By Frederick N. Rasmussen , Sun Reporter|June 13, 2008
David Hedleston Fulton, retired president and former owner of Plantabbs Corp., the Hunt Valley manufacturer of tablet plant food, and city zoning board watchdog, died Tuesday of a heart attack at his Tuscany Canterbury home. He was 82.
Mr. Fulton was born in Baltimore and raised on St. Johns Road in Roland Park. His education at Severn School was interrupted during World War II, when he enlisted in the Navy in 1944.
After being discharged from the service, he went to work for his father, David H. Fulton Sr., a Baltimore pharmacist who was a founder of Plantabbs.
His father soon died, and Mr. Fulton, who was studying for a bachelor's degree in business at the Johns Hopkins University, took over the operation of the business while earning his degree in 1950.
The company had its roots in the elder Mr. Fulton, who was an avid gardener and knowledgeable about the advances nitrogen and phosphorus-based fertilizers were bringing to agriculture in the late teens and early 1920s.
After combining a mixture of nitrogen, phosphorus and potash, Mr. Fulton created a tablet that could be used to fertilize plants.
In 1921, he and his brother, T.R. Fulton, founded Plantabbs and began producing fertilizer tablets with the same name in a facility in the 1100 block of Maryland Ave.
They were sold in 10- and 25-cent packages nationally through such stores as Woolworth and Kresge.
"He put together a formula and started selling it," the son told The Evening Sun in a 1977 interview. "Flower shows then were big, and he'd hire a girl to hand out samples."
The product's popularity soared after the elder Mr. Fulton purchased a full-page advertisement in Life magazine in 1939.
"People told him he was crazy, but he said it was his money," Mr. Fulton said of his father. "The response was tremendous. It was written up in some advertising textbooks as a phenomenon."
In the early 1960s, the company moved to a larger, more modern plant in Hunt Valley.
By the late 1970s, the company was producing millions of plant tablets that were sold in 30,000 to 40,000 stores throughout the United States, and it eventually became the largest manufacturer of plant food in the world.
"I can tell you it went out of here pretty good during the 1970s and 1980s," Carrie Engel, Valley View Farm's retail greenhouse manager, said yesterday.
In 1988, Mr. Fulton sold the business, which became a division of Tango Industries Inc., and retired.
