James Cook Ayer

James Cook Ayer (May 5, 1818 - July 3, 1878) was an American pharmaceutical chemist and patent medicine manufacturer, the founder of J. C. Ayer Co. of Lowell, Massachusetts, producers of his namesake Ayer's Ague Cure and Ayer's Sarsaparilla, among many others. Ayer has been argued to have been one of the most successful patent medicine men of his age, amassing a fortune of some $15 million dollars in the course of his business, and the town of Ayer, Massachusetts was named for him, in large part owing to his generosity in financing construction of their town hall. This financial success, however, did not translate into the political success that he sought later in his life, as Ayer ran unsuccessfully as the Republican candidate for the Massachusetts's 7th District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives during the 1874 U. S. elections, a failure that has been suggested as being a cause for his later poor health and confinement to an asylum in the final years of his life.