Finance History | 4605 North Hermitage Avenue — Two Thousand Dollars of Granules Behind a Drugstore

People treat Abbott Laboratories as an Abbott Park campus and a ticker in the S and P 500.

The first granules were made in Ravenswood, behind a neighborhood drugstore.

In 1888 Wallace C. Abbott, a thirty-year-old University of Michigan physician who kept People's Drug Store, began producing alkaloidal dosimetric granules in the rooms at the rear of the shop.

Abbott's own later company history records first-year sales of 2,000 dollars in 1888 currency.

The point of the granules was dose.

Liquid plant extracts of morphine, quinine, strychnine and codeine lost strength on the shelf. A weighed grain in a tiny pill did not.

The Chicago Tribune, writing the firm's origin in 1989 from company and neighborhood memory, placed the earliest work in a cramped Ravenswood kitchen between house calls made on a bicycle.

In 1891 Wallace and Clara Abbott built the Queen Anne house that still stands at 4605 North Hermitage Avenue.

Chicago designated the house a city landmark on 1 March 2006.

It remains a private residence.

The sidewalk and the plaque are the public view. Do not walk onto the lot.

In 1894 he incorporated the Abbott Alkaloidal Company and put a factory about a block and a half away at 4753 North Ravenswood Avenue.

Neighbors complained of fumes. A 1905 fire at the plant was reported as a 200,000 dollar loss in period figures.

The company took the name Abbott Laboratories in 1915.

The firm broke ground in North Chicago in June 1920.

Wallace Abbott died on 4 July 1921, before that plant was running.

The company left Ravenswood for the North Shore in 1925.

AbbVie was split out of Abbott in 2013. The parent that remains in the S and P 500 still traces the name to these blocks.

The mechanism is a physician who stopped buying other men's granules and started weighing his own.

Photo: Thshriver, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The 1891 house on Hermitage, photographed from the public way in 2012.