6 Prize Medal Oil of Peppermint

As discussed above, the early history of the peppermint oil industry featured serial migration and the development of a strong family business network that gave Ashfield native Henry Ranney a competitive advantage over his rivals. The second part of the story overlaps significantly with the first, taking place primarily in New York and Michigan during the middle years of the nineteenth century. It is mainly the story of Hiram and Leman Hotchkiss, brothers who dominated the local business, created a national brand, and declared themselves peppermint kings. Like Ashfield’s family-dominated peppermint business, the Hotchkiss enterprise was operated by two brothers and their families. Unlike the Ranney operation, however, the Hotchkiss peppermint business involved a shift toward modern business practices that aligned with the Hotchkiss brothers’ predilections for conflict and controversy. Although born and raised in rural western New York, the brothers operated an international business that included essential oil distilling, brokerage, branding, exporting, and banking—but also bickering, name-calling, and quite a bit of litigation. Their story illustrates the difficult economic transition of the nineteenth century and suggests Hiram and Leman Hotchkiss viewed themselves not as peripheral players in a changing world of trade and finance dominated by New York City but as formidable competitors at the center of their own commercial network.

Peppermint oil production in western New York began in the 1810s following the introduction of peppermint roots by the peddler Archibald Burnett. By the time the Ranneys had begun settling in Phelps, many of their former neighbors were already living in the area, raising peppermint, distilling it, and shipping the oil to Ashfield for the peddler trade, and to Boston and New York City for use in medicines, confections, and cordials. But this is not the history of peppermint remembered by contemporary western New Yorkers. The story of peppermint in Phelps and Lyons has been retold to put the western New York region and the Hotchkiss brothers at the center, often by writing out anything that happened before New York’s peppermint kings ascended their thrones.

A 1903 newspaper article, for example, described Hiram Hotchkiss as merely a small-time storekeeper in 1841 to emphasize the way his fortunes grew when he “discovered” peppermint oil, and it included an account of Yankee peddler “Jim” Burnett dickering with Phelps farmers over small quantities of oil.^[1] The 1903 account became a key source for a charming but inaccurate article published in Yankee Magazine in 1957, and it is still typical of the error-filled storytelling perpetuated in commemorative celebrations such as Lyons’s annual “Peppermint Days” and interpretive materials at Lyons’s H. G. Hotchkiss Museum and the Museum of Wayne County History. Local accounts not only give Hotchkiss undue credit for developing the New York peppermint oil business, they understate his prominence in regional business before his entry into the essential oil trade. Local histories of Phelps and Lyons, New York, uncritically build on these accounts, giving credit to the Hotchkiss brothers as the originators and first kings of the peppermint oil business. In fact, Hiram and Leman Hotchkiss originated little but rather were important innovators who created one of America’s first globally recognized brands and changed the way essential oils were marketed.

The Hotchkiss brothers were sons of a western New York merchant named Leman Hotchkiss and his wife, Chloe Gilbert, who had arrived in Phelps in 1811, about the same time as peppermint. Like the Ranneys, the Hotchkiss family was a widely distributed clan, whose first home in America had been in southern Connecticut, near New Haven. Leman Hotchkiss had moved to Phelps from Oneida Castle, about eighty-five miles to the east. Leman’s brothers William and Calvin had also migrated to western New York about the same time, becoming a Niagara County judge and a wealthy landowner, respectively, in Lewiston, near Niagara Falls. Twenty-six-year-old Leman opened a gristmill on Flint Creek, which he named the Eagle Mill after noticing a bald eagle perched on its roof. The Eagle Mill prospered, and Leman opened a general store that became the region’s largest, reputedly doing more than a hundred thousand dollars in annual business in the early 1810s.^[2]

In 1816, Leman opened a second store, in Lyons, about ten miles north of Phelps, and then opened a third store, in nearby Newark, in 1822, sending his twelve-year-old son, Hiram, to work there as clerk while he trained his younger son, Leman Beecher, at the Phelps store. When the elder Leman died unexpectedly in 1826, his two sons took over the family businesses, while their mother, Chloe, and their uncle William managed Leman’s substantial estate. Chloe and William retained control of the estate well into the 1830s, long after Hiram and Leman B. had reached majority. The Hotchkiss brothers probably received their first exposure to litigation and to trading in distressed assets while watching the ongoing administration of their father’s complicated estate.^[3]

The brothers learned the milling and mercantile trades well. By 1829, eighteen-year-old Hiram, his sixteen-year-old brother Leman, and their cousin William T. Hotchkiss, were partners in a general store and owned two mills in Phelps and a third mill in Seneca Falls. The combined capacity of the Hotchkiss mills was more than five hundred barrels of flour daily.^[4] The opening of the Erie Canal, completed in 1825, provided the Hotchkiss mills with a ready market for flour in New York City. The Hotchkisses partnered with fellow western New Yorkers at the prominent Manhattan brokerage firm of Dows and Cary.

