Fulford, George Taylor

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Paul Adolphus Bator, “FULFORD, GEORGE TAYLOR,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/fulford_george_taylor_13E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Businessman and politician; b. 8 Aug. 1852 in Brockville, Upper Canada, son of Hiram Fulford and Martha Harris; m. 20 Jan. 1880 Mary Wilder White, and they had two daughters and a son; d. 15 Oct. 1905 in Newton, Mass., and was buried in Brockville.
    • George Taylor Fulford was the last of five sons of a farming family with uel lineage. Unlike his forebears, he was determined not to be a farmer. After finishing public school and a course in business college, he worked for his brother William M., a dispensing chemist in Brockville. He soon achieved a modest degree of prominence; elected to town council in 1879, he served 12 years as a councillor.
    •  Fulford had a sharp eye for the profitable and in 1887 he moved to tap the thriving market for medicinal products by setting up his own patent-medicine company. Locating his firm in Canada meant that he would benefit from tariffs that protected patent medicines. He experimented with a variety of concoctions but met with little success until he encountered a pill prescribed by a local physician, William Jackson. Fulford purchased the rights to the pill for $100 in 1890 and then launched the Dr Williams Medicine Company, operated by G. T. Fulford and Company, to produce and distribute Pink Pills for Pale People. They quickly became a commercial and advertising sensation and were promoted as a cure for almost everything. Interestingly, Brockville was the Canadian headquarters for another patent-medicine empire, that of William Henry Comstock, originally of New York State, whose most famous product was Dr Morse’s Indian Root Pills.
    • Fulford’s company flourished in the golden age of patent medicine – the decades before World War I. Social conditions and technological changes were responsible for the boom. The high cost as well as the perceived ineffectiveness of regular physicians made self-medication most attractive to the common person. The invention of machinery capable of manufacturing large numbers of pills and packaging them cheaply provided the basis for huge profits. As well, cheap postage and the growth of the railway system made it possible to ship goods inexpensively over long distances. However, it was the development of mass advertising that made patent medicines so popular. Companies producing them were among the first advertising patrons of the people’s press. Not surprisingly, many newspapers were reluctant to expose the shortcomings of businesses that supplied a large part of their revenue. Fulford’s international advertising budget for Pink Pills in the first decade of the 20th century surpassed a million dollars, according to a brief biography of Fulford written by Arthur Leonard Tunnell and published in 1934.
    • Patent medicines made Fulford a multimillionaire, and he sought the social status to go with his wealth. He acquired a mansion, Fulford Place, overlooking the St Lawrence River in Brockville, a yacht, corporate directorships, and an automobile. A Liberal, he was appointed to the Senate in 1900 by Sir Wilfrid Laurier*, after he had reputedly donated $5,000 to the Liberal party. “A prince of the patent medicine world,” as he was called by the Toronto World, Fulford died tragically at the age of 53 following a car accident in Massachusetts in October 1905. As a patent-medicine merchandiser and early international Canadian businessman, Fulford had been a leader in the development of techniques of modern mass advertising in a consumer society.
  • Great Grandson of Proven United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=3043
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/155528295/george-taylor-fulford