Those Pre-Pro Whiskey Men!

There is an old adage that “necessity is the mother of invention.” My thought, rather, is that Ohio is the mother of invention. Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers come particularly to mind, but during the early 1900s the Buckeye state teemed with individuals bent on making improvements to all manner of things. Among them was Joshua Low who sold liquor in Steubenville to make a living but whose lifelong passion was inventing.

It appears that Low’s first invention was a “thill coupling,” shown left, that he patented in 1873 when he was 28 years old. For those, like me, not familiar with the term, a thilll is one of two long shafts, usually of wood, between which a horse is hitched. The coupling is important because it should be fastened easily, hold steady as the buggy or cart is being drawn along, and then be released with similar ease. The figure below shows a horse with a thill secured with a coupling.

Born in 1845 in the town of Paris, Washington County, Pennsylvania, Low had migrated the short ten miles over the Ohio River to Steubenville as a young man.

He dated the founding of his wholesale liquor house to 1865, a time when he was only 20, a dubious claim that suggests that he had bought an existing business, perhaps after working there for a time. The 1870 census recorded him working as a “clerk” not an owner. By the 1889 census, however, his occupation was “liquor dealer.” According to local business directories the “J. Low” company, was located initially at 221-223 Market Street, the avenue shown below.

Low’s decision to sell rather than dispense whiskey over the bar appears to have been a strategic one. Steubenville directories at the time listed only three liquor houses but some six dozen saloons, all of them needing regular restocking of spirits. Joshua supplied them and retail customers in cobalt decorated ceramic jugs, featuring one proprietary whiskey he called “66.” Although willing to spend significant funds to patent his inventions, he never bothered to trademark this brand name.

Low advertised vigorously in the local press: “Ask any man who is an judge of good liquor and he will tell you that our reputation for the finest goods as reasonable prices is not excelled by anyone in the city,” read one of his advertisements. “And if you want to see how true it is, give us a call.” Another Low ad shows a tiny child popping the cork on a bottle of sparking wine. The text suggested that good wine was health-giving for men, women and even kiddies. The ad urged “…get some good stuff from us and get well. Prices are right. Goods are right.”

The press of selling alcohol could not, however, deter Joseph from his passion for inventing. Although no evidence exists that his “thill coupling” ever saw commercial fulfillment, he turned his attention to coupling railroad cars. This invention, he claimed, could firmly join two pieces of rolling stock simply by pushing them together.

Once again, no proof exists that this innovation ever saw actual production. Perhaps discouraged with the coupling field, Low next turned his inventing fever to an area of where his knowledge was more personal — coaxing liquid out of a barrel and into a jug or bottle. Years of tediously siphoning whiskey and wine out of barrels and into wholesale or retail portions apparently had triggered a desire on Low’s part to facilitate a means whereby the liquid could be drawn off at a point higher than the tank or cask. It consisted of two tubes rather than the standard single. By blowing into the smaller tube, Low contended that liquid would be forced out into the larger one and the flow would continue until the container was empty.

Having patented this invention in January 1885, Low continued to work on the problem of emptying barrels. His improved dual siphons needed to be stabilized in place if they were to work right, he subsequently suggested. This required a specialized kind of siphon cork made of rubber to hold each tube in place. With this further development, patented the following September he claimed he had perfected “a device…that will meet the general demands of the trade….” While Low himself may have employed this invention, again there is no evidence of general manufacture.

Low’s last idea was for an “electric ignitor for gas engines.” Patented in 1894 just as the automobile age was dawning, he and his partner may have had in mind a way of starting a vehicle without the need for cranking to obtain a spark. The description speaks of a battery providing the electrical current needed to ignite the gasoline, presumably the answer to retiring the automobile crank. It would appear, however, that commercial application once again escaped the whiskey man.

One wonders about the thoughts of Joshua’s wife about his incessant tinkering. He had married Elizabeth Mohr, a German immigrant, when he was 22 years old and she was 21. They would go on to have a family of nine children, five girls and four boys. In addition to the amount of time Low was spending on his “novelties,” as he sometimes called them, obtaining a patent could be expensive. Even if the inventor did not provide a three-dimensional model, an artist had to be hired to provide a suitable drawing. A lawyer familiar with the patent process usually was required to fill out the necessary paperwork and to make sure that the written descriptions provided were done appropriately in “patent speak.” Otherwise the application might be rejected on its face with loss of the filing fee, itself a substantial sum.

No evidence exists that over the approximately 21 years during which Low was inventing and patenting his brain-children that any of them actually were put into commercial production or that even that he was able to sell the rights. In his lifetime Thomas Edison owned 1,093 U.S. patents, the first issued for a voting machine when he was 22 years old. By the time Edison was 33 he had invented the light bulb and Orville Wright the airplane. Low at 33 owned a patent on a horse hitch.

Nevertheless, the Steubenville whiskey dealer deserves no disparagement. Whether his inventions were commercially successful or not, Joshua Low was firmly within the rich tradition of the Ohio workshop tinkerer, passionate about making something that would improve an existing mechanism or process. Unfortunately Joshua developed heart trouble during his late 50s and died in December 1903 at the age of 58. His joint gravestone with Elizabeth is shown here.

After his death his elder sons who had been working with him in the business took over. They renamed the company "Joshua Lows Sons Wholesale Liquor." The sons piloted the company successfully until it was shut down when Ohio voted itself “dry” in 1916.

From their base in Lexington, members of the Stoll family at various times owned part or all of five Kentucky distilleries, bought and sold them frequently, and played cozy with the Whiskey Trust. Their gambits in the liquor trade did not bring them lasting fame but in their own time earned them grudging respect as canny businessmen.

The Stoll family was established in the United States as early as 1818 when Gallus Stoll, a native of Wurtemburg, Germany, brought his family here. After a brief flirtation with Pennsylvania, Gallus headed west, settling in Lexington. There his son, George, was educated, found a wife in a Kentucky native, Mary Scrugham, began a family, and sold furniture and later insurance.

From that union emerged a band of brothers whose names would be among the most noted in distilling circles of the time. The eldest, born in 1851, was Richard Pindall Stoll, shown right, whose jutting chin and stern demeanor give some hint of his determination to succeed. Educated in public schools and at the University of Kentucky, he first learned the liquor business as a federal revenue agent, collecting taxes on distilled products. In time his brother, James Scrugham Stoll, born in 1855, would join him in the whiskey trade.

In 1880 the brothers, operating as Stoll & Co., established their first distillery, one they called “Commonwealth.” Known in Federal parlance as Registered Distillery #12 in Kentucky’s 7th District, the whiskey-making was accomplished within the brick shell of a old cotton warehouse. This distillery was capable of producing 45 barrels a day or 5,000 barrels per year, made possible by twelve 9.000 gallon fermentation vats in the cellar. Three small warehouses could accommodate 13,000 barrels of aging stock.

After five years Stoll & Co., in a likely shrewd business move, dissolved and its assets were auctioned publicly. A third brother, George J. Stoll, bought the distillery and Richard Stoll acquired several hundred gallons of the stored and aging whiskey. Out of this transaction the Commonwealth Distillery Co. was born, incorporated in 1883. Richard became president and his board included James and a fourth brother, Charles H. Stoll. Members of a Cincinnati liquor wholesaling family, the Pritzes, also came on board. [See my post on Pritz, October 2011.]

Meanwhile a second firm was formed by Richard Stoll with a partner, Robert B. Hamilton, to merchandise the products from the Commonwealth plant. To a great extent using large ceramic jugs for their wholesale customers, they sold under their own names and “Old Elk.” Their symbol for the latter was a large elk head peering from a horseshoe and bearing the motto, “Always Pure.”

Meanwhile Richard also was becoming involved with William Tarr in the Ashland Distillery (RD #1, 7th District), the facility shown below, located in Fayette County. In a series of business moves this distillery had come into the possession of Tarr, a prominent Kentucky land speculator [See my post on Tarr, February 2015.] In time James Stoll, shown right, also became a major partner. The Ashland distillery issued $50,000 in bonds secured by company assets. The aftereffects of a financial panic and depression in the whiskey industry, as well as some bad personal loans by Tarr, however, soon caused the company to go into bankruptcy.

In May 1897 all Ashland Distillery assets were assigned to James and Richard Stoll, as receivers. The major asset was 10,000 bottles of “Old Tarr" whiskey in bond. Two years later the distillery was sold at auction for $61,000 to a “straw bidder” for the Kentucky Distillery & Warehouse Company, better known as the “Whiskey Trust.” The cartel was now a major force in Kentucky distilling and Charles H. Stoll was its attorney who engineered the deal.

Meanwhile the brothers continued to be busy on other fronts. In 1891 James Stoll, shown here, teamed with Sanford K. Vannatta, a whiskey broker from Bloomington, Illinois, in a effort to make “Old Elk” a recognized brand across America. As the Stolls' relationship with the Trust ripened they deeded the Commonwealth Distillery to the Trust and it promptly expanded production. James Stoll eventually severed the relationship with Vannatta but continued to wholesale Commonwealth whiskey under the name “Stoll & Company.” James’ son, George J. Stoll III, was made a vice president of this entity.

Returning the several favors the Stolls had bestowed on it, the Trust reciprocated in 1902 by ceding the family the Bond & Lilliard Distillery (RD #274, 8th District), located in Anderson County, on Bailey’ Run near the town of Lawrenceburg Courthouse. In March 1905, once more with Trust assistance, the Stolls acquired the Belle of Nelson (RD #271, 5th District) and the E. L. Miles (RD #146, 5th District) distilleries both located in New Hope. With these acquisitions the Stolls now were running the largest whiskey-making operation in Kentucky.

In addition to Old Elk the Stolls controlled a number of whiskey brands including “Bond & Lilliard,” “Old Buckhorn Rye,” “The Acme,” and “Belle of Nelson.” For the last label the Stolls issued a series of saloon signs that depicted Western card-playing scenes. My favorite is one in which a cowboy is reaching for his gun against a gambler while a Union soldier sits nearby in a drunken stupor.

In March 1903 as the Stolls were at the apogee of their power in Kentucky distilling, Richard died at his residence, only 52 years old. Several months earlier a local newspaper had commented on his vigor and youthful appearance. The cause of death given was a sudden heart attack. He was buried in the Lexington Cemetery. Through his lifetime Richard Stoll had been prominent not only in business but in the civic and political affairs of his community and state. He was elected to represent Fayette County in the Kentucky legislature twice and had run unsuccessfully on the Republican ticket for state treasurer and the U.S. Congress.