Ira B. Cary’s first business had been shaving shingles on the banks of the Mohawk River during western New York’s long winters and floating them to market in the city each spring. When New York’s governor, DeWitt Clinton, began constructing the Erie Canal in 1817, Cary and his partner, John Dows, immediately recognized the opportunity and became the first shippers to operate canal boats on the new waterway.^[5] Dows and Cary opened offices in Albany and New York, and they were running fifteen boats on the canal by 1829.^[6]

In the early 1830s, the Dows and Cary firm was one of the leading flour commission merchants in New York. The firm sold flour shipped to it by merchant millers like the Hotchkisses, taking a commission on each transaction as well as charging fees for shipping and storage. As their business expanded, Dows and Cary also advanced money on inventories, charging interest, and discounted notes for its upstate clients. Discounting was a method of converting debt obligations to cash by selling promissory notes to financial institutions at a discount from their face value that reflected the interest. Discounting involved risk because the discounting firm was liable if the maker of the note defaulted. David Dows, John’s younger brother, joined Dows and Cary in 1833 at the age of nineteen and became increasingly involved in managing the firm in the early 1840s during his brother’s illness prior to John’s death in 1844. As a young businessman of similar background, raised in Saratoga, apprenticed in Utica, and roughly the same age as the Hotchkiss brothers, David Dows was the firm’s main contact with Hiram and Leman.^[7]

By the mid-1830s, travel and shipping time from Buffalo to New York City had been halved, from twenty days to ten. More important, freight costs fell by a factor of twenty, from one hundred dollars a ton to five dollars. More than 150,000 tons of freight was shipped through the canal to Albany annually, including nearly three-quarters of a million barrels of flour.^[8] Although the Hotchkiss brothers’ shipments were a small part of this total, they were not insignificant. In December 1842, for example, David Dows wrote Hiram to acknowledge “receipt of your flour, 8442 barrels 948 half-barrels . . . amounting to $3915.76.”^[9] Dows also warned the brothers that the company had already advanced Hotchkiss more than ten thousand dollars on the season’s flour shipments, adding: “It is quite certain we shall need some remittance and you may as well send at once say $2,000.” A week later, Dows wrote again to say he had sold 1,388 barrels and one hundred half barrels of Hotchkiss flour for $6,174.18. The proceeds would be applied against Dows and Cary’s advances, but Dows noted that he still had more than three thousand barrels on hand; “the demand is quite small generally.”^[10]

A year later, Dows wrote Hiram to warn him that his balance due had risen to $32,840.44, and that “against this we have in hand unaccounted for 4993 barrels and 445 half barrels.”^[11] Although at 1843 flour prices the inventory held by Dows and Cary would easily cover the debt, David Dows’s concern that the flour was not accounted for shows the seeds of a disagreement. Dows expected to have his advances repaid when the notes associated with them came due, typically in sixty days. Hotchkiss, on the other hand, felt no urgency, believing that the value of the flour held in New York was adequate security to extend the debt. Hotchkiss expected to roll over his paper into new notes, adding interest and fees to the principal carried forward. After a few more months, Dows had sold off another 3,600 barrels worth nearly twenty thousand dollars, and the proceeds had paid down the outstanding balance.^[12] Although Hiram’s perspective differed from Dows’s, it was defensible for a product that sold quickly and at fairly consistent prices. If Dows wanted his money faster, Hiram reasoned, all he had to do was sell the flour. As we will see, Hiram’s assumptions regarding a ready market and stable prices were not so easily transferable to the peppermint oil business.

As merchants in Phelps in the 1820s, the Hotchkiss brothers were surely aware that families such as the Burnetts, the Vandermarks, and the Ranneys were all deeply involved in growing peppermint, distilling oil, and selling their output to merchants in Ashfield, Boston, and New York City. A publicity campaign begun by Hiram Hotchkiss and proudly carried on by his descendants after his death has, however, distorted the facts to the point where newspapers, regional historians, museums, and even a published history of the peppermint oil industry incorporate the misinformation Hotchkiss had originally promulgated to boost his essential oil sales.

According to the H. G. Hotchkiss Company’s retelling of the peppermint story, sometime in the 1830s farmers began taking peppermint oil “with their wheat to the Hotchkiss store where Hiram accepted jugs-full in trade for goods. The supply grew until there were 1,200 pounds stashed in the store cellar.” Hiram drove a wagonload of oil down to New York City, says the story, only to discover that American oil was considered unmarketable—especially when compared to the premium oil produced in Mitcham, England. Undeterred, Hotchkiss discovered that the arbiters of quality peppermint oil resided in Germany, “bottled some, shipped it to Hamburg and then waited.” After a long wait, Hiram was informed that “his peppermint oil was declared by Hamburg authorities as the purest in the world.” So, discovering “there were no large markets in America for the product,” Hotchkiss decided to challenge the formidable international competition.^[13]

While the Hotchkiss account exaggerated the details that favored Hiram, there are some important elements of truth. Hiram’s first international sale consisted of an unsolicited bulk shipment of peppermint oil to Hamburg, Germany, around 1839. The tale of this first shipment is told in several local histories and repeated in James E. Landing’s agricultural history American Essence, which to a great extent is an uncritical compilation of such stories. The Hamburg shipment is considered the beginning of the H. G. Hotchkiss Company, which dates its establishment from 1839—although, as we will see, the changing nature of the Hotchkiss brothers’ business and the ongoing, semisecret partnership between Hiram and Leman makes setting precise dates problematic.^[14] Hiram shipped his oil in metal containers marked “Peppermint Oil from Wayne County, U.S.A. Guaranteed Pure by H. G. Hotchkiss.” After waiting several months for a decision on the quality of their oil, the brothers received an acknowledgment that their shipment had been judged suitable for Hamburg customers. The notice included an order for more oil than Hiram had originally shipped. The Hamburg endorsement of Hotchkiss’s oil was considered a turning point for Hotchkiss’s business, although Hiram had already begun moving his business from Phelps to Lyons in these years to take better advantage of the canal for shipping flour, and he began acquiring properties in foreclosure after the failure of the Bank of Lyons in 1842. And there was a final motivation for Hiram to move to Lyons. In 1833, he had married a Lyons resident, Mary Ashley, daughter of the town’s physician, who had migrated from Deerfield, Massachusetts, around the turn of the century. Hiram and Mary settled on a large estate known as the Hecox mansion in the center of Lyons, where they had twelve children.

