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

What Was Flood's Ointment? 🏥 Ideal for Burns, Boils … and Felons: The Ointment Tin from Beggs, Oklahoma

Size: 1 1/2" x 1/2" ~ New old stock, empty, label intact.

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. These 1950s tins are 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: BEGGS, OKLAHOMA arched across the top, "Please buy at your local stores" beneath it, FLOOD'S OINTMENT in bold capitals across the center, then "Ideal for burns, boils, cuts, stings, insect bites, sores, scalds and felons," and MANY OTHER USES arched around the bottom.

They're new old stock: empty, 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.

👨‍⚕️ Dr. Daniel A. Flood

So who was D. A. Flood? A doctor, it turns out. Daniel A. Flood, M.D., was born in 1852, and by 1905 the Beggs paper was praising "the popular and reliable drug store of Dr D A Flood," an experienced physician and pharmacist. He ran the Model Drug Store in Beggs, and that's where Flood's Ointment was born: he swore it had been in use in his business since January 1, 1907.

He had quite a run in Beggs. When Carry Nation came through town in June 1909, the paper noted that at Flood's and Garwood's drug stores she was not allowed to go back of the prescription case. A month later, on July 12, 1909, fire took his drug stock, and his notice in the paper said he was "down and out on account of the fire." He didn't stay down. That September he moved the family to Okmulgee and opened another Model Drug Store at 215 East Main. He ran for Okmulgee County register of deeds in 1910 and lost, 263 votes to 1,138, and in 1911 the Beggs editor was still ribbing him about the tall tales he told of an automobile trip to Colorado that he'd cut short. By 1922 he was advertising in the Okmulgee paper: "For Boils, Cuts, Burns, Scalds, Felons, and Wounds of All Kinds - IT HAS NO EQUAL," fifty cents a jar, with sworn testimonials from customers, one of them headlined "Doctors Would Amputate Thumb." He died in Okmulgee in December 1939, at 87.

🏡 Back Home to Beggs

The ointment outlived him. His daughter Jean German and Myrtle Flood Mitchell renewed the trademark in 1942 and kept it going out of Okmulgee, and the ads ran week after week into the 1950s. Then, in November 1957, the name went back home: it was sold to the Belfords of Beggs, William A., Hugh W. and Robbie F., and in 1967 to W. E. Lee, Jr., a Beggs farmer and rancher, the last owner of record. That's the Beggs printed across the top of this lid. Every ad from the doctor's Okmulgee years sells it by the jar, and this lid says Beggs, so I'd put these little tins in the Belford years, the late 1950s.

🏛️ 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.