In 1907 the Stoll liquor empire underwent a further change as distillery operations were merged with the whiskey marketing arm. This new unified corporation featured James S. Stoll as the president and George J. Stoll III and Richard’s son, John G. Stoll, as vice presidents. Suggesting the Stolls continued relationship with the Whiskey Trust, the cartel’s man, Samuel Stofer, was secretary and treasurer. That arrangement was in place only one year when James Stoll died in May, 1908, during a visit to Oxford, Ohio. He was 53 years old. He too was buried in Lexington Cemetery where the gravestones of the brothers lie not far apart.

With James’ death the liquor empire rapidly came to an end. The days of Stoll wheeling and dealing in Kentucky whiskey were over. Family distilling interests were ceded in their entirety to the Trust, who had controlled much of the Stolls’ output. At that point the Ashland Distillery, one that had helped launch the family into state prominence, was razed. The family, however, continued to be involved importantly in Lexington. Richard P.’s son, Richard C. Stoll, became an attorney and was a leader in local business, including guiding family ownership of the city’s transit system. He also was a power in Republican party circles.

Three generations of the Moul family were prominent in the sale of whiskey to the townsfolk of York, Pennsylvania, over a period of almost seventy years (1851-1919)— an amazing record in the liquor trade where a twenty-year run is notable. But the Moul dynasty was in true peril for three days in June, 1863, when the town was occupied by the Confederate Army and threatened with destruction.

First, something about the Mouls. The origin of the name variously is given as Scottish, English, Irish, German, French and Dutch. Not in question is where Moul families located upon coming to America, the vast majority settling in Pennsylvania as farmers. A section of York County in Heidelberg Township was known as “Moulstown” and there, appropriately enough, Charles Moul was born in the summer of 1814 to Conrad and Anna Maria (Hair) Moul.

Farm life apparently had little appeal for Charles and he gravitated toward York, then one of the hundred largest cities in the nation. My guess is that he began by working in a local grocery store, saved his money, and planned some day to strike out on his own. He may have been spurred on by his marriage in January 1844 at Christ Lutheran Church in York to Susannah (“Susan”) Stambaugh. About 1851, Moul took the step and opened his own grocery on South Duke Street, a store that specialized heavily in selling liquor.

Prospering as a merchant, in 1859 Charles moved his grocery and liquor business into a brand new four-story building at 112-114 South George Street. These facilities allowed him to stock large quantities of spirits for wholesaling to local saloons and restaurants. The space also allowed him to buy whiskey by the barrel from Pennsylvania distilleries and decant it into his own jugs and bottles labeled with his name. He featured a proprietary brand he called “Violet Springs 1851.” Life at mid-century seemed good to Charles Moul — but things were about to change.

In late June 1863 General Jubal Anderson Early, a fiery Confederate commander marched into the heart of York County with 6,600 battle-hardened troops. They burned railroad bridges and turntables, took down telegraph wires, confiscated more than 400 horses and dozens of mules from angry farmers, and seized control of major roads. Then they occupied York. An artist’s rendering here shows rebel troops tearing down the American flag in the town’s Miller’s Square.

Even more distressing was Early’s threat to townsfolk: Come up with $100,000 in tribute to the Confederacy or face the burning of York — the equivalent of asking for $2.5 million today. Moul’s building with its stock of whiskey was in serious jeopardy of being torched. Meeting Early’s demands was impossible but local leaders went from door to door to try to collect as much as they could. Although there is no list of who gave what, we can believe that Moul with so much at stake was among the larger contributors. In the end, only $28,610 of Early’s demand could be raised and turned over. By that time, however, Lee had ordered the general and his troops to the fateful battleground at Gettysburg. As the troops marched out of town, I imagine there was a collective sigh of relief.

The crisis over, Charles Moul continued to prosper, phasing out of groceries into fully pursuing the more lucrative liquor trade. In time he was joined by his son, Edwin T. Moul, born in York in 1849. Beginning as a clerk, the son learned all facets of the business and demonstrated many of the entrepreneurial qualities that characterized his father. As he aged, Charles increasingly turned management over to Edwin. The elder Moul died in 1884 at the age of 73 and was buried in Prospect Hill Cemetery in York.

Edwin lost no time in putting his own stamp on the enterprise. He changed the name to the “Edwin T. Moul, Wines and Liquors.” That name adorns ceramic jugs, none of which appears to bear a pottery mark. The assumption of local bottle collectors is that these containers were made by either the Pfaltzgraff Stoneware Co. or the The Pfaltzgraff Pottery Co., located in York County. Shown here, the jugs ranged from two gallons down to quart size.

Although Edwin Moul was faced with the financial panics of the late 1800s, growing anti-alcohol sentiment, and several attempts to impose monopolies or “trusts” on the whiskey business that often made it difficult to get supplies, he continued on the track of prosperity that his father had blazed. After 23 years of guiding the fortunes of the South George Street establishment, Edwin died at the age of 58 and was buried at Prospect Hill, not far from his parents.

By this time a third scion in the family line was primed to take over. He was Charles D. Moul, born in September 1878 at York to Edwin and his wife Addie. Edwin early on had introduced his son into the liquor trade. Just as his father had done, Charles took the opportunity to change the firm name to his own. The South George St. company became “Charles D. Moul, Wholesale Wines and Liquors.”

A postcard from about 1908 shows a well-established York that was undergoing a modest economic boom. As a wholesaler, Charles D. faced a new set of challenges, forced to advertise and vie vigorously for the business of the burgeoning number of saloons and restaurants in the city and surrounding areas.

A key business strategy for wholesalers was providing customers with gifts that contained advertising. In Charles’ case the giveaways included a shot glass advertising Virginia Spring Whiskey, and a corkscrew touting Moul’s Rye. My favorite, shown right, is a small jug that sported a bail handle (now missing) and containing a few swallows of liquor. With such vigorous marketing, this third in the line of Mouls was able to continue the thriving business his grandfather had begun in 1851.

National Prohibition, however, posed a threat that even General Early could not match. Faced with the passage of the Volstead Act that mandated the end of all alcohol sales nationwide, Charles D. was forced to shut the doors on the Moul whiskey dynasty. He was 42 years old and had been running the business for twelve years. Still relatively young and with cash to invest, he entered the new and expanding auto supply market, opening a business in the early 1920s called The Community Tire Shop.

This may have been a relatively short-lived enterprise. According to the 1930 census Charles D., living in York with his wife, Linda, and two adult sons, had no occupation. Although he lived to see Prohibition repealed, no evidence exists that he or his sons returned to the liquor trade. He died in 1939, age 61, and is buried with other family members in Prospect Hill Cemetery.

Any liquor house that could count a life span more than a generation would have had its share of history-driven vicissitudes. Few if any, however, faced the destructive challenge that Jubal Early posed in June 1863. Having survived that crisis, the Mouls thrived for three generations and 68 continuous years in business — a remarkable accomplishment. As a symbol of their success, the Moul Building, shown here, still stands in downtown York.

And there was distant music,

Simple and somehow sublime,

Giving the nation

A new syncopation-

The people called it Ragtime!

The son of a freed slave, Thomas Million Turpin learned the niceties of running a saloon from his father, “Honest John.” Then Tom established the Rosebud Bar in St. Louis and made it the showplace for offbeat rhythms the world has come to know as “ragtime” music.

Tom Turpin, shown left, and his brother Charles both inherited their physiques and their spirit from their father. John Turpin was a man of independence and courage whom slavery left unbowed. Likely a house slave and literate, he often bragged that after Emancipation he never worked for anyone but himself. Following the Civil War, known as “Honest John, he became politically active as a black leader in Savannah, Georgia, where a street is named for him and where Tom was born in 1873.

Later in that decade, John moved his wife, Lulu, and their children to Mississippi, arriving just as Reconstruction was ending and the state began passing “Jim Crow” laws that would discriminate strongly against people of color. Apparently recognizing the deteriorating situation, Turpin uprooted his family once more and moved to more moderate Missouri, settling in St. Louis about 1880. There he went into business as owner of the Silver Dollar Saloon at 425 South 12th St. Noted for his ability to handle trouble in his establishment, Honest John never used his fists, preferring to grab miscreants by the wrists and strike them with his head — called by some the “Missouri State Head Butting Champion.”

When his sons Tom, known as “Million” to his family, and older brother Charles were old enough, John took them into the business, teaching them how to wait tables and tend bar. The boys, however, developed “gold fever,” traveled West, and likely with money from their father bought a stake in the Big Onion Mine in Searchlight, Nevada, the town shown above. When the mine proved to be a bust, they separately wandered back to St. Louis where Tom in an 1889 directory was recorded as a bartender in his father’s saloon.

While working at the Silver Dollar, Tom began to entertain customers by playing the piano. Largely self-taught since a boy, he had developed his own hard-thumping style that lent itself to the new syncopated rhythms that people were calling ragtime. Turpin also was writing music in this idiom,in 1897 becoming not only the first published St. Louis ragtime composer, but the first black composer with a published rag. Called the “Harlem Rag” it proved to be successful and was issued in several editions. It gave the youth the money to strike out on his own.

In 1897, drawing on the years of experience working for his father, Tom opened Turpin’s Saloon at Nine Targee Street, apparently living above the establishment with a wife and baby, both of whom died during this period. This twin tragedy may temporarily have unhinged him. According to a report in the St. Louis Post Dispatch in late February 1898, Tom was arguing with a bar patron on “the relative merits of negro women." Inflamed by liquor, each drew a pistol and dared the other to shoot. Said the newspaper: “It was a battle to the death and both of the black men exhibited nerve and bulldog tenacity...Then came a bullet that prostrated Keeler. It entered his left side and he sank to the floor.” He later died at the hospital. Tom was arrested but charges appear to have been dropped. Turpin’s saloon closed.

According to the 1900 census, Tom now was living with his brother Charles, two younger sisters, and Honest John, a widower because Lulu had died several years earlier. That same year he opened the Rosebud, sometimes called a cafe, sometimes a bar, at 2220-2222 Market Street near downtown St. Louis — destined to become a legend. The saloon, shown here, soon became the gathering place for black pianists during the height of ragtime popularity, hosting such well-known composers as Scott Joplin, Joe Jordan and Louis Chauvin.

Turpin advertised his saloon relentlessly. He touted it as “headquarters for colored professionals” and kept it open around the clock. According to one observer: “The Rosebud had something for almost everybody, including two bars, gambling facilities, a sportsmen's club, a wine room where the piano entertainment resided, and a gentleman's brothel upstairs.”