Hiram’s brother, Leman, remained in Phelps, where he married Lucretia Oaks in 1844 and began raising three children with her before her death in 1855. After losing his wife, Leman tried unsuccessfully to scale back his activities as part of the partnership with Hiram and to focus more on his own business and less on supporting his brother’s. Leman and Hiram officially ended their partnership in the essential oils business in 1855, but their business interactions only became more complicated. The convoluted family-business dynamics of the Hotchkisses are examined in detail in a later chapter.

There is also truth in the assertion that there was not much opportunity for domestic sales of essential oils for the Hotchkiss brothers until they found a market not dominated by their neighbors the Ranneys. Shipment of peppermint oil from Phelps to Massachusetts for the peddler trade was controlled by an earlier generation of men such as Roswell Ranney in Phelps, working in coordination with Henry Ranney in Ashfield. Although Henry later stated he knew Hiram and his business practices, there is no evidence the Hotchkisses ever made any significant inroads into this older peppermint business or supplied peppermint oil to Ashfield. Hiram and Leman did, however, take advantage of opportunities to buy oil from local farmers and ship it to New York City on the canal, along with their flour.

In an era before rolling mills and the grain elevators invented in 1842 in Buffalo by another Erie Canal shipper, Joseph Dart, flour from different sources was readily distinguishable on the basis of quality.^[15] Historian William Cronon has described the standardization and commodification of flour in the later nineteenth century, and the corresponding decrease in the power of farmers relative to processors. But when the Hotchkiss brothers were merchant millers, a local miller with solid connections to urban brokers had considerable power in the local market. The standard for acceptable flour was relatively easy to achieve, and the processes employed were well-known. By all accounts, the Hotchkiss mills produced quality flours.

Unlike staples such as wheat and corn that required postharvest processing by millers who added value, peppermint was traditionally distilled on the farm. Buying already-distilled peppermint oil complicated the Hotchkiss brothers’ ambition to differentiate the end product based on quality. The Hotchkisses branded their farina and other mill products. Similarly, they wanted to create a peppermint oil brand they could sell at premium prices. It took the brothers several years to determine how selling oil differed from selling flour.

Because they focused on selling oil in wholesale quantities to makers of medicines or confections, Hiram and Leman needed to convince their customers that not all peppermint oil was equal. Their innovation was to build a brand name associated with consistency and quality. Although both brothers accumulated several hundred acres of land over the years and grew some peppermint of their own, most of the essential oil sold under Hotchkiss labels was grown and distilled by independent farmers, first in western New York and later in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. The development of a Hotchkiss brand thus hinged on strict quality control and on effective marketing. The main focus of the Hotchkiss brothers’ effort was a decades-long campaign to raise the prestige of their peppermint oil by comparing it with foreign oil rather than American competitors.

Since peppermint’s earliest days, the Hotchkiss brothers claimed, British peppermint oil had always been considered vastly superior. It was true that British peppermint oil produced in Mitcham, England, where the plant had first been commercially grown sold at prices three or four times greater than those received for American oils.^[16] British peppermint oil was considered the world’s best, but its production was also limited by the availability of farmland in the area surrounding Mitcham. Demand was increasing both in Britain and on the Continent. The price difference between scarce British peppermint oil facing high demand and abundant American oil may have been due more to supply and demand than to quality. Hiram and Leman recognized that there might be a substantial foreign market for Hotchkiss peppermint oil that their American competitors had not yet tried to serve. The brothers realized that if they could convince foreign buyers that Hotchkiss peppermint oil was comparable to British oil, they could sell their product in foreign markets at much higher prices and use the prestige derived from that success to command premium prices in America. They also understood that if they convinced Americans that the premium paid for British oil was due to its higher quality, then any success they had selling their own peppermint oil overseas would set them apart from any other American brand.

Throughout his career, Hiram Hotchkiss had an unfailing confidence in his unique personal capability to distinguish the quality of peppermint oil. He considered himself an infallible judge, easily able to spot oils tainted with weeds during distilling or deliberately adulterated afterward. When he grew his own peppermint, he paid crowds of farmworkers to hoe his peppermint fields three or four times a season, to ensure that at harvest time there would be minimal contamination of the mint hay. The difficulty he often faced was convincing other people of his expertise, especially when this insistence frequently took the form of claiming that his own oil was obviously superior or that a rival was willing to sell oil for less because it was old, of poor quality, or had been cut with turpentine. Although apothecaries and medicine manufacturers remained an important market for Hotchkiss oil, a rapidly growing confectionary market offered the Hotchkisses their most significant opportunity. Mass-produced brand-name candies would not reach consumers for another half century, but by the middle of the nineteenth century Americans were developing a sweet tooth, and small candy-making concerns operated in every city. Although Hiram focused most of his energy on developing a distribution channel through commission agents and later exporters, confectioners were his target clientele. A twenty-one-ounce bottle of peppermint oil, he announced, would flavor a thousand pounds of candy.

