Antique 1930s In-Step Foot Remedy 🥫 Free Sample Tin In-Step Laboratory Wayne NY Small Apothecary Medicine Tin 1 Inch

What Was In-Step Foot Remedy? 🦶 Antique 1930s Free Sample Tin, In-Step Laboratory, Wayne NY

Size: 1" across ~ Lithographed lid bright and legible.

🦶 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 cataloged: a foot ointment sample, 1/4 by 1 inch, made by the American Can Company - an outfit that started up in 1901 and kept turning out cans until it sold off its packaging side in 1986.

🏭 The In-Step Laboratory

This one has a real paper trail, and it starts with that REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. on the lid. IN-STEP was a foot cream, and its trademark was filed on December 12, 1935 by Clare C. Conrad of Wayne, N.Y., claiming the name had been in use since September 12, 1935. The Patent Office registered it on May 12, 1936, as No. 334,651. That notice is also what dates the tin: it belongs on a lid after May 1936, and this lid still says In-Step Laboratory, the name the drug trade lists used until the firm became In-Step Company around 1940. So these little samples come from the second half of the 1930s.

Here's the part I love. There was a Reverend Clare C. Conrad, a Baptist minister, living in Wayne with his family right then, and as far as I can tell he's our man: a country preacher on Keuka Lake who put his own foot cream on the market in 1935 and registered the name himself. The In-Step Laboratory name turned up in the Elmira paper almost daily that winter of 1936, and In-Step was still being listed in the drug trade books into the late 1940s. He died in 1953.

Old-timers in the medicine-tin hobby will tell you the one-town remedy makers have a pull all their own, and the old story goes that plenty of them started out as the local druggist or a single family mixing up their own formula and putting their town's name on the lid. This one, it turns out, came out of a parsonage.

🏞️ 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 lake brought the visitors, though. The Keuka Hotel went up right on the shore in the mid-1890s, thirty rooms, with guests coming in by steamboat or carriage - the steamboats hauled in the goods too, back before the roads were up to the job - and the fishing on Keuka Lake was a big draw.

🎹 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. Collectors tell one more tale that fits right in here: that some of the little remedy labs of the day worked the resort hotels as hard as the drugstore counter, since a guest who'd been on his feet all day was about the best person alive to hand a free foot-ointment sample. With the Keuka Hotel right there in town, I like to picture a few of these going out that way.

📮 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.