He boasted about being a distributor of Applegate’s “Old Rosebud Whiskey.” Profiled earlier in my post[June 2012] Col. C. L. Applegate was described in his own ads as “Kentucky’s Leading Distiller.” Old Rosebud was a flagship brand of Applegate’s distilling and rectifying organization, renowned for the colonel’s give-away items to saloons. Turpin’s likely would have been well supplied with shot glasses and a fancy Rosebud decanter sitting behind the bar.

Tom Turpin himself often was the star entertainer. As he got older, he carried three hundred pounds or more on his six-foot frame. His large stomach made it difficult to see the keyboard so that he often played standing up in front of a raised piano, banging out ragtime tunes in an inimitable style.

He also continued to write music. After issuing “Bowery Buck” in 1901, Turpin composed “A Ragtime Nightmare,” a tune based on a work by a black playwright. He followed that up with “Buffalo Rag.” Although he composed a number of other ragtime pieces, these are the ones by which Tom Turpin is best remembered today.

In 1901, Tom married for the second time; his wife Willamete “Willie” Turpin. The next several years were a boom time for the Rosebud Cafe as the year-long St. Louis International Exposition (1904/1905) brought hundreds of thousands to the city. The saloon was constantly busy. Ragtime music, now at the top of its popularity, poured out its doors. With the end of the World’s Fair, many musicians moved on to Chicago and other destinations. Interest in ragtime declined in St. Louis. Jazz became the craze.

Beset by these realities, the Rosebud folded in 1906. Far from being discouraged, however, Tom Turpin continue to run saloons, dance halls, brothels and even a theater in St. Louis, often with the help of brother Charles. In 1910 he open a new establishment, the Eureka Club at 2208 Chestnut Street. In 1916 he opened another saloon at 2333 Market Street that he called The Jazzland Cafe, another center for black musicians. During those years Turpin also was serving as a deputy constable for the African American community in St. Louis and regarded as politically potent.

Turpin died in August 1922 at the relatively young age of 50, the cause of death listed as “peritonitis” from a rupture of the abdominal wall. He was buried at St. Peter’s Cemetery in the Normandy district of St. Louis County, a graveyard run by the United Church of Christ. His gravestone is shown here as it lies in Section 27, Lot 16.

The inscription calls him "The Father of St. Louis Ragtime." One biographer has summed Tom’s life up this way: “Turpin left a wide swath of happy memories for thousands of people in his considerable wake.” As a fan of ragtime, to that observation I add “Amen.”

Note: A two -story replica of the Rosebud with bar and piano has been built next to the Scott Joplin House in St. Louis, now a state historic site. Except during the winter closing of the entire complex, Turpin’s recreated drinking establishment is on the tour given at the site and can be rented for special events.

Berkshire swine: (bûrk`shər, bärk`–, –shĭr), one of the oldest of the improved breeds of swine, originating in the county of Berkshire in south central England. This variety was imported to the United States in large numbers between 1830 and 1850 and adapted itself to all parts of the country. Berkshires are of medium size, generally smooth, and somewhat longer in proportion to depth than other breeds. Their ears stand erect, their noses are short, and their color is black with white feet, nose, and tail. In the U.S. today it is considered a fairly rare breed of hog — From a Wikipedia entry.

The piggies produced by Amann & Company of Cincinnati similarly are considered rare by the many collectors who prize the bottles that once held the liquor house’s “Berkshire Bitters.” The Amanns’ was a family liquor business, one in which members over time seemingly played interchangeable parts. As a result it is difficult to credit any one Amann for having conceived of naming a bitters “Berkshire” and putting it in the pig shaped bottles shown throughout this post. Today these porkers avidly are sought by collectors and can fetch up to $1,000.

Liquor wholesalers who featured a line of bitters, advertising them as “medicinals,” was not unusual for the times. The government put a considerably lighter tax on bitters than on whiskey, even though the alcoholic content might have been similar. That certainly was a factor in the heavy merchandising the Amanns’ lavished on Berkshire Bitters.

According to an email sent me, the recipe for that elixir came from the wife of William McRoberts who was a close friend of Edmund Amann [See my post of November 2016 on McRoberts.]: My correspondent wrote: “Grandmother Harriet Conway McRoberts had a recipe for bitters that William gave to the Amann brothers as he was on the decline. They put that bitters recipe in little pig bottles.”

Two Amanns were born in Europe, the exact place variously given as France or Germany. Daniel was the firstborn in 1822, followed 13 years later by the birth of Anthony. In 1839 their father uprooted the family and they immigrated to the United States, settling in Cincinnati. There a third brother, Edmund, was born. Educated in local schools, the brothers appear early to have gone to work in the burgeoning local distilling and whiskey merchandising industry.

When McRobert’s firm — Boyle, Miller & Company — faltered, the brothers pooled their resources to buy the liquor house in 1868. Two years later they changed the name to Amann & Company, with Anthony, Emanuel and David as the executive cadre. Their first address was 57 East Second Street and thereafter they never strayed far from that major commercial avenue, moving in 1872 to 59 East Second Street, a large four story building, 25 by 190 feet in dimensions. Advertising themselves as wholesale liquor dealers, they conducted a major rectifying — whiskey blending — operation, using both the first and second floors for the process. For that purpose they were said be“replete with all the mechanical devices and machinery requisite to that branch of the business.” Their whiskey brand names were “Amann Rye” and “Berkshire Rye,” as noted on the back-of-the-bar bottle shown right.

The federal government taxed rectifiers and wholesale liquor dealers in addition to the taxes imposed on the distillers from whom they relied for supplies. The Amanns and others in their trade were required to keep careful records of the spirits they produced, available for scrutiny at any time by federal officers in order to determine the amount of tax. Owners were allowed to delegate the task of making entries but held responsible for seeing that they were promptly and properly done. In 1876, the government hauled the Amanns into U.S. District Court in Cincinnati, claiming several instances in which entries were omitted or made erroneously.

Suddenly the Amanns were fighting for their corporate life. If found guilty the government might have had the right not only to confiscate their stocks of liquor but also to seize their rectifying plant and equipment. The brothers mounted a

spirited defense, asserting that they had“placed a competent bookkeeper in charge of that branch of their business,” that they had moved rapidly to rectify the errors, that in each case the taxes were fully paid, and that no loss occurred to the government from the mistakes. The judge was impressed with their arguments and to the great relief of the Amanns found them not guilty.

Meanwhile, Edmund had begun a family. After marrying a British-born woman named Mary during the late 1860s, the couple had a daughter they called “Lizzie,” born in 1869. The 1880 census found them living in Newport, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. Residing with them was elder brother Daniel, still a bachelor at 50 years old. The occupations of both men were recorded appropriately as “wholesale whiskey dealer.” Anthony had married in 1861, a woman named Margaret Apple. Their union produced at least one son, Edwin, who would enter the liquor firm upon attaining maturity.

Like many rectifiers, Amann Bros. needed a consistently available supply of “raw” whiskey for their products in order to thrive. This was a continuing problem, one exacerbated by the advent of various whiskey “trusts” that hiked prices on spirits available to rectifiers. The brothers began to look for a distillery they could buy.

In 1890 they found one. Initially known as the Almond Distillery it was located about 100 miles directly south of Cincinnati and three miles north of Nicholasville, in Jessamine County, Kentucky. At the time of the Amann’s purchase the plant was operating as the Old Lexington Club Distillery and its flagship brand was “Old Lexington Club.” They paid $10,000 for the property, a relative bargain likely related to the plant being located on low ground and subject to period flooding. The photo below indicates the extent of the facility.

Insurance underwriter records compiled in 1892 indicate that the distillery was built of stone with a fireproof slate or metal roof. The property included a frame cattle shed 75 feet southwest of the still and a corn crib. The cows would have been fed the spent mash from the distillery and in months when not operating, from corn in the crib. Three bonded warehouses were sited northwest of the still, two of frame and one of metal construction, all with shingle roofs.

Before the Amann’s bought the distillery it had the mashing capacity 200 bushels a day and capacity to store about 7,700 barrels for aging. The brothers promptly increased the mashing capacity to 300 bushel per day and over time increased warehouse capacity to 13,500 barrels. Most of this production was shipped to the Amanns for rectifying and bottling; the rest was sold to other wholesalers and rectifiers.

From all indications, the Amanns, now assured of a steady supply of product, were thriving during the 1880s. In October 1887, however, Daniel died, 65 years old. He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Campbell County Kentucky, Section 2, Lot 3. With Edwin now working as a clerk, his brothers, carried on. At this point Edmund Amann appears to have been guiding the business — but only for a limited time. In 1903, for reasons shrouded in the mists of history, he sold the Old Lexington Club Distillery. Amann & Company subsequently disappeared from local directories, leaving only its Berkshire pigs to perpetuate its memory.

Edmund Amann died in 1910 at the age of 70 and was buried in Maple Grove Cemetery in Nicholasville, not far from his former distillery. His gravestone is shown here. Anthony, the youngest, lived on through National Prohibition and Repeal, dying in October 1936. He lies buried in yet a third cemetery, Gate of Heaven, in Hamilton County, Ohio, Section 14, Lot 148.

Since the demise of the Amann brothers, one of the challenges in bitters collecting has been to acquire all four variants of the glass Berkshire Bitters pigs. Aficionados have divided the piggies into three types: short thin, short fat, and long fat. Although their color is given as amber, as seen in the examples shown here, significant variations exist in shade.

Note: I was researching an article on the Amanns as liquor dealers when I came across Ferdinand Meyer’s Peachridge Glass post about their figural pig bitters and decided to make those bottles the theme of my vignette. I have taken a number of illustrations from his piece and am grateful for his continuing encouragement and support of my writing efforts.

When German immigrant August Greulich arrived on the Wisconsin lakeshore near Milwaukee in 1842, he faced a heavily wooded landscape of scrub oak and tamarack. He stayed for the rest of his life, working as a farmer, newspaper editor, political office holder, philanthropist, and for much of his life, successful whiskey merchant. When he died Greulich left behind a thriving city of more than 200,000 souls.

Shown right, Greulich (pronounced “groo-lick”) was born in 1813 on his father’s farm in Baden, Germany. Educated in local schools, he may have spent a period of time as an apprentice in a butcher shop. At 21, an age when many young Germans left their homeland, he emigrated to the American shores, landing in New York. He was recorded working as a butcher in Boston for nine months, then moving on to Buffalo and Cleveland, traveling ever westward.

By 1836, August was in living in Detroit and running his own butcher shop. He found a wife there, Margaret Ann Alter, herself an immigrant from Baden, marrying her about 1837. Their first two children were born there, Cecelia Catherine and Andrew Francis. As a pioneer merchant in Detroit, Greulich began to recognize his leadership skills, became active in politics and was involved in passing the first Michigan constitution.