Despite Hiram’s claims, there really was no objective standard for peppermint oil quality. And sometimes his own product did not meet the standards Hiram claimed for it. In February 1843, for example, David Dows wrote to Hiram acknowledging receipt of nine crates containing fifty-three cans of peppermint oil, valued at $1916.63. Unfortunately, Dows reported, the oil had been contaminated with water, which had rusted the insides of the containers and then frozen during shipment, bursting some of the cans.^[17] Luckily for Hotchkiss, occasional quality issues with the peppermint oil did not prevent Dows from doing business with the brothers, and in August 1843 the two companies entered a joint venture to operate a flour mill in Seneca Falls.^[18] The soft demand for Hotchkiss’s peppermint oil, however, did cause Dows and Cary to regard the product more skeptically than it did flour. In February 1844, David Dows wrote to Hiram: “We have had a number of applications for HG&LBH oil but as yet none take hold.”^[19] Hotchkiss believed Dows and Cary did not push his peppermint oil as aggressively as it ought. For its part, Dows and Cary was frustrated that the oil, which Hotchkiss expected the company to advance money on as readily as flour, languished in its warehouses. Later in the year, when the peppermint oil had been sold and Hiram had shipped another batch, Dows reacted to the request from Hiram to begin advertising his oil before Dows and Cary had received it: “It will not answer for us to advertise the oil till it arrives. It would be unpleasant to advertise an article and have a purchaser call and have to say to him we have not got it but expect to have this.”^[20] Hiram responded, “When the 21 boxes oil peppermint arrive containing 1820 5/16 pounds please advertise . . . that you have just received 89 cans of pure oil of peppermint from Ontario and Wayne County containing 1820 pounds and that the same will be warranted by you to be pure and unadulterated and that same is believed to be equal to the best English oil.” Hiram noted that he wanted Dows to try to sell the oil in a single lot because he suspected that people buying oil in small parcels would be more likely to adulterate the product to “stretch” it.^[21]

Hiram’s suspicions of adulteration were not limited to buyers of small batches, however. A few days later, Hiram wrote to Dows again: “We notice in the Journal of Commerce of the second instant and Express of the sixth instant the sale of 2500 pounds pure oil peppermint at $2.63 1/2 per pound. This is no doubt the Wells lot and it was probably sold to Miller who no doubt will soon adulterate it.” Phillip Wells was a peppermint oil broker with whom Hiram later worked closely, but Hiram suspected anyone who beat him on any deal. Hiram told Dows, “We believe our lot nearly the only lot Pure in your city. We want you to keep our lot of oil advertised till sold.”^[22] Dows responded with a clipping of the advertisement he had placed, which unfortunately had failed to bring any buyers.^[23] Three months later, Hiram wrote to Dows again: “Our oil of peppermint does not seem to work off satisfactorily but is worth all we ask for it and why it does not sell is a mystery.”^[24] Dows responded, “Miller says he sold his oil bought last fall without touching it. There appears to be no disposition on the part of any of the oilmen to buy . . . we do not believe a sale could be made here at over 16 shillings [$2.00].”^[25]

Hiram’s patience with Dows began to fray. The day after he wrote to Dows, Hiram wrote to an exporter named George Morewood proposing a consignment deal to ship peppermint oil directly to Liverpool. “We are extensive dealers in the article and our object in making shipments to England would be to get the value (if possible) of a pure and unadulterated article, and if we could do so our shipments to England would be quite large, say about 5000 pounds annually.” Hiram noted that a pound of American peppermint oil usually sold in England for between eight to twelve shillings ($1.00 to $1.50), while British oil commanded at least thirty shillings ($3.75). “There can be no doubt in our minds,” he concluded, that a pure article of American oil is equal in value to the English. We would like to have your opinion in regard to this matter and whether your partners in England would be able to discriminate and get for a pure article its real value?”^[26] In May Morewood agreed to advance Hiram $342 for 120 twenty-one-ounce bottles of peppermint oil, which would be used as samples to attract customers in England.^[27] Dows and Cary continued to insist, “Nothing new in oil of peppermint, had no calls for it.”^[28] Several weeks later, David Dows reiterated his position: “We have had one applicant for oil since we wrote you, but he would not talk about it at your price and such has been the case with all that have applied.”^[29]

The Hotchkiss brothers soon discovered they were no longer Dows and Cary’s only contacts in the peppermint oil business. Leman wrote to Hiram in late summer 1845 that “Cary says he has just received a letter from a Gent in Michigan (White Pigeon) which says he shall during September have in about 6000 pounds oil of peppt & wants an advance of 8/- per pound.”^[30] A few days later, Leman reported about “a sample of oil belonging to Hale which old Ranney took to David Dows and requested him to ascertain the most he could get for it.”^[31] Alfred Hale was a peppermint farmer in Alloway, a village along the road between Phelps and Lyons. Although less famous than the Hotchkiss brothers, Hale and his sometime partner, banker William Parshall (whose son DeWitt married one of Hiram’s daughters), were also successful peppermint oil merchants. The illustration of Hale’s farm included in an 1877 History of Wayne County contains an inset showing workers loading mint hay into a still.^[32] And according to Leman’s information, Hale was cooperating with “Old” Roswell Ranney, who also had a working relationship with David Dows.

