Another message on a bottle, Part 2

By Steve Roush
HCP columnist
 
Ladies and gentlemen, in our previous offering, we were chatting about an old medicine bottle that I’ve had since I found it in an old outhouse on the family farm when I was a young lad.
 
The bottle was from the Mosby Medicine Company of Cincinnati, founded by Gilbert H. Mosby, and it contained Konjola, which was described as a “cure all” type of medicine. Gilbert H. Mosby was born in 1886, and before he established his medicine company, according to a 2017 article in Cincinnati Magazine written by Greg Hand, Mosby had a factory job on Pearl Street, churning out a cure-all potion sold as “Vola Tonic” for a company known as Vola Remedies.
 
According to the article, in 1921, Mosby married a young lady (he was 34, she was 18) named Roberta Epperhardt, and incorporated his own tonic manufactory, the Mosby Medicine Company, to produce an elixir sold as “Konjola.”
 
It’s difficult to determine, exactly, what went into proprietary nostrums like Konjola and Vola Tonic. It is impossible to tell if Mosby developed his own formula or whether he stole or adapted a recipe from Vola Remedies. Roberta later claimed Konjola was her idea. 

Mosby claimed Konjola would cure nervousness, indigestion, rheumatism, neuritis, catarrh, constipation, stomach trouble, general weakness, kidney problems, and liver dysfunction. We know Konjola had lots of herbs. It also had the secret to Mosby’s success in this Prohibition era — lots of alcohol — according to Charles Westheimer, writing in the Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin [Fall 1976]:
 
“Mosby was popularly known as the “Konjola King” for the name of the patent medicine he manufactured on Reading Road and sold all over the United States. It was a vegetable concoction with a high alcohol content that could be sold without prescription and gave comfort to many who could not or would not find a bootlegger to ease the strictures of prohibition.”
 
It’s been written that Konjola sold like bathtub gin in the Roaring Twenties. Gilbert and Roberta started Mosby Medicine by mixing up tubs of Konjola in their basement and bottling it themselves. By 1927, Mosby owned a factory on Reading Road in Avondale and was planning an even bigger complex up the road. Mosby bought a spectacular neon sign, 84 feet long and 32 feet high, to advertise Konjola on the central pier of the Atlantic City boardwalk.
 
And then it all fell apart.
 
Let’s pause for now and we’ll continue next time.
 
Steve Roush is president of the Highland County Historical Society and served as chairman and vice chairman on the HCHS Board of Trustees for two terms, a board member of the Highland District Hospital Foundation, a vice president of an international media company and a columnist and contributing writer for The Highland County Press. He can be reached by email at roush_steve@msn.com.

Below is Gilbert H. Mosby. (Find A Grave.)