, Indiana

Size: 2" x 7"

A tall sage-green carton with the JBL script monogram in a dark oval band, TOILET ARTICLES, a woman's-head trademark with TRADE MARK on either side, QUALITY FIRST, and Dr. J.B. Lynas & Son, LOGANSPORT, IND. The top flap carries the JBL monogram in a little medallion like a wax seal, and one tuck flap is printed B No. 5. My pictures show both kinds - a flat, unfolded carton blank and one folded up into the box - and these have never held anything.

🩺 Dr. Lynas

James B. Lynas was born February 14, 1835, in Dearborn County, Indiana, started studying medicine at seventeen, and by 1861 was practicing in Logansport. By the 1870s he was mixing and selling his own remedies - Catarrh Remedy, Hoosier Cough Syrup, Ready Relief, Rheumatic Liniment, White Mountain Salve, Egyptian Salve, Liver Pills - and the story in Logansport is that the side business was soon bringing in about $10,000 a year. He added flavoring extracts for the kitchen, then soaps, lotions and perfumes, and the museums still have the labels: the Wellcome Collection in London holds Lynas labels for Crown Hair Tonic, Witch Hazel Glycerine Soap, Imperial Tooth Wash and a compound wintergreen flavor, and the Detroit Historical Society has his Essence of Jamaica Ginger. The doctor died in 1901.

🏢 Dr. J.B. Lynas & Son

His son George took over, and in 1904 the business was incorporated under the name on this box - so the box is 1904 or later. The toilet-article line kept growing: Queen Beauty Toilet Soap, San Remo Toilet Water, Langtry Balm and more, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History has a Lynas toilet soap in its collection. In December 1906 the Logansport paper reported a contract for a new four-story brick and stone block for the company on East Market Street. By 1913, reports put somewhere around 1,400 to 1,500 people connected to the firm, counting the door-to-door agents who carried JBL soaps and tonics from farmhouse to farmhouse, the way the Watkins and Rawleigh men did. The Lynas line was sold door to door from before 1900 into the early 1960s. George, who was also president of the Kiddie Knead bread company in town, died in December 1926, and by 1938 his brother Will had sold the family business; the company was finally dissolved in 1965.

🏞️ Logansport

Logansport sits where the Eel River meets the Wabash in Cass County, a 19th-century canal and river town that grew into a railroad and manufacturing hub. The four-story Lynas building still stands on East Market Street, and local history keeps a detail worth passing on: giant JBL letters were mounted along the top of the building, visible for blocks. Old-timers have long pointed to that rooftop sign as one of downtown Logansport's landmarks from the early 1900s on, the way another town grew up under a courthouse clock. The Cass County Historical Society, founded in 1907, keeps the Lynas story along with the rest of the county's.

🧴 About these

Every one I have is unused - flat blanks and folded boxes from the same stock. Toilet articles was the polite old word for soaps, powders, waters and balms, and this little carton looks right at home on a bathroom shelf, a vanity tray, or in an Indiana history collection. The supply is finite - nobody's printing JBL boxes for the Lynas company again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.