Vintage Flood's Ointment Tin 🏥 NOS 1950s Beggs, Oklahoma Medicine Collectible — Burns, Felons & More

Ideal for Burns, Boils … and Felons: The Ointment Tin from Beggs, Oklahoma 🏥

Read the lid slowly. Burns, boils, cuts, stings, insect bites, sores, scalds — and then felons. Nobody in Beggs was offering to reform the county jail. A felon is an infection in the pad of a fingertip, the kind that throbs, swells and, left alone, turns into an abscess, and Flood's Ointment put it on the label right beside the bee stings.

The name on that label has a paper trail most small-town remedies never got. A federal trademark for FLOOD'S OINTMENT, carrying D. A. Flood's own signature, claims first use in 1907 — the year the Pure Food and Drug Act took effect and the year Oklahoma became a state. It was registered in 1922, renewed for a third time in 1982, and not cancelled until 2002. An ointment out of a Frisco railroad town that counted 855 people in 1910 stayed on the federal register for eighty years. This 1950s tin is part of that run.

🔍 The Tin: What It Prints and How It Is Made

A small round ointment tin, 1.5" x 0.5" ~, with a lift-off lid ringed by a crimped metal rim. The white top of the lid is printed in dark blue, reading from top to bottom:

• BEGGS, OKLAHOMA — arched across the top
• Please buy at your local stores
• FLOOD'S OINTMENT — bold capitals across the center
• Ideal for burns, boils, cuts, stings, insect bites, sores, scalds and felons
• MANY OTHER USES — arched around the bottom

The photographs show the lid lifted away: the underside of the lid and the inside of the base are plain metal, and the tin is empty. One frame sets it beside a quarter so you can judge it in the hand. Condition is new old stock — an empty tin, never used, the printed label intact.

📜 D. A. Flood's Trademark, 1907 to 2002

Most home remedies from towns the size of Beggs left nothing behind but their tins. Flood's Ointment left a federal file. On January 13, 1921, an application went to the U.S. Patent Office for the mark FLOOD'S OINTMENT D A FLOOD, and it was registered on January 3, 1922 as Registration No. 150,361. The record states that the name "D. A. Flood" in the mark is a facsimile of the applicant's signature, that the drawing used a rectangular border, and that no claim was made to the word "Ointment" on its own. Anyone could sell an ointment. Only Flood's was Flood's.

The goods named in that 1921 filing read almost like this lid: "an ointment having medicinal properties and especially useful in the treatment of cuts, burns, boils, stings, insect bites, old sores, felons, scalds, and wounds." Lay the two side by side and the list barely moved over the years between them. The tin says plain "sores" where the filing said "old sores," it leaves out "wounds," and it closes with a promise no trademark examiner asked for: MANY OTHER USES. The signature is gone from this round label too. In its place is a request to the customer — buy it at your local stores.

The file gives the first use of the mark, anywhere and in commerce, as January 1, 1907. The registration ran through its twenty-year terms, with the third renewal recorded in 1982 and a Section 8 filing accepted in 1984. It was cancelled on October 5, 2002, entered in the record as "Cancelled Sec. 8 (10-yr)/Expired Section 9." From claimed first use to cancellation: ninety-five years.

🏛️ 1907: The Year the Rules Changed

The year on Flood's first-use claim was a turning point for every medicine sold in America. The Pure Food and Drug Act, passed by Congress in June 1906 and signed by President Theodore Roosevelt, went into effect on January 1, 1907. It was the first federal law to prohibit the sale of misbranded or adulterated food and drugs in interstate commerce. Enforcement went to the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Chemistry, led by Harvey Wiley, the chemist at the head of the pure food movement, and the law laid the foundation for the Food and Drug Administration.

The same year remade the map under Beggs. Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state on November 16, 1907. Until then Beggs lay in the Creek Nation, Indian Territory, and Okmulgee County did not exist; it was organized at statehood. A remedy claiming its start in 1907 was born on the seam between the territory and the state, and between the patent medicine free-for-all and the first federal drug law.