This was the last straw for Hiram Hotchkiss. Receiving a letter acknowledging the arrival of his samples in London, Hiram turned his attention to the problem of cracking the British market.^[33] He immediately wrote to Morewood to request “the best sample of English oil of peppermint they can procure in London. . . . We wish to compare it with some we have on hand. We feel sanguine that we hold an article equal to the best English.” Hiram then added a postscript, soliciting his agents “to inquire of your friends in London whether we could in their opinion pack our oil menth pip in any more desirable size bottles or any better quality of bottles in our recent shipment for their market?”^[34] Morewood responded, “A sample of the best peppermint oil grown here will be sent to you. It comes from Mitcham. The superiority arises from the soil we think. The cultivation has been attempted in other parts of England without the same success which attends at Mitcham.”^[35]

Morewood also mentioned he did not think the bottles were an issue, but Hiram held on to the idea that distinctive packaging would help him differentiate his oil. Although many histories of marketing focus on the advertising of products to attract the attention of consumers, before a brand could be advertised it had to be created. For example, when the sons of beverage merchant John Cadbury turned their attention exclusively to selling packaged cocoa in the early 1860s, they began creating a recognizable brand. According to historian of advertising Mark Tungate, Cadbury “started packaging their products, not simply to protect them and preserve their quality, but also to establish their quality by the use of the company’s own name. Instead of leaving it to the retailer to determine which company’s products a customer would buy, they began to build their own relationship with the customer.”^[36] Ultimately his focus on packaging led to Hiram shipping his oil in twenty-one-ounce cobalt blue bottles from the nearby Clyde Glass Works. The bottles, which each contained one pound five ounces of peppermint oil, had originally been designed to carry ink and had convenient fluted spouts. To guarantee his oil against the adulteration he insisted was so rife among his competitors, Hiram sealed his bottles with labels bearing his signature. In addition to his peppermint oil, Hiram shipped five hundred barrels of flour to Liverpool. The Irish famine was driving up the price of flour in England, and Hiram got five dollars a barrel for his shipment.^[37] In early winter, Leman wrote: “The Brittania [sic] arrived about 5 minutes before the cars left . . . there is great excitement in England and Ireland about wheat and flour and potatoes. . . . Starvation seems inevitable. All excitement in England . . . therefore buy all the wheat you can. . . . We have about 450 bbls in Lockville—get it shipped.”^[38]

In addition to handling the brothers’ flour exports, Morewood managed to sell the sample bottles of Hotchkiss peppermint oil for seventeen shillings [$2.125], which he informed Hiram was much better than the seven shillings [$.875] most other American peppermint oil received in London.^[39] Hotchkiss continued negotiating with Morewood, pushing him to take shipments of a thousand pounds of oil packed in bottles and at the same time insisting on a price of at least sixteen shillings [$2.00].^[40] Morewood countered that he could advance no more than $1.50 per pound, and then only on the condition that Hotchkiss ceased shipping any additional oil to other British brokers.^[41] His dealers, Morewood said, had been embarrassed to discover they were not the only source of Hotchkiss peppermint oil in their market. A few months later, Hiram again asked Morewood to take a shipment of a thousand pounds of peppermint oil and also asked Morewood to ship him a supply of the best Mitcham peppermint roots.^[42] Hotchkiss was planning on cornering the peppermint oil market and wanted to plant only the best peppermint while everyone else was plowing under his old mint.

Hotchkiss planted the Mitcham roots he received, but there was not a widespread transition from the older peppermint, which had also originated in Mitcham, to the new. This may have been due to the fact that Hiram immediately set about trying to reduce the overall planting of peppermint, and that he and Leman were both reducing their focus on peppermint culture in favor of aggregating and marketing oil produced by others. They both owned substantial acreages, and Hiram seems to have introduced the practice of flooding his peppermint fields in the winter to protect the roots from excessive cold.^[43] But by the mid-1840s, the brothers were more interested in cornering the peppermint oil market than in improving peppermint cultivation.

In late 1845, Leman had written his brother from Phelps with alarming reports of his conversations with “Old Ranney” about Roswell Ranney’s recent trips to Boston and New York City. Hiram suspected that Ranney had considered trying to corner the peppermint oil market, which led him to consider trying it himself. In 1846, peppermint farmers produced nearly forty thousand pounds of oil in western New York, ten thousand pounds in Michigan, three thousand pounds in northeastern Ohio, and nearly a thousand pounds in Indiana.^[44] Working with information from his British contacts, Hiram estimated that the next year’s demand in European markets would be about twelve thousand pounds. In order to reduce the oversupply of American peppermint oil to a level where the Hotchkiss brothers could meet European demand at a reasonable profit, Hiram partnered with a New York brokerage called E. C. Patterson and Company, to pay Ohio, Michigan, and New York peppermint growers to plow under their fields.^[45] In one of the earliest recorded attempts at market cornering, Patterson and his men contracted with 128 of the 210 peppermint farmers in New York, paying $19,393.35 to take about a thousand acres out of production for two years, beginning in March 1847.^[46] Growers were allowed to keep only as many “seed” roots as they would need to replant after the contract expired, and they agreed to sell all their remaining oil to the partnership for $2.50 per pound.^[47] By June, Patterson reported that his agents had reduced New York and Michigan plantings substantially and added, “We have contracted for nearly the whole Ohio crop.”^[48] Many peppermint growers in Michigan ignored Patterson and his agents and continued supplying peppermint oil to meet Henry Ranney’s needs in Ashfield. Hiram seems to have ignored the Ashfield-oriented peppermint oil market in his calculations, and the Ranney brothers never mention the Hotchkiss-Patterson plan in their correspondence, suggesting that the cornering attempt was more successful in New York and Ohio than in Michigan. Patterson may have exaggerated his agents’ successes with western growers in his correspondence with Hiram; and even if his reports were accurate, Michigan production rebounded quickly when the contracts expired. But the cornering was a success in Ohio, where farmers never replanted. By 1850 Ohio had ceased being a significant producer of peppermint.

