Antique 1930s-60s Glycerin & Rose Water Label 🌹 Waggoner Drug Co., Klamath Falls OR

What Was Glycerin and Rose Water For? 🌹 Antique 1930s-60s Label, Waggoner Drug Co., Klamath Falls OR

Size: 2 1/2" x 1 1/2" ~ Little to no wear.

🌹 Before there was a lotion aisle, you went to your druggist, and he mixed you up a bottle of glycerin and rose water and stuck one of these on it. This little label came from Waggoner Drug Co. on the corner of Ninth and Main in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and it's never been on a bottle. The gum on the back is still there.

🔍 What's On It

Green ink on cream: GLYCERIN AND ROSE WATER, then A PLEASANT AND SOOTHING APPLICATION FOR CHAPPED HANDS, FACE AND LIPS., then Waggoner Drug Co. in a big italic script, PRESCRIPTIONS, and COR. 9TH & MAIN STS., KLAMATH FALLS, ORE. with the little raised TH the old job printers used.

Look close at APPLICATION and you'll see it's printed APPLJCATION, with a J where the I should be. Somebody at the print shop grabbed the wrong piece of type, so every label off that setting has it. I love that. It also tells you these were printed the old way, from hand-set metal type.

🧴 Glycerin and Rose Water

This was the go-to remedy for chapped skin for about a hundred years. Scientific American printed the recipe in 1858: two ounces of glycerin and one of rosewater, rubbed into your hands before bed. A 1922 doctors' reference called equal parts of the two "a favorite perfumed lotion for chapped hands, lips, and face." The wording on this label was a druggists' standard too. By 1912 the same soothing-for-chapped-hands wording was the stock line pharmacists put on their glycerin bottles, and druggists kept boxes of their own gummed labels like this one on hand to stick on whatever they bottled.

💊 Walter Waggoner and His Drugstore

Walter R. Waggoner was a salesman for Coffin-Redington, the big San Francisco wholesale drug house, until 1920, when he came to Klamath Falls to manage the Whitman Drug Co. By the next year he was part owner, and the drug trade papers announced the birth of his son, Walter Benton Waggoner, on August 15, 1921. He was a hunter too. In 1927 he bagged the first deer of the season in the Klamath country, the third year running he'd been first.

Late in 1930 he sold his share of Whitman Drug, bought the stock and fixtures of the Forbes Drug Store No. 2, and moved them into a new store at Ninth and Main as the Waggoner Drug Co. That's the store on this label. It was still there at 839 Main in the 1961, 1963 and 1970 druggists' directories, so these labels could have been printed any time in those years. The same store imprint shows up on a Dramamine label too, and Dramamine didn't exist until 1949.

🌲 Klamath Falls

The town started out in 1867 as Linkville, at the mouth of the Link River, and took the name Klamath Falls in 1893. The Southern Pacific got there in 1909, and in the 1920s Klamath Falls was the fastest-growing city in Oregon, going from about 4,800 people in 1920 to about 16,000 by 1930, right when Walter opened his own store. The Oregon Bank Building went up at Ninth and Main in 1929, finished just as the Depression hit.

📏 Details

• Antique Waggoner Drug Co. glycerin and rose water label, Klamath Falls, Oregon, 1930s-1960s
• Green ink on cream, letterpress, with the APPLJCATION typo
• Gummed back, never applied, New Old Stock
• You'll get one label like the ones shown

🖼️ It's a sweet little piece for a vanity, a bathroom shelf frame, a pharmacy collection, or anybody with family in Klamath Falls.