It remains unclear why, after five years in Detroit, he decided to uproot his small family and move to even more primitive Wisconsin, still a territory on the Northwest Frontier. It may have been the prospect of cheap land, available for clearing and growing crops. Gruelich tried farming south of Milwaukee for several years, likely find it grueling work and unrewarding. By 1845 he had left agriculture and with a partner opened a general store in Milwaukee.

About the same time he joined one of Milwaukee’s volunteer fire companies, eventually rising to the position of foreman. This was a post elected by the volunteers himself and may have rekindled Greulich's political instincts. In 1848 he was elected from Milwaukee’s Second Ward as a legislator in the first Wisconsin legislature. This was only the first of his elective offices. In 1856 he was again elected to the State Assembly and in 1857 and 1858 was raised to the State Senate.

In the meantime, August had abandoned mercantile pursuits in favor of buying an interest in the Seebote German-language newspaper. This move may have been dictated by Greulich’s political ambitions. Many of his constituents were German, as was he, and read German newspapers like the Seebote. Oriented to the Democratic Party, to which August adhered, the paper was an important political tool. After buying a half interest in 1852, Greulich became the managing editor.

By 1860 publishing a newspaper had lost its attraction and August turned his attention back to commerce. His general store had made him considerable money with alcohol sales as the major profit center. Taking with him as a partner his son-in-law, Julius Kersting, he bought out an existing Milwaukee liquor house, calling the new firm “The Aug. Greulich Co.” Its initial location was 341-345 Third Street, moving to 342-346 Fourth Street in 1867.

Unlike several other Milwaukee whiskey merchants, Greulich was not blending and selling his own brands of whiskey. Rather, he featured national brands purchased from distillers and sold at retail in his establishment. Among them were “Jockey Club Bourbon,” trademarked by the Halliday Company of New York, “Chimney Corner Bourbon” from the Squibb family of Lawrenceburg, Indiana [See my post of March 2016], and “Montebello Whiskey,” likely from a Baltimore area distiller. The company advertised that “Fine old rye and malt whiskeys from the most famous distilleries of Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Maryland are…specialties.”

In 1868, Kersting died while on a trip to Switzerland leaving August’s daughter a young widow. Greulich went on as sole proprietor of the liquor house. By this time the politically active German immigrant had a family of five, four girls and Andrew F. whom he eventually took into the firm. He gave his son advanced education and a two-year “grand tour” of Europe, possibly to keep the youth out of the Civil War draft. When the company incorporated in 1891 with $65,000 capital, equivalent to $1.6 million today, Andrew was taken as a partner. The publication, “Milwaukee — A Half Century of Progress” opined: “The trade is large and influential in this city and throughout the Middle and Western States and is annually increasing.”

Even as he was building his liquor business, Greulich was continuing his political life. For more than a decade during the 1860s and 1870s he was elected to the Milwaukee City Council, where for a time he headed an investigation into corruption in City Hall. He also served as a member of the County Board of Supervisors and spent two years on the Milwaukee School Board. Greulich’s most enduring commitment was to the St. Emelianus Orphans Asylum, in the Milwaukee suburb of St. Francis, shown below. He served on the board of managers of the orphanage for 20 years and was a principal source of its financial support.

As he aged, Greulich received considerable recognition for his contributions to Milwaukee and Wisconsin. Said one publication under the headline “Milwaukee Pioneer”: “Although now well advanced in years, Mr. Greulich has by no means outlived his usefulness….,” citing August's continuing interest in civic betterment. An 1881 article said: “Mr. Greulich…has been highly respected by his fellow citizens; and during all the years of his public life had an eye to the best interests of the city.”

In January 1893 at the age of 79 Greulich died in the home he had built for his family 45 years earlier. He was buried in Milwaukee’s Catholic Calvary Cemetery, Block 9, Row 141. August’s grave is marked with a large statue that appears to be Mary Magdalene mourning at the cross. Almost exactly two years later his wife, Margaret died and was interred next to him.

With Greulich’s death the liquor house underwent a management reshuffle. John Seiben, who had been brought in as a vice president in 1891, became president with Andrew Greulich as secretary-treasurer. The last entry for the company in Milwaukee directories was 1908, well in advance of National Prohibition. Andrew Greulich died in 1912 and was buried in Calvary Cemetery not far from his parents.

New York, according to the Harper’s Weekly of April 11, 1857, was“…A huge semi-barbarous metropolis...not well-governed nor ill-governed, but simply not governed at all — with filthy and unlighted streets, no practical or efficient security for either life or property, a police not worthy of the name, and expenses steadily and enormously increasing.”

Charles B. Macy and Francis Jenkins might have agreed with that harsh assessment. They had been involved in liquor sales for more than a decade in Manhattan at 149 Fulton Street as Macy & Jenkins whenon March 4, 1857, an attempt was made blow their establishment to smithereens. Who was behind the blast — and why were they targeted?

The year 1857 was one of extreme unrest in Gotham City. Two major riots had rocked the scene. One occurred in June when New York Municipal Police clashed violently with Metropolitan Police over the Mayor’s allegedly corrupt appointment of the city’s Street Commissioner. Shown above, the spectacle of cops fighting cops was concluded only by the intervention of the New York State militia.

Much more serious was a melee that consisted of widespread violence and looting called the “Dead Rabbits Riot” after one of the Irish gangs involved. A newspaper illustration above caught the mayhem. This altercation, lasting July 4 and 5, accounted for at least eight deaths, multiple serious injuries and extensive property damage. The fighting was stopped only by a second intervention by regiments of the New York State Militia who marched on the rioters with fixed bayonets. With police help they were able to intimidate gang members to retreat back to their hideouts.

This was the environment in which Macy and Jenkins did business. The first floor of their Fulton Street store typically was crowded with barrels and casks of whiskey and other items. Just after dark on an otherwise quiet Sunday evening when the store was closed a tremendous explosion rocked the building. It blew out the doors and windows front and back. The rear windows that had been secured by iron shutters were blown open by the violence of the concussion as were windows in the cellar. Fragments of the front doors were thrown across the street.

An investigation afterward revealed that an effort had been made to blow up the building with gunpowder and, in the estimate of officials, to cause a raging fire. The explosive material had been been placed between a barrel of whiskey and a stairway and lighted with a slow match, seemingly designed to burst the cask, ignite the whiskey and throw flames in every direction. In reality, the resulting blaze was negligible. A policeman and a fire fighter — known in those days as “an insurance patrolman” — were nearby, ran to the scene and extinguished the fire with a few buckets of water.

The proprietors quickly were called to the scene. They found their safe untouched, nothing of value missing, and their stock largely in the same condition as it was before the blast. The total damage was estimated at not more than fifty dollars. Macy and Jenkins had gotten off lightly. If the partners had an idea who had perpetrated the explosion and why, they did not share it with the press. Before long, however, they moved their enterprise to a more staid neighborhood at 67 Liberty Street, a five story building between Broadway and Nassau Street in the Financial District, next to the New York Chamber of Commerce.

How these partners came to link their fortunes is unclear. Charles Macy was the oldest, born in Hudson, Columbia County, New York, in 1807, the first of six children of Benjamin and Lydia Bunker Macy. Members of the Macy family had a habit of dying young. Before he reached 20, Charles had experienced the death of his father and two younger sisters. Jenkins was eight years Macy’s junior. He was a native New Yorker who, according to the census, still lived with his elderly father, Jonathan, and other siblings at the age of 32. He would marry later and raise a family.

Having survived the blast and moved to more prestigious quarters, the partners saw their business thrive. At the new location with additional space they were able to operate as “rectifiers,” that is, blending their own whiskeys to achieve color, taste and smoothness. They called their flagship brand, “Old Club House,” a name initially they never bothered to trademark. Their advertising promised that this brand was “warranted pure and softened by age only.”

The company bottled Old Club House in a distinctive glass bottle with a handle, giving the appearance of a jug or decanter. Their names appeared on embossing on the base of the container, which came in varying shades of amber. A paper label overlay the glass. Shown below the label referenced the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, a common and meaningless ploy by wholesalers.

By 1906 the original owners were gone from the company, taken by death. Macy was the first to pass, in February 1869 at the age of 61. He was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, shown here. In the years that followed Francis Jenkins carried on alone, eventually bringing a son, William B. Jenkins, into the business. Francis died at the age of 77 in October 1893, leaving William thereafter to guide Macy & Jenkins. Francis too was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery.

Under William Jenkin’s guidance, the liquor house moved into the 20th Century and continued to thrive. The American Carbonator and Bottler publication hailed it by writing: “Bottlers who want find wines and liquors for the holiday trade or for family or office use will find just what they want in the superior stock of wine and liquors kept by the famous old house of Macy & Jenkins, 67 Liberty Street, New York.” The firm continued to feature Old Club House whiskey as its flagship brand. With the strengthening of trademark laws in 1904, William Jenkins saw the benefit of registering the name with the federal government for the first time in 1905.

The last New York City directory listing for the firm that I can find is for 1918. As a result of the onset of National Prohibition, the next year Macy & Jenkins would be forced to shut down after almost 80 years in business To the end the liquor house was located at 67 Liberty Street in Manhattan.

This brief history of Macy & Jenkins fails to shed definitive light on why in 1857 someone tried to destroy their store. Assessing the lawlessness that ran rampant over New York City during that time, my guess is that the partners were targeted for refusing the blandishments of gang members to buy “protection.” Gotham gangs like Dead Rabbits, Bowery Boys, Atlantic Guards and Roach Guards were known to engage in those kinds of extortion schemes. When Macy and Jenkins apparently refused to play ball with the thugs, they put their business in jeopardy.

Note: Earlier in this century the Macy & Jenkins building was turned into residences and additional stories placed on top. Here is a picture of the structure as the construction progressed and how it was expected to look at the end. One writer put it this way: “Something wacky this way comes at 67 Liberty Street in the Financial District, where a boarded up five-story commercial building is quickly adding floors….And that rooftop addition? Oh, it’s just going to be 15 stories.” Only in New York City.

I am no handwriting expert but looking at Max Selliger’s signature above, particularly noting the curlicues on the capital letters, it seems to exude confidence. He was 30 years old at the time, in the midst of his climb up the Kentucky distilling ladder, beginning as a poorly paid clerk and ending as the sole proprietor of two major Louisville distilleries, maintaining offices in the heart of the city’s “Whiskey Row,” and selling his bourbon coast to coast.

Selliger was born in Louisville in 1852, the son of Caroline and Samuel Selliger. His father ran a millinery store. Max was provided an elementary and some secondary education in local schools but by the age of 18 was recorded working as a clerk, possibly in his father’s shop. Given the importance that making and selling whiskey had assumed in Louisville during that era, selling women’s hats may have seemed like a dead end to an ambitious youth like Max. By 1872 he had gone to work for Barkhouse Bros. & Co., wholesale liquor dealers located at 69 Main Street near Third Road.

