Another message on a bottle, Part 3

By Steve Roush
HCP columnist
 
Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve been chatting about the old Mosby Medicine Company of Cincinnati, mainly because ever since I was a youngster, I had an old medicine bottle from the company but never knew the history behind it – until many, many years later.
 
Gilbert H. Mosby (born in 1886), the founder, started his company more than a century ago. The product that was in the old bottle was Konjola, an elixir that was billed as a “cure-all” and had many ingredients – including lots of alcohol. 

Popularly known as the “Konjola King,” Mosby’s tonic sold like bathtub gin in the Roaring Twenties. He and his wife, Roberta, used some of his newfound wealth to build a mansion in Hyde Park in 1927 – a three-building estate that sat on nine acres across Erie Avenue. It was described as an edifice that was “designed to impress visitors as a testament to a real rags-to-riches story.”
 
After mixing tubs of Konjola in his basement with his wife in the early days, Mosby ended up owning a factory on Reading Road by the time his mansion was built.
 
Konjola was huge success, money was rolling in and life was grand – until it all fell apart.
 
According to a 2017 article in Cincinnati Magazine written by Greg Hand, both Gilbert and Roberta had champagne tastes and wandering eyes. He owned an outlandishly expensive Isotta Fraschini auto. She owned a lot of furs. He chased a New York showgirl named Gladys Deering. Roberta was seeing an aeronautical entrepreneur named Hugh Watson who operated what later became the Blue Ash Airport. They filed competing lawsuits for divorce in 1929, and Roberta walked away with the largest alimony ever awarded to that time in Hamilton County: $400,000.

Gilbert gave her the house and some cash to settle up. The payments sent his company into receivership and he declared personal bankruptcy in 1934.
 
By then, Prohibition was over and the demand for alcohol-rich tonics was waning, but Mosby gave medicinal concoctions another shot and launched a new elixir named Indo-Vin, billed as “ethyl fuel for the human motor.”
 
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 Mosby's Konjola sign at Fountain Square in Cincinnati, circa 1930.