🚂 Beggs, Oklahoma: A Depot, a Saloon and an Oil Boom

Beggs began with a railroad decision. In 1899, as the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway — the Frisco — built south from Sapulpa through the Creek Nation, Charles Hoffman Beggs, the Frisco vice president in charge of construction, chose a site for a depot and a stock pen. The town took his name. The first business to serve the settlement was a saloon; retail merchants followed, selling to the hog, cattle and horse ranches around it, and Beggs officially became a town when its post office opened on September 15, 1900.

It was frontier country in the legal sense as well. The Dawes Commission, which enrolled Creek citizens and divided tribal land into allotments, held preliminary hearings at Beggs, and the first court held in town, in 1903, took up cases that included livestock theft.

Then came oil. In 1918 production began from a discovery half a mile west of town, and lease buyers and drillers transformed Beggs into a boomtown. The census counted 855 people in 1910 and 2,327 in 1920, while a floating population of around five thousand moved through during the boom. It ran until about 1926. By 1930 the official count had fallen to 1,531, and corn, cotton, pecans and stock raising carried the town again. Beggs sits in northwestern Okmulgee County, thirteen miles northwest of Okmulgee and thirty-one miles south of Tulsa, within the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Reservation.

That is the town arched across the top of this lid: a trademark that claims its start in the railroad-and-ranch years before the wells, a boom that came and went, and a name still printed on tins bound for local store counters in the 1950s.

🖐️ About Those Felons: Pepper, Vinegar and an Egg Yolk

To a modern reader, "felons" on a medicine tin sounds like a punchline. It is a real medical word, still used by doctors today: a felon is a bacterial infection in the pad of the fingertip that brings pain, swelling and redness, and if it is not treated a pus-filled abscess can form. A splinter or a small puncture is enough to start one — the ordinary injuries of anyone who works with their hands.

Long before antibiotics, a felon was treated at the kitchen table, and country newspapers printed the cures. The Forest News of Jefferson, Georgia, ran "a never failing remedy for a felon" on February 17, 1877: a tablespoon of black pepper, a tablespoon of vinegar and the yolk of an egg, simmered together and bound on. The same paper had printed a poultice for the deeper "bone felon" the summer before — whisky, a lump of blue-stone the size of a partridge egg, a lump of alum the same size and the white of one egg, beaten together and applied in three parts.

Then there were the drawing salves, the dark ointments people swore would pull out a splinter or bring a boil to a head. Dermatologists today call them a folk remedy, but the tradition runs deep: there are accounts of sulfonated shale oil being used on wounds as far back as the 1400s, and ichthammol, the best-known drawing ingredient, dates to the 19th century. Flood's label never says what went into the tin. What it does say is where it lived — on the household shelf, one small tin for burns, boils, stings, scalds and the finger that would not heal.

❓ Questions People Ask About Flood's Ointment

What is a felon on an old medicine label?

An infection in the fleshy pad of a fingertip — painful, swollen and red, and able to form an abscess. The word has nothing to do with crime; it was, and still is, the medical name.

Is there any ointment left in this tin?

No. The lid lifts off and the tin is empty, with plain metal inside both the lid and the base.

How big is the Flood's Ointment tin?

1.5" x 0.5" ~, small enough to sit in the palm. One photograph shows it next to a quarter.

When was Flood's Ointment first sold?

The federal trademark file for FLOOD'S OINTMENT D A FLOOD gives January 1, 1907 as the date of first use. The trademark was filed in 1921 and registered in 1922. This tin is from the 1950s.

Is the Flood's Ointment trademark still active?

No. After its third renewal in 1982, the registration was cancelled on October 5, 2002.

Where is Beggs, Oklahoma, and who was it named for?

Beggs is in Okmulgee County, 31 miles south of Tulsa. It is named for Charles Hoffman Beggs (1865–1942), vice president of the Frisco railroad, who chose the depot site in 1899.