The brothers, Julius and Louis Barkhouse, were relative newcomers to the Louisville whiskey scene, but ambitious. Originally they were wholesalers and “rectifiers” — that is, blending whiskey to achieve smoothness, taste and color. They must have seen promise in the 20-year-old Selliger and made him their bookkeeper. It was a post of considerable trust because Max would have been responsible for making the entries on whiskey purchases and rectifications as required by Federal law. Carelessness or mistakes could result in court action and potential confiscation of stocks and equipment.

By 1876 Barkhouse brothers had determined, as many rectifiers did, that in order to assure whiskey for blending, it was advantageous to own their own distillery. Accordingly in 1876 they built a plant at 278-300 Story Avenue, near Ohio Street. They released Selliger from his desk-bound job and green eyeshade to become a salesman for what they now called the Kentucky Distilling Company. Max made the rounds of Louisville area saloons hawking such brands as “Beargrass,” “Gold Dust” and “Kentucky Pride.”

After three years on this job, Selliger left the Barkhouses to team with Nathan Hofheimer, who came from an established Louisville whiskey clan, including Ernest and Sigmund Hofheimer who ran a wholesale whiskey business on Main Street. Nathan also was kin to the Cincinnati-based Hofheimer Bros., who owned the White Mills distillery in Louisville.

The new company, Hofheimer & Selliger, was located at 8 Main Street below First St. Likely helped by their important connections, from the beginning the partners were successful. “This wholesale liquor company had exclusive control of many of Kentucky’s finest bourbons,” according to the Encyclopedia of Louisville (2001). Those brands included “Crystal Springs,” “G. W. S. Mellwood,” and “Glencoe.” [For further information on Glencoe, see my post of July 10, 2012.]

Meanwhile another scion of a well-known local whiskey family was fulfilling his ambitions in the liquor trade. He was George H. Moore, who in 1865 had returned to Louisville from a Union prison camp at Johnson’s Island, Ohio, where he had been interned after being captured in the battle of Allatoona, Georgia. He went to work in the whiskey operation of his uncle, Jesse Moore. Beginning in 1881, likely with Jesse’s financial help, George built the Astor Distillery, shown above, located in Louisville between Lexington (later Breckenridge) and Arbegust Streets. Subsequently Moore built a second plant immediately adjacent, shown below, and called it the Belmont Distillery.

Insurance records show the Astor and Belmont Distilleries adjacent at the site. Each of the two stills was of brick construction as were four shared warehouses with fireproof metal or slate roofs. Warehouse A, located 40 feet east of the stills was used for Astor storage and Warehouse B, located 45 feet northeast, likely was assigned to Belmont. Warehouses C and D sat south of the stills. The Astor made a sweet mash whiskey called “Astor” and the Belmont was producing “Belmont” and “Nutwood,” both sour mash bourbons.

City directories for 1881-1883 indicate that while maintaining their wholesale liquor business, Selliger early on joined Moore’s distillery company as treasurer and Hofheimer became corporate secretary. This cozy arrangement proceeded until 1884, when Max left Hofheimer to join Moore full-time in a new firm, one they called Moore and Selliger. Considered one of the wealthiest men in Louisville and seventeen years older than Selliger, Moore must have seen considerable talent in the younger man to take him as a partner. With this move Max had made the jump from rectifier — always viewed as second class to actual distillers in Kentucky — to part ownership of two major facilities.

As he was climbing the ladder to whiskey success, Max had remained a bachelor. Now as a bonafide distiller, in 1882 at the age of 30, he married Nannie Rosenthal, Kentucky-born of German immigrant parents, a woman several years younger than he. They may have taken a honeymoon aboard because Selliger applied for a passport that same year. The document provides a description of Max as a young man: Five feet, eight inches tall; blue eyes; black hair; long face, and dark complexion. Over time the couple would have a family of two girls, Leah and Jessie.

Moore & Selliger Co. packaged its whiskeys in clear glass bottles, sized from half-pint and pint flasks to “fifths” and full quarts. They all carried paper labels. The Belmont brand displayed a particularly well-designed label involving a large bell and the statement that:“This Whiskey Was Mashed in Little Tubs and Distilled in the Old Fashioned Hand Made Sour Mash Press.” The partners early saw the benefits of registering their trademarks with the federal government, patenting Astor in 1888, Belmont in 1889 and Nutwood in 1894. .

During the twelve years from 1882 to 1896 the company flourished under the two men. By the mid -1890s the Astor Distillery was consuming 725 bushels a day to produce sweet-mash whiskey and the Belmont Distillery 760 bushels for sour-mash. Warehouse capacity had been expanded to 42,000 barrels. The plants employed a large work staff. A fire in the Belmont mash room in 1891 that caused $1,000 damage was quickly repaired and whisky-making resumed.

As he aged, George Moore’s heath deteriorated markedly. After taking breakfast with his family in January 1896 he died quietly, sitting in an armchair. The verdict was a heart attack. Now the former clerk was running both distilleries as the sole proprietor. He promptly changed the name to the Max Selliger Company. In a climb of 26 years at last he had reached the pinnacle of success, recognized as a true Kentucky “whiskey baron.” For the next 24 years Selliger continued to manage both distilleries, establishing his three major whiskeys as national brands. After trademark reforms by Congress in 1904, within two years he had registered his Astor, Belmont, and Nutwood brands a second time.

Once in full charge of the whiskey-making Selliger stepped up his merchandising, providing an attractive reverse glass sign and shot glasses to saloons and restaurants using his liquor. As a result of this intense marketing hedeveloped a wide market for his whiskey as attested by a letterhead from Denver that includes the Belmont logo and by a shot glass from a California saloon.

Shut down by the advent of National Prohibition in 1920, Max continued to be listed as a distiller in the federal census of that year. By the 1930 census, however, he was recorded as “ex-distiller” and “financier.” In 1933 as Repeal was imminent, Selliger, now 81 years old and with no son to take over the business, sold his idled distilleries and brands to a group that also bought the Bernheim Distilleries. Eventually, as shown below, Schenley picked up the Belmont name and motif.

In 1936 Max and Nannie Selliger were still listed in Louisville directories, living at 1022 South Third Street. With them was their unmarried daughter, Jessie. The Max Selliger company was still extant, now with a hired manager. As he relaxed in virtual retirement, Max must have thought frequently about the timely careers moves he had made, decisions that had seen him rise from clerk to whiskey nobility — and smiled. In April 1838 while on a visit to Philadelphia, at the age of 86, Selliger was stricken with a heart attack and died. His body was returned to Louisville for interment, with Nannie, Jessie and a granddaughter among the mourners.

Note: In February of this year three unopened “fifth” bottles of Selliger’s Belmont whiskey were sold at auction. The label identified all three as having been distilled in 1902 and aged for eight years at the Louisville facility. Although a small part of the contents had evaporated from each bottle, as shown right, most of the whiskey still remained and would be considered potable. The three bottles each were knocked down at prices ranging from $1,230 to $1,476 — each sip an expensive one. Max Selliger would be proud.

Labels: Max Selliger, Barkhouse Bros., Astor Distillery, Belmont Distillery, Astor Whiskey, Belmont Whiskey, Nutwood Whiskey, Hofheimer & Selliger, Moore & Selliger Co., George H. Moore, Nathan Hofheimer,

In writing about her Montana ancestor, a descendant headlined an article “Franklin James Pierce — A Complicated Man.” That was an accurate assessment of a saloon keeper and “Green Arbor” liquor dealer whose labyrinthine ways and tangled fortunes might best be narrated as a series of four “complications” to be explored.

Complication #1 — His Name: Franklin James Pierce was not his real name. He was born James P. Harshaw in 1866 in Fannon County, Texas, where his father was a rancher. When James was only nine years old he witnessed the cold-blooded killing of his father by four men who had vowed revenge after he had testified against them in court as cattle rustlers. According to family lore, the boy was holding his father’s hand when the shots rang out.

His mother having died earlier, his father had married again, a woman named Mary Helena Pierce. Although the boy was fond of his stepmother, her father was alleged to have horsewhipped him, resulting in his leaving home at age 13. With a brother, John, he went to Forth Worth, Texas, where for a time the two ran a gambling wheel in a carnival. Although John returned to Texas, James, shown right, entrained north to Montana, settling for a time in Anaconda, a copper mining boom town.

About the same time, he decided to change his name to Franklin J. Pierce, identical to an undistinguished dead President who held the office from 1853-1857, before James Harshaw was born. He may have selected “Pierce” as a last name from his stepmother but why “Franklin J.”? My own theory is that because Montana was heavily Democratic in those days and Pierce a Democrat, Pierce/Harshaw may have seen social advantage in the name.

Complication #2 — Marriages: An Ancestry.com family history has copies of three Pierce marriage certificates issued in the decade from 1890 to 1900. When he was 24, working as a waiter in Butte, Frank met an Irish immigrant girl named Julia O’Neil by whom he fathered a son. He subsequently wedded her. After a relatively short marriage, they divorced and she returned to Ireland with the boy.

Eventually Pierce moved to Missoula, Montana, where he owned and managed the Gem Theatre, a vaudeville house that featured, among others, Mrs. Samoya, a master of “black art,” the Mohring sisters who sang and danced, and, as announced in the Missoula newspaper: “Joe Crotty, the American boy, a celebrated clog dancer. He does the act on a pedestal and is said to rank among the very best.”

Pierce met and fell in love with 21-year-old entertainer named Lulu Inman, originally from Kansas City, who was performing at the Gem. They were married on New Years Day 1898. Lulu rapidly became restless “off the circuit” in Missoula, Montana. When the chance came to join the Rentz-Santley Novelty & Burlesque Company on the road, she left town and Pierce. The local newspaper headlined: “She Refused to Live with Him; Missoula Man Looking for Divorce from His Spouse on the Ground of Desertion.”

Before long, however, Frank found true love in the person of Mary Helena Murphy, born into aNew Orleans immigrant Irish family. She also was a performer at the Gem. In June 1900 the couple were married by an Episcopal priest at Holy Spirit Church in Missoula. This marriage was destined to last and produce ten children. A photo from Missoula taken about 1910 shows Frank and Mary (standing) with five of their brood. They named the two oldest girls “Missoula” and “Montana”

Complication #3: Misfortunes in Missoula: For a time after his marriage events seem to go well for Pierce. While having little formal education he was said to have had good business sense. While continuing to run the Gem Theater, he opened a fancy restaurant on Missoula’s Front Street that he called “Ye Olde Inn.” Advertised as “the most elegantly appointed cafe in Montana,” the establishment featured a “ladies orchestra” in the evening. The local paper enthused: “Ye Olde Inn is one of the most elegant hostelries in the West and a place of which the Garden City [Missoula] can be proud.”