Rumors of Hotchkiss and Patterson’s activities began to circulate in England, and in midsummer Leman wrote to his brother from New York City, where he had met with Morewood. Rather than selling peppermint oil at current prices, the brothers wanted to hold it until scarcity drove up its value. “The price must advance to $3 ½ to $4 I think—perhaps to $10,” Leman wrote. The brothers decided to pay Morewood a fee of one hundred dollars to hold their oil in inventory for an additional four months and to release it only after the conclusion of the next harvest.^[49] But their control over the market was not as absolute as the brothers imagined. Hiram approached Stevens Trott and Company in Boston with an unsolicited sample of peppermint oil, which he assured them “will compare in quality to any ever sent to Boston.” Hiram had gone on to boast, in the draft of his letter, that “we understand the article is mainly monopolized for about two years to come by a New York house,” but he scratched out this section. He concluded, “If you could sell this lot say about 200 pounds at $4 per pound . . . you may do so and we will forward the oil without delay . . . although we are inclined to think the article will go much higher before 1 January next.”^[50] Stevens Trott replied that it had received Hotchkiss’s sample and would show it to its largest buyer but noted, “This article has receded in value as rapidly as it rose and would not bring above $2.50 today.”^[51] A couple of weeks later, Hiram received a telegram from Stevens Trott reporting that the buyer would take one hundred pounds of oil for twenty-eight shillings ($3.50). Hiram accepted the terms, remarking: “We are inclined to think oil will go to 40/- per pound before 1 January next but we want to realize on part of ours immediately and we may be mistaken about its advancing so much.”^[52]

E. C. Patterson continued to assure Hotchkiss that “the news from abroad are very favorable, considerable view having taken place in London, all is working right, it only requires time to carry the price very high, both there and here.”^[53] The Ranneys and their network were still very active at this time, however, both in New York and in Michigan. This was the summer Henry Ranney received the letter from his cousin Frederick mentioned previously, looking for payment on a recent shipment of oil.^[54] And in the fall, Leman wrote to Hiram from Phelps that the Ranneys’ longtime associate “Mr. Belden [Belding] returned from New York today. . . . I think he wants to buy some oil Peppt . . . he seems to think 3 ½ is all that it is worth and said he would like to buy a few hundred pounds. . . . I do not like the idea of selling to old Belden but still we must do so if we cannot get along for money we must have.”^[55] A few weeks later, Leman wrote from New York City, “I have been round to ascertain the present value pept oil and I can assure you that there is no price to this article.” He said he did not believe oil could be sold at even three dollars, so “if you can sell our oil at 3 1/2 dont hesitate a moment.” He said he had visited Morewood and authorized the broker to sell enough of the Hotchkiss brothers’ oil to pay the advances coming due. Leman concluded his letter with the suggestion, “Suppose you go & see old Belden it seems to me he would like 3 or 400 pounds.”^[56] By the end of the year, he announced: “Pept oil is very dull, everybody appears to be afraid of it. I think I shall ship 800# in Morewood’s hands and order it sold in London at once. My opinion is decidedly in favor of settling & not wait.”^[57]

As more time passed, Hiram’s British agents began to lose confidence in Hiram’s ability to limit the supply of peppermint oil and drive up the price. Hiram suggested to E. C. Patterson that the partners should make an arrangement “with some new house in the city of New York not now at all interested in oil of peppermint . . . and that holders agree to deposit all their pure oil and let this house advance in money or their credits to the extent of 12/- per pound . . . then have all sales made at a certain and fixed price.” Hiram concluded, “We have all had so much trouble that it seems like a pity if nothing favorable should grow out of it. A concert of action would give tone and character to the market that would in my opinion be beneficial to all parties.”^[58] He was playing for time: this was the substantially the same deal he had already made with Morewood, and the exporters were no longer receptive to his argument. “You cannot with any degree of fairness,” Morewood wrote, “ask us to hold the mint any longer under cash advances. . . . When you consider the length of time we have been over advanced, the commission you are to pay is but little consideration. We therefore must settle a sufficient quantity to cover our advances and if it will not bring $3 we must sell it for less.”^[59] Hiram offered to repay $1,500 of the advances in exchange for the return of 750 pounds of oil in Morewood’s warehouse, and Morewood responded that he would take the money but would return only six hundred pounds of oil.^[60] Morewood’s agent in London reported: “Of your oil peppermint we have yet been unable to make any sales. It was put up at public sale last week in order to bring it before the trade, but not a single offer was made for it.” After the sale, an offer of twelve shillings sterling ($2.88) was made for the whole lot, but the agent had followed instructions and refused to sell below three dollars. The agent concluded, “Regarding the probable sales for any further quantity which your friends Messrs Hotchkiss may be inclined to send over, it is really almost impossible to offer any opinion.”^[61]

Hiram responded to Morewood, holding out for higher prices and arguing that the current low price of peppermint oil was actually deliberate. He and his partners, Hiram claimed,  “intend to keep the oil market depressed till after setting time is over for the reason that should the market at this time be at a high figure if might induce the growers to break their contracts with peppermint company not to grow any this year.”^[62] Morewood was not taken in. “The price at which you are willing to sell ($3 per pound) cannot be realized,” he wrote, and “pure oil is now offered at $2 cash.” Morewood concluded, “We have in our opinion done all which can reasonably be expected from us by holding it for so long a time against cash advance, and had you followed our advice you would have sold it when we could have got $4 ½ for it.”^[63]

