Mrs. Joe Person's Remedy
Alice Morgan Person - An Extraordinary Woman
“My life has been out of the ordinary run of woman’s life.
Circumstances have forced me to the front, where I have met both Knights and
Cowards. Circumstances have compelled me to stand my ground and fight the great
Fight single-handed and alone. …” This is in the Foreword of Alice Morgan
Person’s autobiography, The Chivalry of
Man as Exemplified in the Life of Mrs. Joe Person, the story of Alice
Morgan Person and “Mrs. Joe Person’s Remedy,” from 1858 until 1892.
In the Preface of her book, Mrs. Person gives us a glimpse
of her life: “…For fifteen years I have led a drummer’s life, have come into
contact with all manner of mankind, high and low, rich and poor, patricians and
plebeians, knights and cowards, and it must be an opaque nature that could not,
in turn, learn a lesson from each, as they came along. …”
Alice Morgan Person was a colorful woman who met life’s
challenges head on. She succeeded as a business woman—at a time when women were
supposed to stay close to the hearth; as a talented professional musician—when
women were supposed to play sweet melodies for dinner guests; as the primary
provider for her family of nine children—not to mention producing the children;
and as an example of what a determined woman could do—when women had few such
examples!
Mrs. Person’s primary business was the manufacture and sale
of “Mrs. Joe Person’s Remedy,” a well-respected patent medicine. In 1872, she
was given the mixture by a neighbor who convinced her to use it to treat her
gravely ill daughter, Josephine. Her daughter survived what was thought to be a
fatal illness, and for the next six years Alice Person gave the remedy to
friends and family and observed its success in the treatment of a variety of
illnesses.
In 1878 she registered the remedy’s trademark with the U. S.
Patent and Trademark Office, making it official that she was now a business
woman. She continued to sell “Mrs. Joe Person’s Remedy” until 1910 when, at the
age of 70, she sold the trademark and the formula to her son, Rufus.
Alice Person’s career was not an easy one. At first, she
sold her product locally. Her children helped her prepare the mixture. In February
1882, filled with big dreams of expanding her market, she approached several
doctors in Raleigh, seeking their help in performing supervised trials of her
remedy with the expectation that, having seen its usefulness, they would
prescribe the medication. They turned her down, and, for several months, she seemed
to have lost her buoyancy about the future of business. However, in the fall,
she traveled to Charlotte for the same purpose, and there she was more
successful.
In Charlotte, Alice tried a more direct approach. She had only
a few circulars describing “Mrs. Joe Person’s Remedy” and could not afford to
print more, so she attached a label to each one that asked the recipient to
read and save the circular which she would pick up the next day. She then left
them at every house along a prominent Charlotte street. The next day, when she
called to redeem her circulars, she was invited into many homes to talk about
it, but she didn’t sell a single bottle. However, within two weeks of returning
home, she began to receive orders from Charlotte doctors whose patients were
asking for it. She had developed a successful marketing strategy which she continued
to use.
Mrs. Person’s story is one of many ups and downs. She spent
a good part of her life on the road, visiting towns and stopping at houses
throughout the area of North Carolina east of Charlotte and in central South
Carolina and Central and eastern Virginia. She kept a record of the places she
stayed—those that were satisfactory and those where she would not stop again.
She worked with several partners, all of whom turned out to
be unsatisfactory—one embezzled from her, one failed to pay her the agreed on
price for his partnership, and one didn’t understand her business methods.
Despite these setbacks, she persevered and somehow managed to provide for her
family.
Before the Remedy
Alice Morgan Person’s beginnings were ordinary enough. She
was born in Petersburg, VA in 1840. Her father was often in financial straits,
but she seemed to have received a good education for that time. She married
Joseph Arrington Person in 1857 when she was 17 and he was 42.
Joseph, who was from Franklin Co., NC, was well-to-do and he
and his bride made their home at Greenwood, his 466 acre plantation. In her
autobiography she says: “…I found that my lines had indeed been cast in
pleasant places. Not a care, not a responsibility, not a thought or fear for
the future did I have.”
