antique bottles THE MEDICINE CHEST --- BY DR. RICHARD CANNON old bottles

ARMOUR AND SWIFT

We sold plenty of Armour Star and Swift Premium Bacon when I worked in my dad's grocery store in the 1940's and 1950's. But I have two milk glass bimal bottles that look like they could have contained medicine: a rectangular with rounded corners and a bulged neck embossed on one panel vertically ARMOUR / AND COMPANY / CHICAGO, 5 1/4 inches tall; and a round with a long neck, embossed on the base in a circle SWIFT AND COMPANY with CHICAGO / U.S.A. n the center, 4 5/8 inches tall. There's a similarly shaped 8 1/2 inch tall bottle embossed horizontally on one panel ARMOUR / AND / COMPANY / CHICAGO as well as a 3 inch tall square bottle with an embossed monogram in a circle Crème / Luxor on one panel and ARMOUR & COMPANY /CHICAGO / U.S.A. on the base, both in milk glass. Also, there are at least two types of amber rectangular bottles with ARMOUR, CHICAGO embossed.

Base of Swift bottle.

Philip Danford Armour, born in Stockbridge, New York, on May 1832, founded Armour and Company in Chicago, in 1867. It soon became one of the worlds largest food processing and chemical manufacturing companies. Armour Chemical Industries included drugs, soaps, fertilizers and other chemical products. Armour also gained control of several private railroad car lines and banks. In 1892, he donated money to establish the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago, which in 1940, became the Illinois Institute of Technology, a privately endowed coeducational college. A branch, the Illinois Institute of Technical Research, does scientific research for business, industry and government. P.D. Armour died on January 6, 1901, in Chicago.
Food processing by-products were the primary source for their medicines. Earlier ones included wine of beef and iron, fluid and extracts of beef, nutritive wine beef peptone, digestive ferments, desiccated thyroids, pituitary body, beef tea and elixir of enzymes. In 1985, Armour Pharmaceutical Co. of Tarrytown, N.Y., listed 19 products, which included insulins, pituitary and thyroid products, vitamins and plasma and thrombin preparations. By 1998 the division had become Centeon and in 2001, Aventis Behring.

Armour and Swift bottles.

Gustavus Franklin Swift, 1839-1903, was born in Sagamore, Massachusetts. He quit school and started working in his brother's butcher shop at age 14. He went into business for himself at 17, and by age 35, was involved in wholesale meat and cattle exportation. In 1875, he moved to Chicago and became the first to slaughter meat for shipment east. He hired an engineer to design a refrigerated railroad car to make this a year-around business. Gustavus founded Swift and Co. in 1885, which included feed lots of cattle, assembly line butchering, refrigerated transportation, regional warehouse and retail stores. Plants were opened in South America, Australia and New Zealand, and Swift became one of the world's largest packing companies. Four of Gustavus' sons also played major rolls in the company.
I can find no information about a medicine or drug division. Neither have I found my swift bottle listed in any of the reference materials available to me.
Today, in our area, Armour and Swift products appear to no longer exist. A meat expert in one of our local grocery chains says that several mergers have occurred to explain this.....

References:
1. Denver, K.: Patent Medicine Picture, 1968.
2. Denver, K.: At The Sign of The Mortar, 1970.
3. Fike, R.: The Bottle Book, 1987.
4. Richardson, L.C. and C.G.: The Pill Rollers, 1992
5. World Book Encyclopedia, 1999.
6. Umberger, A. and J.: Top Bottles U.S.A., 1971.

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