Pierce’s restaurant also appears to have harbored a semi-clandestine casino. Gambling was illegal in Montana but generally overlooked by authorities. When a patron complained that he had lost $95 at a roulette wheel in Pierce’s establishment, however, officials were obliged to act. The owner was arrested and hauled into court. Although Pierce appears to have escaped serious consequences, his life as a restauranteur posed other challenges.

“Ye Olde Inn” experienced two fires he believed to be started by disgruntled employees. After the second blaze, the insurance company refused to pay off. By now Pierce was over-extended financially. According to a descendant: “Frank had planned on a railroad station locating to Missoula, MT where he could make his fortune. Instead, the railroad settled on Spokane Washington so his ‘gamble’ did not pay off.” As a likely result Pierce did not have the money to rebuild “Ye Olde Inn.” Possibly angry at what had befallen him in Missoula, in 1912 he sold the Gem Theater and real estate holdings there and moved his family to Butte.

Complication #4: Booze in Butte: Now firmly middle aged, as shown right, Pierce in effect was being forced to start over — this time with a large and still growing family to feed and clothe. This time he looked to liquor for an income.

Having owned a restaurant he was well aware that alcohol was by far the most profitable item on any menu. With the money he had made from his Missoula sales he opened a saloon in Butte, located at 124 Montana Avenue.

He was began retailing whiskey, buying stock by the barrel and decanting it into half-pint and pint flasks for take-away clientele. Pierce could buy pre-printed labels to slap on the bottles to give them a personalized appearance, as here. He chose to call his whiskey “Green Arbor.” Frank also moved his family into a large house at 1015 West Silver Street, shown here.

Pierce plied the liquor trade despite a major looming complication. Despite harboring hard-drinking ranchers, cowboys and miners, the West rapidly was filling with folks who sought quieter times and gentility. By 1912 many of them had become advocates for Prohibition as one by one states beyond the Mississippi River chose a “dry” path. Montana was no exception. Although a majority of voters in Butte was opposed, in an 1916 referendum the state voted itself dry — but was not in a hurry to impose the ban on alcohol. The law did not take effect until January 1919.

Before the deadline, Pierce shut down his saloon and in the 1920 census was listed as the proprietor of a soft drink parlor at 11 South Montana, down the street from his old saloon. As shown here, the building still stands. Given the hard-drinking reputation of Butte, it should be no surprise that bootlegging flourished. Pierce became part of it. While his establishment served soft drinks it also served as a cover for the harder stuff. One of his descendants, noting the difficulties Pierce faced during those years, has related: “…He reportedly had to pay a lot of bribes to make the local officials look the other way so he could serve alcohol.”

The stress may have taken a toll on Pierce’s health. Shown here is a photo of Frank with his dog, taken in 1923. At the time he was only 56 years old with his youngest child only age five, but he looks like a much older man. Three years later he died in December 1926, the cause given as heart disease. His body was return to Missoula for burial in a family plot. Shown here, his marker sits on Grave 2, Lot 7, Block 032, of the Missoula Cemetery

Summarizing the persona of a man like Franklin J. Pierce is difficult. From all accounts he was a loving husband to Mary Helena and a good father to his children. His obituary in the Butte Miner newspaper identified him as a “well-known businessman of Butte” but did not go into details. Another observer has suggested: “He rubbed shoulders with respected citizens in the community. He entertained a lot of people during his lifetime….” For all that, the record remains mixed. During his lifetime Pierce also was involved in activities such as illegal gambling, illicit liquor sales, and bribes to local officials. “He took risks,” one descendant has observed. True enough and they complicated his life.

Note: This vignette would not have been possible without the wealth of material found in ancestry.com from the Bumala/Yearian family tree. Although their relationship to Pierce is not explained, they have assembled multiple photos, public documents and several biographical narratives. It was while tracking the origins of Green Arbor whiskey bottles that I came upon the site. Pierce’s story was too rich to ignore. Most of the information and a majority of the photos in this post originated there.

Complication #3 — Rest. in Missoula

Complication #4 — Whiskey in Butte

Foreword: It is likely that the world would never have heard of Joseph J. Mersman if Dr. Linda A. Fisher, a public health physician, had not been doing research for a lecture on the 1849 St. Louis cholera epidemic and came across Mersman’s diary account in the Missouri Historical Society where it had laid “undiscovered” for years. She found the whiskey merchant’s story intriguing and eventually edited it with annotations and put it into book form, published in 2007 by the Ohio University Press. As a result, the day to day activities and thoughts of the German-born St. Louis rectifier and liquor house owner have enjoyed a wider audience.

In July 1824 Joseph, shown right, was born in Borringhausen, a small town in the German Duchy of Oldenburg, the son of Friedrich and Catharina Maria (Polhschneider) Messmann. When he was eight an older sister and brother emigrated to the United States. The next year his mother died and Friedrich packed up Joseph and three other children and sailed from Bremen to Baltimore. They settled in a German settlement in Northwestern Ohio today called Minster. What little education Mersman received in the U.S. he achieved there, but by by the age of 13 had his first job, working as a water boy on the Miami and Ohio Canal.

About that time the family had moved to a much larger Germanic town, Cincinnati. There Joseph at age 15 was introduced to the liquor trade, working as an apprentice with Edmund Dexter, a wholesaler who taught him how to rectify whiskey and other elements of the business. Dexter is shown left. [See my post on Dexter, November 2015.] About this time the family began using “Mersman” as their surname.

In November 1847 when he was about 23 years old Joseph Mersman began his diary, documenting his work in the whiskey house and other aspects of his daily life. Shown below is a sample of his handwriting and a transcription. He often described the day to day fluctuations in the amount of Dexter’s liquor trade. On November 19th, for example, Mersman noted that while business was slow in the store he had “plenty to do” because Dexter was conducting a vigorous mail order business and shipping extensively. Several weeks later he reported: “Business very good, our Commercial transactions cannot but prove to be very satisfactory to Mr. Dexter.”

In January 1849 Mersman completed his apprenticeship with Edmund Dexter. From his elder he had become practiced in keeping records, so important to keeping federal inspectors happy, as well as managing inventory, salesmanship, and supervising employees. So comfortable was Dexter with the young German immigrant that the owner had trusted him to run the business while he took a seven week vacation on the East Coast. Mersman knew full well the profits that could be made in the liquor trade..

Now free to strike out on his own, Mersman had saved his money for just such an opportunity. He soon moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and at 25 years of age established a whiskey and tobacco business with John C. Nulsen. Nulsen, shown right in middle age, was the younger brother of the partner of Mersman’s older brother in a Cincinnati tobacco firm. This suggests that family money may have helped the younger siblings get established as “Nulsen & Mersman Co.”

Mersman’s arrival in the Missouri city could hardly have come at a worse time. Shown above from a Mississippi levee view, St. Louis was racked with community-wide cholera outbreaks in 1849 and again in 1853. Rather than flee the city as many did, Joseph stayed and recorded the terrible effects of the epidemic. A map of downtown St. Louis locates Nulsen & Mersman (E) amidst landmarks and the cholera hospitals.

Despite these trials, the company did well. St. Louis boasted hundreds of saloons and other establishments selling alcohol that a wholesale house could supply. A continuing concern for Mersman was low water in the Mississippi River that made it difficult to receive shipments of whiskey. Believing that a substantial rain event had raised the river, he risked a major purchase: “…So I bot 146 Bbls whiskey 17 1/4 (cents). There cannot be a loss at this figure.” Assuming 40 gallons in each barrel, he spent about $6.90 per barrel or a total of $1,036. Shortly thereafter he became discouraged when the price of raw whiskey fell slightly. Given his ability to sell a quart bottle of rectified whiskey for as much as 80 cents, however, he likely still made money.

In 1850, Mersman found a wife in the person of Claudine Creuzbauer, a sister of John Nulsen’s wife. An immigrant from Baden, Germany, she was 21 when they married in 1851; Joseph was 26. Their first child, a boy they named Joseph, was born 13 months later. A touching photograph of mother and son is shown here. The couple would go on to have eight children. In his diary Mersman recorded his enjoyment of his growing family, noting that he was becoming “quite domesticated.” He ensconced his them in a large home on Chouteau Avenue, St. Louis, shown below.

In March 1855, Mersman abandoned his diary only to take it up again in 1862 after the outbreak of the Civil War. Despite Missouri being a hotbed of Confederate sentiment and conflict, Nulsen & Mersman thrived. Having signed loyalty oaths to the Union, the partners were able to obtain lucrative contracts with the Union Army to provide whiskey for the troops. In 1863, according to Dr. Fisher, each partner netted $20,000, the equivalent today of about a half million dollars. An 1863 ad touted three Nulsen and Mersman brands, “Copper Distilled” “Superior Double Rectified,” and “Celebrated Congress Whiskey.”

Merman’s sentiments lay with the North and for a time he served as quartermaster of a “home guard” unit stationed in St. Louis. The war years also brought sorrow. Joseph penned two entries in 1864 — one on the death in Cincinnati of his father, Friedrich, where he rued his inability to travel to the funeral, and a second just five months later when his sixth child, a boy, died shortly after birth. That was Mersman’s last diary entry.

As time had worn on, Mersman was moving away from the liquor trade and into other pursuits. In February 1864 with a group of other, mostly German, businessmen he helped form the Fourth National Bank of St. Louis, capitalized at $160,000 — equivalent to $4 million today. Indicating the place he had now achieved in the city’s business circles, Mersman was elected the first president of the bank. The next year he became a naturalized citizen.

Even as his long climb up the economic ladder was reaching the real prosperity, Mersman began to develop eye problems, possibly a secondary symptom of the syphilis he had contracted as a youth. He resigned from the presidency of the Fourth National Bank and gradually reduced his involvement in Nulsen & Mersman. In 1867 after 28 years in the liquor trade he and his partner dissolved their company. In 1868 and 1869, city directories have Peper, Rassfield & Co. at the same location running a wholesale liquor business. By 1872 Nulsen was back on the scene, initially with Rassfield, and after 1876 as a sole proprietor.

