page_title: Brandreth Pill Factory
section_title: 1835–1939: Brandreth years
hierarchical_section_title: Brandreth Pill Factory / History / 1835–1939: Brandreth years
caption_attribution_description: Women working in packing room at Brandreth Pill Factory, Ossining, NY, USA
context_page_description: The former Brandreth Pill Factory is a historic industrial complex located on Water Street in Ossining, New York, United States. It consists of several brick buildings from the 19th century, in a variety of contemporary architectural styles. In 1980 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
  Most of the original buildings succumbed to fire in the 1870s, but the oldest, a Greek Revival building possibly designed by Calvin Pollard in the 1830s, remains. Nearby is a corrugated iron structure that may be the earliest use of that material in Westchester County. The main building itself was one of the first to have Otis elevators installed.
  Benjamin Brandreth made his family's popular medicine, said to treat blood impurities, at the factory, starting in the 1830s. The factory's construction was the beginning of the industrial development of the Ossining waterfront. It continued to be used for manufacturing until the 1940s. Some of the smaller buildings remain in use today, although the former main building is vacant.
  The village had been considering a proposal to convert the main factory building to green housing.
context_section_description: A native of the English city of Leeds who was raised in Liverpool, Benjamin Brandreth took over the patent medicine business started by his grandfather in the 1820s. He pioneered the use of advertising with testimonials to the effectiveness of the pills' treatment of the blood impurities thought to create disease at the time, and developed a growing presence in the English and American markets. In 1835 he moved to New York with his family.
  His success continued, and the following year he moved to Ossining, then known as Sing Sing, to acquire all the land the remaining buildings sit on, and build a factory. By 1837 he was working from two buildings, one of which is the Greek Revival building that still stands in the cluster of buildings east of the street at the south end of the site. It may have been designed by Calvin Pollard, who built two houses in Ossining for Brandreth (neither extant) during this period as well as St. Paul's Episcopal Church downtown. An early engraving, used in his ads, depicts the building as having three stories and a cupola. It was right on the shore of the Hudson.
  Brandreth may have found Sing Sing not only a beautiful place to do business but a strategic one as well. Agricultural produce shipped down to its active river port could be used as the vegetable base of the pills, and those pills could then be shipped down to New York City. At the time, there were also mining and quarrying operations, particularly at the new Sing Sing Prison, on the riverside, but Brandreth's manufacture of finished goods at his facility made his the first true industrial facility on the Ossining waterfront.
  After an 1838 trip down the Mississippi River to sell pills, the business grew even more. Brandreth became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1840, and became active in the politics of the growing village. He served as its president for three years, and later was elected to two separate terms in the State Senate. In 1848, he purchased an interest in fellow English American Thomas Allcock's Porous Plasters and began developing a facility to manufacture them on an old mill site further up the river. The Hudson River Railroad was being built through Sing Sing that year, further extending the company's reach and filling in the riverfront to provide a stable, straight surface for tracks. The latter opened more land for future building in the process.
  The factory's expansion served it well for the next two decades. It continued to produce 1.2 million boxes of pills annually, each of which retailed for 25 cents ($10 in modern dollars). The pills were well known enough that Herman Melville mentioned them in Moby-Dick and Edgar Allan Poe devoted part of his story "Some Words with a Mummy" to a fanciful discussion of what their ingredients might be. P.T. Barnum gave Brandreth sardonic recognition in his book Humbugs of the World for his promotional skills. Back in Ossining, Brandreth helped establish two banks, and was on the founding board of Dale Cemetery, still the community's largest. If the company had wanted to expand during this period, the economic pressures of the Civil War prevented it from doing so.
  Seven years after the end of the war, in 1872, a fire destroyed many of the buildings, including Brandreth's first manufacturing facility. The rebuilding put up most of the surviving buildings, as well as the more modern facility on an old mill site at the north end of the property: the current main building. Brandreth wanted to incorporate the newest technology into his new buildings, and so the storage facility midway between the two complexes was one of the first in Westchester to use corrugated iron while the main building had some of the first Otis elevators.
  One morning in early 1880, Brandreth collapsed and died shortly after leaving his office. His son Franklin took over management. During the later years of the 19th century and the early 20th, the factory began to diversify its operations in response to increasing federal regulation of the patent-medicine industry. Among the new products were ammunition-box line
caption: Women packing pills at factory, ca. 1900
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