Hotchkiss’s domestic sales were also suffering. John Bement, the Ashfield native who supplied Henry Ranney with essence vials for his peddlers, wrote from Philadelphia: “I find by making a little inquiry about oil that I cannot sell any at the price you ask.” Bement reported that Mr. Miller, the dealer Hiram had accused of adulterating oil, “does not wish to do much in the article at present.” Although, Bement wrote, “[I] called on two or three of my old drug friends, I thought it would rather injure the sale of what you have with Mr. Miller for me to be running about offering oil all over the city.”^[64] Hiram tried contacting other exporters but was informed they were aware he was already consigning peppermint oil to dealers in London. Miller wrote, “I do not think you will ever obtain two thirds the price for English oil for any to be made. You have the best name now and I have no doubt you will keep it, but although we think your oil to be very good, it does not appear that any great difference in price will be given and I much fear the only principle use for your finest oil would be to mix with our Mitcham.”^[65] Miller also sent a sample of Mitcham peppermint oil and asked Hiram to enter it into the American Congress exposition in 1850.^[66] Although Hiram declined to enter the British peppermint oil in the exposition, he was inspired to send his own oil to the upcoming Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace. Hotchkiss’s success at the first world’s fair was a turning point for the brand and an opportunity for Hiram to focus more exclusively on his essential oil business.

London’s Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations ran from May through October 1851. The event was attended by six million visitors and more than fourteen thousand exhibitors from twenty-seven countries. Among the stars of the American delegation to the Crystal Palace were Borden’s Meat Biscuit, Dick’s Anti-Friction Press, Bond and Son’s Astronomical Instruments, Goodyear’s India Rubber, and McCormick’s Reaper, which each won a prestigious Council Award. Hiram and Leman Hotchkiss’s peppermint oil was among the 519 products entered from the United States and won one of the 102 prize medals awarded to Americans out of a total of 2,987 awarded.^[67] A bronze medal with portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert was accompanied by a certificate signed by the prince, which still hangs in the lobby of Hiram’s former headquarters in Lyons, New York.

The Hotchkiss brothers entered their peppermint oil and also kiln-dried cornmeal from their Eagle Mill with the help of their friend Benjamin P. Johnson, the secretary of the New York State Agricultural Society, who had been appointed by the governor to attend the exhibition.^[68] Johnson’s influence on the judges helped secure a prize medal for the peppermint oil, the first of many. The Hotchkiss brothers capitalized on the publicity surrounding the award and began to call their product “International Prize Medal Oil of Peppermint.” Sales increased, and the Hotchkisses took advantage of every opportunity to show their essential oils, receiving additional awards at shows in New York (1851), Paris (1855, 1873), London (1862), Hamburg (1863, 1868), Paris (1867), Vienna (1873), Philadelphia (1876), and Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition (1893). In his 1862 Report on International Exhibition of Industry and Art, Commissioner Benjamin P. Johnson observed that following Hotchkiss’s 1851 London award, “large sales of his oils are made in England and on the continent.”^[69]

The Hotchkiss brothers’ campaign to brand their peppermint oil was one of the first such efforts in American history. Historians of branding draw a critical distinction between bazaar economies, where products are “unbranded and ungraded,” and brand economies, where goods are “standardized, strictly graded, and directly substitutable for one another.”^[70] The market the Hotchkisses operated in was beginning a very slow transformation from the bazaar to the brand. The key issue for an early brander like Hiram was to raise the perception of his product out of the bazaar. He aspired to leave his generic American competitors behind and make his peppermint oil the sole substitute for what he claimed was the world’s undisputed leader, English oil from Mitcham.

Although Hiram remained deeply concerned with defending his essential oils’ content and reputation as the purest, highest-quality products available, after 1851 a greater part of his effort went toward branding and packaging. He wanted his peppermint oil to be immediately recognizable as superior to its generic competitors. He spent a great deal of time and money developing elaborately engraved labels for his bottles that reproduced the images of his prize medals. Innovative marketers like him were beginning to register a few specific names and labels with the Patent Office in the 1870s, years before U.S. trademark laws were passed in 1881 and the nation’s first major brands such as Coca-Cola (1887) and Quaker (1895) began to appear. In an era before the widespread use of trademarked names and logos, Hotchkiss was a pioneer. Years later, another agricultural prize winner became a household name: the Washburn-Crosby Company in Minneapolis branded Gold Medal Flour after it won gold, silver, and bronze medals at the 1880 Miller’s International Exposition in Cincinnati. When the company was merged into General Mills in 1928, the brand was retained and remains a staple on supermarket shelves. Although Hiram never managed to achieve price parity with English peppermint oil, his higher profile enabled him to increase the distance between his own prices and those of less well-known American oils. By the end of 1855, Hotchkiss peppermint oil was selling for twenty-four to twenty-six shillings sterling ($5.76 to $6.24), which although still less than the thirty-six to forty-five shillings ($8.64 to $10.80) received at the time for Mitcham oil, was a great improvement.^[71]

Although professional advertising and especially the creation of registered brands and trade-marked slogans became more significant elements of national culture after the Civil War, American newspapers had been carrying advertisements, including the ads for peppermint oil mentioned earlier, since before the Revolution. Patent medicines were among the earliest products extensively advertised in print, and their outrageous claims alienated many consumers and damaged the credibility of advertisers in general.^[72] Essences like those sold by Ranney’s and Bement’s peddlers had not needed elaborate labels, since the peddler was always there in person to make the sales pitch. Hiram’s challenge was to create the perception that Hotchkiss was a premium product without making ridiculous assertions customers would immediately reject.

