Old barn still stands, ad and all

COLLEGE WARD, Cache County — About a hundred years ago, a man knocked on the door of a farmhouse next to the road here just a few miles south of Logan and asked if he could paint an advertisement on the side of the barn.

The barn's still standing.

So is the ad.

Through blizzards and droughts, through war and peace, through the Great Depression and Great Recession, through the Hippie Era and the Internet Age, through you name it, "Dr. Pierce's Favorite Prescription" has come out on the other side.

Just don't try to buy the prescription. The company went out of business sometime in the 1940s.

From all historical accounts, Dr. Pierce's Favorite Prescription, which he marketed toward women, was wildly popular in its day. It was first concocted in the late 1800s by Ray Vaughn Pierce, a Buffalo physician, and contained, among other ingredients, opium and alcohol.

People would take one shot and swear they were cured.

Then they'd take another shot just to make sure.

By the turn of the century, Dr. Pierce was selling nearly 2 million bottles a year through the mail.

It's one of the reasons they're called the good old days.

To spread the word, Dr. Pierce seized on the idea of using the sides of barns close to roadways to publicize his medicine. In essence, they were America's first billboards.

He'd pay farmers so much for barn rights and then an amount for rent every year. Very much like the Miller family agreeing to put "EnergySolutions" on the side of its basketball arena, only on a smaller scale.

From the 1900s onward, Dr. Pierce ads could be seen on the sides of barns across the country.

Sometime after 1904 and before 1929, College Ward farmer Lovenus Olsen was approached by a Dr. Pierce salesman concerning the side of his barn, which stood in an ideal well-traveled location next to Highway 89-91.

Locals know it was after 1904 because that's when Lovenus built the barn. And they know the ad was there before the Great Depression arrived in '29.

Lovenus agreed to the deal because he got $25 the first year and $10 rent every year thereafter, and in the bargain he also got somebody to paint his barn.