"I was young, and green as a cucumber," Mr. W.T. Rawleigh, affectionately known as "W.T." later wrote. "I had practically no business experience. I had lived away from home but a few months. The only experience I had had was in making ink and selling books...but I packed my clothes, said farewell and departed to Stephenson County, Illinois."

Three years later he was successful enough to start advertising. Here is a reproduction of his advertising as it ran in the Freeport Weekly Journal, which had a large circulation at that time among farmers in Stephenson County.

Now the business began to grow, and Rawleigh was at the cross-roads. It was either sink or swim. Without proper expansion it would be impossible to go further. Expansion, however, meant complete risk. Rawleigh did not even hesitate. With Mrs. Rawleigh's help, cooperation and support, he began to make his own products in their home. Soon after that, he mortgaged his home, borrowed money from all available sources and started his first small factory and laboratory in a rented building downtown. His organizational genius and imagination could not be denied.

Six year later in 1898 he built his first factory building, located "on Douglas Avenue in the residence district of Freeport." In a laboratory in that building, Mr. J.R. Jackson, his brother-in-law, under Rawleigh's supervision made careful tests and established new standards of strength and uniformity.

In 1924-25, Rawleigh began curing vanilla in Mexico and the West Indies, and in the same year opened a branch in Marseille, France and bought plantations in Madagascar and its dependencies, opened a vanilla office in Tamatave and began to cultivate, cure and buy vanilla. He did this because at that time the vanilla industry was highly inflated, closely controlled and manipulated and prices were about double what they should have been.

When Rawleigh had accumulated abundant stocks of vanilla he proceeded to fight the monopoly which was strangling the islands and which monopolized and controlled the vanilla market at an artificial price of $9.50 a pound, F.O.B. New York, the highest price ever known up to that time. He first printed a series of vanilla market reports calling attention to the fact that there was no real shortage of vanilla supplies, but crops were above normal and abundant stocks were in the hands of dealers and speculators. He further pointed out the fact that despite these conditions the artificial price of $9.50 prevailed. Rawleigh was so successful in his fight against this monopolistic practice that during the first year of his fight, he successfully reduced the price of vanilla from the artificial high of $9.50 a pound to $2.50-$3.00 a pound.

Foreign branches were started in 1925 at St. Mary's Island, Reunion Island, Mexico, Grand Comore Island to secure raw materials at lower prices. On Zanzibar and Pemba Islands large staffs of employees were buying, cleaning, packing and shipping Rawleigh quality cloves. In Japan and elsewhere in the Far East, Rawleigh employees were busy making studies, investigating crops and markets for menthol, camphor, peppermint, cassia, black pepper, nutmegs and other raw materials.

In line with Rawleigh's unflagging efforts to pioneer and discover new markets and supplies, as well as to modernize and update his factory operations, Rawleigh's glass bottle factory was built at Freeport in 1926 to make the carload of bottles that was being used every working day at the Rawleigh factories. The glass furnace tank held 150 tons of molten glass (about 2600 degrees F.) which was heated by blasts of producer gas. Three forming machines supplied automatic feeders with a capacity of 60 bottles per minute.

The diorama was commissioned by Mrs. Lucille Rawleigh, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. W.T. Rawleigh. In the kitchen of Mrs. W.T. Rawleigh's home, she and her husband, founder of the W.T. Rawleigh Company, are shown making and bottling the first Rawleigh Liniment in about 1892. Rawleigh's mother is helping them.