Third-party endorsements offered an opportunity for advertisers to print positive statements about their products without losing credibility. Hiram was not selling his products directly to household consumers but rather through dealers to druggists and confectioners. So instead of running advertisements in newspapers, he printed pamphlets he could send to potential customers and use as packaging for his oils. Among the first was a pamphlet advertising “Hotchkiss’ Prize Medal Oil of Peppermint, Spearmint, and Wintergreen.” The pamphlet was dominated by an engraved image of the two faces of the medal awarded to the Hotchkisses for their peppermint oil in 1851, followed by an excerpt from a letter written to them by Benjamin P. Johnson, New York’s commissioner for the exhibition. Johnson wrote that he had “called the attention of the Jury to your Oil of Peppermint” and assured his readers that “the attention which it has received from persons interested in the trade is evidence of its value, and I have no doubt you will find a ready market for it here.”^[73] The letter was reprinted in German, French, and Spanish. The reverse side of the pamphlet included letters from the U.S. commissioner to the exhibition and from President Millard Fillmore congratulating the Hotchkisses on their medal, along with a list of the names of the jurors. These letters were also printed in four languages. Hotchkiss mailed pamphlets to dealers and potential customers and used them as wrappers when packing his bottles into cases. The most important part of this promotional literature, however, was the Hotchkiss product label itself. Hiram had labels for his bottles engraved and printed by the American Bank Note Company. The labels included a main wrap-around label for the distinctive blue Hotchkiss bottle and a special sealing label that would be signed by Hiram and glued over the cork. Hiram redesigned these labels every time his oils won another award. Cultural historians have suggested that advertising and packaging create a link between distant, impersonal manufacturers and consumers. “Wrapping gifts, tying bows, and attaching greetings,” historian James Carrier has noted, “works to overcome a contradiction between the generic qualities of (modern) branded products and the social requirements of ceremonial exchange in contemporary American households.”^[74] While advertising is now understood by cultural critics, advertisers, and even to some degree the public itself as an attempt to imbue market exchange with personal significance and even identity formation, it is important to remember that when the Hotchkiss brothers created their first labels, they were pioneers in uncharted territory.^[75] By creating a sealed product that the user would have to open, Hiram allowed his customers to participate in creating a heightened significance for his products.

By the 1870s, the main label for the twenty-one-ounce bottle included the images of twenty medals. Leman, after splitting his essential oil business from his brother’s, continued using images of the awards “H. G. & L. B. Hotchkiss” had received together and added facsimiles of the additional awards he won on his own. Leman may have been involved in the original design of the distinctive Hotchkiss packaging, but he was not the only other essential oil producer to adopt these techniques. While the extreme attention Hiram gave to the details of his labels might have been expected to ensure that his packaging would be unique, the result was actually the opposite. Not only did Leman emulate the style of labeling and pamphlets used during the earlier partnership, but many Hotchkiss competitors such as Hale and Parshall locally and Albert M. Todd in Michigan began showing their products at expositions, winning prizes, and printing images of the awards on their labels. And at least once, counterfeiters apparently went to the trouble of reproducing Hiram’s labels to sell peppermint oil disguised as a Hotchkiss product.

In July 1857, Hiram published a pamphlet entitled “CAUTION,” reprinting a letter from a dealer in Belfast, Ireland, who wrote that after purchasing “in London some Cases of your Oil Mint, we were led by low quotations to change the place from which we got it, and have been supplied by an article that has been returned to us by our customers, as of inferior quality.” The dealer included labels from the returned bottles in his letter, which Hiram sent to his engraver. “The Counterfeits are so closely imitated as to deceive any one,” the engraver reported, “rendering careful comparison with the original necessary, and a practiced eye, to detect the difference.” Among the subtle differences were the volume of the bottles, which were printed “21oz.” on the forgery where the original had been left blank so the volume could be handwritten, and a lithographed signature where the original had been handwritten. Hiram followed these letters with a notice admonishing dealers and customers to pay close attention to the labels on bottles offered by dealers, suggesting that when in doubt they were welcome to contact him and buy directly from his “Peppermint Oil Depot” in Lyons, New York.^[76]

In spite of Hiram’s clarification, confusion lingered in the minds of Hotchkiss oil customers. The issue, however, was less counterfeiting and more the ongoing presence of two Hotchkiss essential oil companies competing for the same dealers and customers. As Leman explained in a warning pamphlet he printed in 1876, “The co-partnership formerly existing between H. G & L. B. Hotchkiss was dissolved in the year 1855. Please be particular and observe that each case is wire corded, and sealed with red sealing wax, and my seal affixed thereto.” Leman went on to state that since the separation, L. B. Hotchkiss “has always been awarded the prize medal whenever his brands of Oils came in competition with any other brands, either in Europe or America.” Leman urged “dealers and consumers to pay special attention to the ‘signed’ and other labels and wrappers appended to each bottle . . . and to intrust the execution of orders only to honest men, or address them directly to me at the European and American Prize Medal Oil Depot, located at Phelps, Ontario County, New York, U.S. America.”^[77] Leman repeated his warning in German, French, and Spanish for international customers. Although, as Hiram had done years earlier, he claimed to have discovered “bottles with spurious labels counterfeiting his own, and filled with inferior oil,” Leman did not give a detailed explanation. It is unclear whether his warning was really about counterfeiting or rather about the increasingly acrimonious competition he was carrying on with his brother, Hiram, to which we return in chapter 6.