The Kilmer Building: History
secondary literature · 2023
LINK
SUMMARY
A local-history page (byline Linda C. Callea; no dated byline on the article itself, but the site footer reads 'The Kilmer Building © 2023 All rights Reserved.,' used here as the page's year) for the preserved Kilmer office building in Binghamton, New York, fetched directly. States Swamp Root was founded in 1878 by Dr. Sylvester Andral Kilmer; that his brother Jonas M. Kilmer was recruited to Binghamton in 1881 to help manage the growing business; that Jonas bought out Andral's stake in 1892, enabling Willis Sharpe Kilmer (born Brooklyn, N.Y., 1869; Cornell graduate, 1890; died 1940) to take over marketing; and that a fire around 1900, allegedly set by Andral's son, prompted construction of the present Kilmer Building. Used for the 1878 founding year and the 1892 buyout, both corroborated independently by the National Park Service article and (for the buyout) by Samuel Hopkins Adams's 1912 reporting. The page's figure of '24% grain alcohol' for the formula is not used in this case because it conflicts with the two period-dated, directly quoted alcohol percentages in Adams (9% in the 1912 Collier's text; 8.55% per the government chemists Adams quotes in the same year) and could reflect an undated or differently measured formulation.
NOTES
“The Kilmer Building: History,” a local-history page by Linda C. Callea for the preserved Kilmer office building in Binghamton, New York, is fetched directly and used for two specific, corroborated facts: the 1878 founding of Swamp Root by Dr. Sylvester Andral Kilmer, and the 1892 buyout in which his brother Jonas bought out his remaining interest so that Jonas’s son Willis Sharpe Kilmer could take over marketing. Both dates are independently corroborated elsewhere in this case’s source set (the National Park Service article for the buyout; the National Endowment for the Humanities article for the founding decade). The page’s own alcohol-percentage figure for the formula is noted here but not carried into the case body, since it conflicts with the two period-dated figures quoted directly in Samuel Hopkins Adams’s 1912 reporting.