Willis Sharpe Kilmer

• kilmer-swamp-root-1878-1917 financier

Willis Sharpe Kilmer, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1869 (The Kilmer Building history, Callea), was the son of Jonas M. Kilmer, who bought out his brother Dr. S. Andral Kilmer’s interest in Swamp Root in 1892; Willis, a recent Cornell graduate, took over the company’s advertising and marketing at that point (National Park Service; The Kilmer Building history). Samuel Hopkins Adams’s 1912 reporting names “Two Kilmers - father and son - Jonas M. and Willis Sharpe” as the men who manufactured and sold Swamp Root, describing it as “the leading industry” of Binghamton and putting the family fortune “variously estimated at from ten to fifteen millions, all accumulated in the last twenty years.” Adams also documents Willis Kilmer’s direct role in patent-medicine trade politics: a March 10, 1905 telegram, signed “Willis Sharpe Kilmer, Adv. Agt.,” urging out-of-state newspapers carrying Swamp Root advertising to lobby against a Massachusetts patent-medicine labeling bill, and the family’s ownership of the Binghamton Press, which Adams says the Kilmers started because they could not otherwise control local newspaper coverage of the business. He is recorded here as the case’s financier: the family member whose income and public reputation were most directly built on the product’s continued sale and on suppressing unfavorable reporting about it.