Foley's Honey & Tar

[robertk]

Bottle Vitals​

	Date	Color	Shape	Size (Height x Width x Depth)	Value*
Foley's Honey & Tar	1890s	Aqua	Rectangular	4.375" x 1.25" x 0.5"	$8.00

Bottle Views (click to enlarge):

Front	Back	Side	Side	Bottom
Foley's Honey & Tar		Foley & Co.	Chicago USA

Foley's Honey & Tar was a cough remedy sold from the late 1800s up through the mid 1900s by Foley & Company, of Chicago, Illinois. The company was started by John Burton Foley in the 1880s. It started in Steubenville, Ohio in 1885 when he bought the wholesale drug business of Steubenville's W. D. MacGregor, and began making and marketing his own preparations. In 1888, he moved the operations to Chicago and began production at a large scale. He quickly got to work on a massive advertising and distribution network that rapidly grew to a staff of 110 people by 1905. The patent medicine business rewarded Foley with a large fortune, and in 1902, he bought a large tract of forested land in Baldwin County, Alabama, to establish the town that still bears his name -- Foley, Alabama, incorporated in 1915. Mr. Foley financed the initial development of the town, including the railroad, parks, and other community facilities. Strangely, Foley himself never lived there, and it wasn't until 1957, 30 years after his death, that his son moved the business to Alabama.

During its heyday, Foley & Co manufactured a variety of patent medicines, with their Honey & Tar cough formula being one of the most popular and profitable. It was said to contain 7% alcohol, pine tar, honey, and no opiates (since many cough remedies at the time were based on heroin). It was advertised as safe for adults and children alike. It continued to be sold up until 1952, when it became the subject of an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, who found that there was no actual therapeutic benefit to the ingredients and issues a cease and desist order for all medicinal advertising for the product. Declining sales and the deaths of the founders eventually led to the company being sold to Myers Laboratories in 1963, effectively ending the Foley lineage.

The pictured bottle was likely a sample size bottle.

Here are some advertisements from the time period this bottle came from. Click to enlarge any of them:



And just for fun, here are some later advertisements for the same product. These came from the 1930's, some forty years after the bottle in this posting was made, but the product was still going strong. The common theme that traditional cough remedies were worse than the disease is probably true, and was probably true of this concoction as well. Click to enlarge.



And here is what it might have looked like back in the day, in a larger bottle (click to enlarge):



And finally, here's the bottle pictured before and after its soap and water cleaning.



* Value is an estimate based on sold eBay listings and other online sources. Value varies greatly with condition of the bottle.

 

[UnderMiner]

Mother: "Matilda if you don't pipe down and inhale more of those Creosote fumes I'm going to fetch the leaches!"
Narrator: "Isn't there a better way? Introducing Foley's Honey and Tar. Foley's Honey and Tar - better than blood letting - and children love the taste!"
Matilda: "It tastes like tar - but also sorta like honey!" 🙂

 

[pepperj]

Very good write up on the Foley's bottle.
Purely speculation is Myers sent the regulatory folks over.
Like most natural products the scientific facts aren't there. If it worked folks bought it, word of mouth was the best marketing.