But this ideal life did not last long. The Civil War was
just around the corner and change was coming for the Person family. Joseph
suffered a debilitating stroke in 1863 and was no longer able to look after his
growing family. Alice says, after the end of the war: “At one fell stroke our
means of income were swept away and we were left … with only a tract of land,
which my husband was powerless to look after, and a family of little children
depending upon us. Our income became less and less and I knew we were powerless
to stem the tide. My husband’s condition improved so that he could walk around
some, look after his stock, hitch his horse to the buggy and visit his
neighbors, could saddle his horse and ride to town, but, as a man of business,
his career was ended.” [Joe Person died on April 8, 1884. A few months before
he died, Person signed the documentation necessary for Alice Person to register
herself as a free trader. This was not possible without her husband’s
permission.]
As the years passed and the Person family continued to grow,
Alice felt she had two choices: try to make a living on the land, with the help
of her children, or sell the land and use the money to continue their way of
life. She chose the latter. But the money could not last forever, and she began
to dream of what she could do with her marvelous remedy. And so, when the time
came, she was ready.
How did she know what to do? How did she know about
registering her trademark and formula? How did she arrive at a design for the
packaging for her remedy or know where to get it? How did she know how to write
the circulars that were her main tool for selling her product? How did she have
the courage to leave home and live the life of a door-to-door saleswoman? It is
hard to imagine where her knowledge and strength originated.
Her Music
Alice Person was not satisfied with a single career. Beginning
in the mid-1880s, she found a way to add to the family income with her
piano-playing ability. She began traveling to fairs and expositions where she
was employed to demonstrate pianos. She also played regularly at a hotel near
Kittrell, Vance Co., NC. In 1889, she published an assortment of her musical arrangements,
Collection of Popular Airs as Arranged
and Played Only by Mrs. Joe Person at the Southern Expositions. From then
on, she was busy selling both the remedy and the music.
_____________
Mrs. Person’s son, Rufus, joined his mother’s business in
1887. By that time, the operation had been set up in Kittrell, N. C. In 1898,
the Kittrell laboratory burned and had to be rebuilt. In1904, mother and son
moved the enterprise to Charlotte. In 1910, the company was incorporated as the
Mrs. Joe Person’s Remedy Company and in that same year, Rufus leased the remedy
and trademark to Guy Barnes. After Mr. Barnes died in 1916, Rufus again took up
the reins and continued the company as the sole proprietor. It was finally
closed in 1943 when no buyer could be found for it.
Seeing the West
Alice and her sister Lucy traveled to San Diego in 1908 to
visit the grave of her brother Rufus who had died there after eating poisonous
mushrooms. The sisters made a second trip out west in 1911 and were in Santa
Fe, New Mexico, on their third western journey when Alice Morgan Person died
suddenly of a stroke on June 12, 1913. Her sister brought her back to Charlotte
for burial.
Preserving the
Memories
Beginning in October 2007, several people donated material
about Alice Morgan Person to the East Carolina University Library. This
included copies of her musical publications. In 2009, David Hursh,
head music librarian and associate professor at East Carolina
University’s J.Y. Joyner Library, published a biography of Alice Person which
also included her own autobiography. The book is Good Medicine and Good Music. He also assembled a digital
collection from the material in the Alice Morgan Person Collection. The music
she played at the expositions around the south can be heard by accessing the
ECU Digital Collection at: http://digital.lib.ecu.edu Select Alice Person: Good Medicine and Good Music,
Browse, and select Collection of Popular
Airs and Plantation Melodies or Transcription of the beautiful song The
blue Alsatian mountains. Click on Audio File(s) to hear any of the songs in
the collections.
Source: The material for
this story was taken from Good Medicine
and Good Music by David Hursh and Chris Goertzen [McFarland & Company,
Inc., Publishers: Jefferson, North Carolina and London] 2009.
The University of North Carolina also
has a collection of Alice Person papers in the Southern Historical Collection: Collection Number 03987, Alice
Morgan Person Papers, 1872-1972. A description of this collection can be found
at : http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/p/Person,Alice_Morgan.html
