Joseph Ray Watkins

J.R. Watkins, circa 1911

Joseph Ray ("J.R.") Watkins was an entrepreneur and founder of Watkins Incorporated.

Family genealogy

Watkins is of Welsh descent. His great-grandfather was born in New Jersey in the early 1700s and during the Revolutionary War had contracts for furnishing food to the Continental Army. His grandfather was also of New Jersey. In 1800 he migrated to Ohio and settled at Fort Washington, where the city of Cincinnati developed.

Early life

Watkins was the second son and third child of Reverend Benjamin Utter and Sophronia (Keeler) Watkins. He was born at Cincinnati, Ohio on August 21, 1840. Joseph and his older brother were education at a Farmers' College founded Freeman Cary. After graduation his father sold their homestead and moved the family to Minnesota to keep out of the American Civil War.

His father purchased a one thousand acre farm in May 1862 on Pearl Lake. In August, there were rumors of an Indian massacre at New Ulm, Minnesota. That prompted the settlers of the area to build an extensive fort around their houses for protection. There were Indian skirmishes outside the fort the following year when the farmers went to work their fields. The US government then issued a $300 bounty on Indians. This caused them to move out of the area. The threat of an Indian war then ended for these pioneers.

Watkins had moved to southern Minnesota by 1868. He then started to experiment with making linament at his home in Plainview, Minnesota. He bottled the home-made medicine himself and sold it to the local farmers and villagers. He worked a 100-mile radius territory with his horse and buggy wagon as his sales territory. He built his business on customer satisfaction and had America's first money guarantee for one of his products.

Watkins moved his business, known as J. R. Watkins Medical Company, in 1885, to Winona. There it was easier to get the materials for his medical products. He rented a four-room house in Winona and used half for manufacture of his home remedy medical products - linament, extracts, and salves.

Family

Watkins and his wife, Mary Ellen, had two children while living in Plainview. The first was a son, George, who died at 14 months of age; and their second child was a daughter, Grace (b. 1877), who lived to adulthood.

Later life and death

Watkins' wife died in 1904, which was the same year his daughter married. He then married his son-in-law's mother in September 1911, but died in Jamaica three months later.

Bibliography

• Higginson (1900). Encyclopedia Biography of Minnesota. Higginson Book Company. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Williams, Robert Jr and Helena (21 April 2017). Vintage Marketing. Palgrave Macmillan US. ISBN 978-1-137-38721-9. Watkins introduced the first Trial-Mark bottle in 1869, which became America's first money-back guarantee. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)