Meanwhile, Mersman was being characterized as a “capitalist,” that is, an investor in enterprises. A major investment was with Nulsen’s son-in-law who used the funds to expand his St. Louis-based grain businesses. As a result Joseph became a partner in the firm Orthwein & Mersman. He retired from that company in 1880. By that time, according to the federal census that year, Mersman eyesight had declined to the point that he was recorded as blind. He lived another 12 years, dying in St. Louis in March of 1892, of “paralysis.” Dr. Fisher believes it may have been another indication of advanced syphilis. Mersman was buried at the Hillcrest Abbey Crematory and Mausoleum in the columbarium shown above.

Dr. Fisher sees Mersman’s diary as “a record of a man transforming himself from an impoverished, unschooled newcomer into a successful, skilled merchant…a path many took in the mid-nineteenth century.” All that is true but seen from a slightly different perspective, his story also demonstrates how the liquor trade in particular hastened the economic and social rise of immigrants who understood — as Joseph Mersman clearly did — the riches to be made.

Note: Dr. Fisher’s 378-page book provides considerably more material than simply the Mersman diary entries. She has done an impressive amount of research designed to put this whiskey man into the perspective of his times and provides biographical detail and insights not found in the pages of the diary.

This post contains data and illustrations obtained from her book, shown right.

They wore fedoras, not ten gallon hats. They packed pencils, not six-guns. Yet Jewish whiskey merchants Ben Baer and Harris Franklin had considerably more to do with the taming of Deadwood, Dakota Territory, than those with the big hats and guns and even those who wore a badge.

Shown above as the the town looked about the time the partners arrived, Deadwood was settled illegally in the 1870s on land that had been granted to Indian tribes in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. That agreement was quickly forgotten in 1874 when gold was discovered, triggering the Black Hills gold rush. A new and rowdy town sprung up, one that rapidly gained a population of 5,000. Murders were common in Deadwood — among them Wild Bill Hickok’s — and justice episodic and far from impartial.

That was the environment that greeted Baer and Franklin when they arrived about 1876. Neither may have been surprised. The older was Baer, born in Paris, France in 1846. He had arrived in the U.S. about 1871 at the age of 17, ultimately settling in Yankton, D.T., itself frontier town near the Iowa border. Shown right, Baer became involved in the liquor trade in Yankton.

It likely was the draw of the boomtown Deadwood, that drew Baer to travel 400 miles west across Dakota Territory in August 1876. According to historical sources, he carried with him “a plentiful supply of alcoholic spirits” to slake the thirst of the miners and cowmen. Unlike the Oklahoma Territory, liquor was legal in the Dakotas as long as no sales occurred on Sunday.

Harris Franklin, born “Finkelstein,” in 1849 was from an area in contention between Poland and Russia in Central Europe, There are conflicting dates about when he arrived in the United States but in any case, he must have come with family because he would have been too young to have traveled on his own. Shown left, Franklin ultimately settled in Burlington, Iowa, where he was engaged in business. In 1870 he married Anna Marie Steiner there. A year later their only child, Nathan, was born.

Gold also seems to have motivated Franklin to make the move to Deadwood. He apparently had accrued considerable land and other holdings in Iowa. He sold off everything and with his small family traveled more than 825 miles west to Deadwood, subsequently buying the Golden Reward Mine outside of town. It would prove to be a lucrative investment.

Franklin’s partner in the mine was Ben Baer who earlier had experienced his own stroke of luck. A Deadwood history described it: “One of his friends at the poker table had his money tied up in cattle. Ben had won every pot; however, money was scarce due to a drought that left cattlemen with starving herds, so Ben had to accept his winnings in emaciated cattle. The next morning he awoke to a pouring rain that continued for weeks, ending the drought and bringing fresh grass to the pastures. To everyone’s surprise, his herd flourished.” Baer sold the cattle and with the proceeds joined Franklin in buying the mine. The photo above shows Ben, seated center, recreating the poker scene for friends.

About 1885, Franklin also joined Baer in his Deadwood wholesale liquor business. Shown above is a letterhead dated in November of that year that advertises “Ben Baer, Wholesale Dealer in Fine Liquors and Cigars.” Overprinted on the document is the name, Franklin & Baer.

Located on Main Street the store was two floors with a false front and a front door wide enough to allow barrels of whiskey, wine and other liquor to be rolled out to waiting wagons. They would be transported to one of the many Deadwood saloons for decanting and serving. Before long Franklin & Baer were the largest liquor wholesalers in the region with an annual trade approaching $125,000 annually, equivalent to more than $3 million today.

Their success in mining and whiskey emboldened the partners to engage in other enterprises designed to bring civilization to town. In 1878 they formed and owned their own financial institution, the First National Bank of Deadwood. That bank, left, became noted for having printed almost $2 million worth of national currency over a period of 58 years.

They also dabbled in railroads, spearheading the Whitewood and Wyoming Railroad Company with a prospective route of 50 miles from Deadwood to the Wyoming state line with four branches totaling an additional 30 miles. I can find no evidence, however, that that this line ever was brought to fruition. With a third partner, as indicated by a bar token, Franklin and Baer also opened a saloon in Sturgis, D. T., a hamlet about 15 miles west of Deadwood.

Amidst all his business dealings, Baer at 36 years old found time for romance. In March 1884 married Ida Florsheim in St. Joseph, Missouri, the bride’s home town. They would have a family of five children; Ira Ben, born in 1888; Helen, 1890; Jerome and Fernand, 1892, and Edwin, 1898. A year later Ida tragically died, leaving Ben with a household of children under 12. At some point his wife’s sister and her husband came to live with the family, likely to help look after the youngsters.

Franklin’s growing fortune from whiskey and other investments eventually steered him into construction. Between 1883 and 1890 Harris and Anna purchased four parcels of land on which to build a mansion. In 1891 they commissioned Simeon D. Eisendrath, an architect from Chicago, to design their home in the popular Queen Anne Victorian style. One local newspaper reported: “When completed the residence will equal in point of beauty anything of its kind west of Omaha.” Shown here, the Franklins’ house was centrally heated, had hot and cold running water, was lighted by electricity, boasted a telephone, and servants were summoned by electronic bells. Today it is a National Historic Landmark.

Ambitious as this building project might seem, it was overshadowed by Franklin’s commitment to building a fine hotel in Deadwood. For years business leaders had been attempting to build one without success. One abandoned foundation ended as a temporary swimming pool for local children. Not until the whiskey dealer offered to match any contribution dollar-for-dollar in 1902 that construction began in earnest; the hotel, finished a year later, was named or him. Sadly, by this time Anna Franklin’s health had faltered and she died in 1902, never to see the marvel of modernity called the Franklin Hotel. Shown here, half of its 80 rooms had private baths, a novelty at the time. Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, Buffalo Bill Cody, Babe Ruth and world heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan were among the hotel’s guests in its heyday.

In ensuing years the partners continue to thrive as Deadwood was transformed from a mining and cattle town to a regional economic center. With Prohibition forces strong in South Dakota, however, Franklin & Baer were forced to shut down their wholesale liquor house about 1916. Nor could the bar at the Franklin Hotel ever again sell alcohol.

In July 1921, Ben Baer died in St. Paul, Minnesota, where at the age of 75 he may have moved to be closer to his children and grandchildren. He was buried at Mount Zion Temple Cemetery in St. Paul. Baer was followed to the grave two years later by Harris Franklin who continued to live in Deadwood. He was buried beside Anna in the Mount Moriah Cemetery there. The headstones of both men are shown here.

Franklin and Baer were foremost among businessmen, many of them Jewish, who during four decades transformed Deadwood from a rowdy and dangerous frontier outpost into a modern American city. In his book, “Deadwood: The Gold Years,” author Watson Parker observed: “If the gold brought money, the merchants brought stability….The miners brought in money, and spent it, and called for goods and culture; the merchants and businessmen mined the miners, and seem to have made the better thing of it.”

Note: Some of the information for this post and several of the illustrations are from the book, “Jewish Pioneers of the Black Hills Gold Rush,” a volume in the “Images of America” series.

Foreword: With more than 500 individual posts on pre-Prohibition American distillers, liquor dealers and saloonkeepers featured on this blog, it seems appropriate from time to time to describe patterns of behavior that link individuals and enlarging the perspective on what they were contributing to our Nation. I have decided to begin the series by briefly relating the stories of four whiskey men historically involved in international diplomacy.

Whiskey millionaire Samuel Taylor Suit whose distillery and estate sat in what is now Suitland, Maryland, was an early example of a “Washington insider.” At his mansion he wined and dined Presidents, members of Congress, and top Executive Branch officials. Shown right, Suit also was responsible for the venue of negotiations that settled a major crisis between the United States and England.

The dispute concerned warships built in Britain and sold to the Confederacy during the Civil War. The most famous of these was the CSS Alabama, shown above as it was being sunk in battle with the USS Kearsarge. Before its end, however, the Alabama had done significant damage to U.S. merchant shipping. Powerful forces in Washington howled for retribution in what became known as “The Alabama Claims.” Some wanted the equivalent today of $50 billion in damages; others called for ceding to the U.S. parts or all of Canada. The British responded by stalling.

When President Ulysses S. Grant sought negotiations to end the prolonged controversy he needed a location. Remembering Suit’s ample food and drink, including his excellent whiskey, in 1871 Grant asked him to host American and British diplomats to hammer out an agreement. Suit was delighted to oblige and played genial host throughout the deliberations.

The ambiance — and perhaps the whiskey — Suit provided seems to have helped break the deadlock and the result became known as the Treaty of Washington. In the end the U.S. settled for neither billions nor chunks of Canada but a relatively paltry $15.5 million — equivalent to about $387 million today. The British quickly paid up. And Suit took his place in the history books.

Grant’s successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, was responsible forGuido Marx, a whiskey wholesaler from Toledo, Ohio, playing a role in international diplomacy. Marx’s story begins in Germany where in his youth he became a revolutionary, fighting for German political rights against Prussian authoritarianism, as in the scene shown below. When the Revolution of 1848 was crushed, he was among those “Forty-Eighters” who fled to the United States.

Settling in Toledo, Ohio, Marx became, in turn, a grocer, the owner of a German-language newspaper, and finally proprietor of the oldest and largest wholesale liquor business in town. He also embarked on a political career that took him into the Ohio legislature and later as Mayor of Toledo, the city’s first chief executive of Jewish heritage. A Republican, along the way he had befriended Rutherford B. Hayes from nearby Fremont, an Ohio governor who became U.S. President in 1877.

Hayes appointed Marx ambassador to Chile. That landed him squarely in the middle of the so-called “War of the Pacific” a conflict that pitted Chile against the combined forces of Peru and Bolivia in land and naval battles, as shown here. The U.S. was neutral in the war. Marx along with his counterparts in the belligerent countries arranged peace talks among delegates from Peru, Bolivia and Chile aboard an American ship, the USS Lackawanna. Peru and Bolivia made extreme demands that Chile rejected and the talks failed. Chile eventually prevailed in the war.

