buildings and did not extend beyond the present 42nd Street.

According to an affidavit written in 1851--and much of the history of
the business is derived from documents prepared in connection with
numerous lawsuits--the founder of the Comstock drug venture was Edwin
Comstock, sometime in or before 1833. Edwin, along with the numerous
other brothers who will shortly enter the picture, was a son of Samuel
Comstock, of Butternuts, Otsego County, New York. Samuel, a
fifth-generation descendant of William Comstock, one of the pioneer
settlers of New London, Connecticut, and ancestor of most of the
Comstocks in America, was born in East Lyme, Connecticut, a few years
before the Revolution, but sometime after the birth of Edwin in 1794 he
moved to Otsego County, New York.

Edwin, in 1828, moved to Batavia, New York, where his son, William Henry
Comstock, was born on August 1, 1830. Within four or five years,
however, Edwin repaired to New York City, where he established the
extensive drug and medicine business that was to be carried on by
members of his family for over a century. Just why Edwin performed this
brief sojourn in Batavia, or where he made his initial entry into the
drug trade, is not clear, although the rapid growth of his firm in New
York City suggests that he had had previous experience in that field. It
is a plausible surmise that he may have worked in Batavia in the drug
store of Dr. Levant B. Cotes, which was destroyed in the village-wide
fire of April 19, 1833; the termination of Edwin's career in Batavia
might have been associated either with that disaster or with the death
of his wife in 1831.

The Comstocks also obviously had some medical tradition in their family.
Samuel's younger brother, John Lee Comstock, was trained as a physician