As a sidelight, the British barred selling warships to either side because, it was said, they were“in mortal dread of another Alabama award.” With the end of his term as ambassador, Guido Marx returned to Toledo and resumed running his liquor business.

Fast forward to World War I and an immigrant named Michael Bosak, a man who began life here breaking coal in a Pennsylvania mine and ended the self-proclaimed “Richest Slovak in America.” Shown here, Bosak began by opening a liquor store and a saloon in the early 1890s and then founding a company to manufacture a wine-based patent medicine that was reputed to remedy such ailments as constipation and loss of appetite. By 1897 he had accrued sufficient wealth to open a bank.

Despite his business success, Bosak never forgot the place of his birth. During World War I he organized collections of money and clothing to help native Slovaks who were suffering from wartime conditions in Europe. With the final break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a movement emerged to create a new country to be called Czechoslovakia.

Bosak played a key role in a conference of Czech and Slovak leaders who met in Pittsburgh in May 1818 to forge a joint approach to independence. The agreement they formulated after two days at the Moose Temple, right, became known as the “Pittsburgh Pact.” As a moving force and early signatory behind the agreement, Bosak became a celebrity among the Slovaks.

Since his death in 1937, Bosak has continued to be honored in Slovakia, now a country in its own right. In 1999 on the 130th anniversary of his birth, the Michael Bosak Society was formed among Slovaks in Northeast Pennsylvania. Each year the Society presents a monetary prize in the name of Michael Bosak to business and economics students in the secondary schools of Slovakia.

Milton Kronheim dropped out of school in the District of Columbia in 1903 to open a liquor store on M Street in Georgetown. He was only 14 years old. He called his enterprise the Maryland Wine & Liquor Company — the name he kept throughout his eight decade career as a Washington liquor dealer. Already a rich man when D.C. went “dry” in 1917, Kronheim opened a clothing store and bail bonding business. With Repeal in 1934 he jumped back in the liquor trade.

Kronheim’s reputation as a Washington “mover and shaker” arrived with the Truman Administration in 1945. He had befriended the then senator in the restaurant of the Mayflower Hotel during the 1930s and thereafter contributed generously to the Missourian’s elections, including $25,000 for Truman’s presidential campaign in 1948. After Truman became President, Milton was a frequent guest at the White House. A photo here shows them together.

One of the outcomes of World War II was the effort to resettle Jews from Europe and elsewhere in Palestine in the Middle East, a new country to be called “Israel.” It was important to proponents that the United States recognize this new state but many in the State Department were skeptical, worried about reaction in the Arab world. Strongly in favor of Israel, Kronheim offered advocates for Israel access into the Oval Office and has been credited with swaying Truman to recognize the State of Israel only minutes after its leaders, as shown below, had declared independence on May 14, 1948.

Kronheim himself always was careful to downplay any role in the President’s decision. In an oral history for the Truman Library, he said: “I think Mr. Truman at heart…that he was whole-heartedly in favor of the establishment of a Jewish home. He knew more about Jewish history that a lot of people will ever know.” Despite his self-effacement, Kronheim has continued to be identified closely with Truman’s momentous decision. In tribute to his contribution, a town in Israel is named Nachalat Kronheim.

Here we have four whiskey men who who played a part in international diplomacy, each with a somewhat different role — host, ambassador, conferee, and political insider. Three were assisted in their efforts by being friends of U.S. Presidents. Moreover, despite whatever other activities they were called to, all four remained whiskey men throughout most of their working lives.

Note: This blog contains fuller biographies of each of these men: S. T. Suit, August 4, 2011; Guido Marx, May 21, 2011; Michael Bosak, August 23, 2013; and Milton Kronheim, July 12, 2011.

When Henry Wolff died in April 1906, Louisville newspaper obituaries speculated that he was the city’s oldest active whiskey dealer, having created his Wolff Distilling Company almost 50 years earlier and having continuously engaged in the trade until the time of his death at age 76. Throughout his long career Wolff was famous for promoting and selling the best whiskeys Kentucky offered.

Wolff was born in July 1830 in Saverne, a town in the French province of Alsace. his family may have had some wealth because his education reputedly was studying under tutors provided by his parents. Of an independent character, as soon as he was able he left home for the bright lights of Paris where he lived until the age of 24.

At that time he came to the United States, landing at New Orleans in the fall of 1854. He remained in that French city only through the winter, going north to Louisville the following spring. His younger brother, Joseph, was already there and, indicating some family money, owned a hotel at 620-622 West Market St. According to an 1891 history of Louisville, the hotel at 35 rooms was one of the city’s finest. Henry went to work there.

The Wolff Hotel boasted multiple dining areas as well as a billiards room and what was known as a “sample room.” The latter operated operated like a “bistro” or saloon within the hotel walls, where liquor sales were primary, whether imbibed over the bar or carried home. The profit-making potential of liquor became clear to the brothers. They sold the hotel and in 1858 set up a wholesale liquor house they called the Wolff Distilling Company, located in a four story building at 66 West Market Street, shown here.

From the beginning the brothers concentrated on selling Kentucky whiskeys, as indicated on a trade card below. They also took as their trademarked symbol the image of an animal that one supposes is a wolf. With a distinctly un-canine look to its face, however, it looks like a cross between a dog and a sheep.

As a possible indication of friction between the brothers, in 1867 after nine years in business — successful ones from all accounts — Henry left Wolff Distilling Co. and brother Joseph, and partnered with Francis Xavier Schimpeler, another whiskey merchant with ties to West Market St. [See my post on the Schimpelers February 2017].

That relationship seems to have terminated in during the early 1870s. At that point the Frenchman struck out on his own as Henry Wolff “Importer and Dealer in Foreign & Domestic Wines & Liquors,” as shown below on a billhead. By 1880 he had moved his establishment to 244 West Market Street between Sixth and Seventh Streets.

Meanwhile Henry about 1865 had married. His wife was Louisa E. Flinchback, a native born Kentuckian whose parents, Karl Louis and Elizabeth Flinchback, were immigrants from Germany. She was twelve years younger than her husband. Their first child, a boy, died in infancy. Subsequently the couple had a boy, William Edward, and two girls, Lillie Belle and Amelia. Wolff provided his family with a spacious home at 1417 South Third Street in Louisville, shown here. Now in a historical district, the house is unique for the angling of windows on the north and south sides to bring additional light into the house and for terra-cotta decorations above the windows on the first and second floors.

Although he had been managing the Wolff Distilling Company successfully after his brother’s departure, Joseph by in 1880 found his health deteriorating and Henry was persuaded to return to the firm they had co-founded. With Joseph’s death in November of that year, Henry Wolff became the sole proprietor.

In 1882 he moved the organization to 638-640 West Market Street.A Louisville business history described those quarters: “The building, utilized for storage and general business purposes, is a commodious, substantial brick structure, 20 by 125 feet in area, and was built in 1875. It is three stories in height and admirably arranged for all purposes of the business.” The article emphasized that Wolff specialized in quality Kentucky whiskeys, including his own proprietary brand, “Non-Pareil Whiskey,” a product of the Spring Hill Distillery Company.

That distillery was located on the west side of the Kentucky River on the Cincinnati and Lexington railroad line, not far from the Franklin County Court House. Wolff did not claim to own the distillery which was the property of John Cochran & Co., but gave that facility credit for the liquor. According to reports, he also was promoting aged bourbon, sour mash and rye whiskeys of “all the most noted” distilleries in Nelson County. He also was drawing whiskey from the Pleasure Hill Park Distillery located in Jefferson County.

Wolff packaged his wholesale whiskey in stoneware jugs of varying sizes and shapes, varying from “ginger jar” to cylinders, and with a variety of labels. Under his management through the 1880s and into the 1890s, the Wolff Distilling Co. did a thriving and expanding business. Not primarily a mail order house, the company customer base was concentrated in serving the saloons and restaurants of the Louisville area, with Wolff’s advertising concentrated on that market.

Even as he aged, Wolff continued at the helm of his company, as one publication put it, “well and favorably known in business and social circles.” While still managing the Wolff Distilling Company in his seventies, Henry developed kidney problems but continued to work. The Louisville Courier Journal, citing his nearly half-century in business, hailed Wolff as “probably the oldest wholesale whiskey dealer in Louisville.”

In April 1906 at the age of 75 Wolff succumbed to kidney failure, known as in that time as “Bright’s Disease.” He was buried in Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery where many of the best known names in Kentucky distilling are interred. Among the mourners were his widow, Louisa, and their three children. With Henry’s death the Wolff Distilling Company disappeared from Louisville directories.

Looking out from Belle Isle, France, where he had been born in 1815, Fortune Chevalier dreamed of striking gold in California only to find out that a better path to the yellow stuff was in coins earned by selling spirits and wine to tens of thousands of thirsty miners and other West Coast denizens. In the process he became one of the wealthiest men in San Francisco.

Chevalier originated on a small island off the coast of Brittany where many residents were involved in growing grapes and making wine. Lacking family connections to that trade, however, Fortune was apprenticed as stained glass craftsman. His employment took him throughout France with teams that worked to restore the windows of churches, castles and mansion houses. With the discovery of gold near Sutter’s Creek in California in 1849, the young man’s attention turned to the New World.

According to accounts, Chevalier hatched a plan to get to California on the pretext of providing window glass for buildings for the boomtowns springing up on the West Coast. He recruited a team of fellow craftsmen, bought a large stock of window panes, and in 1852 took the long sea voyage across the Atlantic, through the wild seas off the southern tip of South America, and then north in the Pacific to San Francisco. He apparently hoped that while his companions were occupied in hanging windows, he could sneak off and pan for gold in the Sierra Nevada mountains. It didn’t work. Upon arrival his men had the same idea, abandoned Chevalier and the glass, and headed for the gold fields themselves.

The next few months must have been lean ones for Chevalier. If he tried panning or mining for gold, he apparently was soon discouraged. In the mid-1850s, the Frenchman surfaced in Placerville, California. The central hub of the Mother Lode region mining operations, that town had grown to the state’s third largest and boasted hotels, banks, and retail establishments. A photo from that time shows buildings built right out to Placerville’s muddy street. There in 1857 Fortune went into the liquor trade as the F. Cavalier Company.

After a short time in Placerville, Cavalier apparently recognized that this boom town, only tenuously connected to the outside world by a railroad spur line, was too small to contain his ambitions. He moved his liquor house to Sacramento, a more likely market. That town was a commercial and agricultural center, and a terminus for wagon trains, stagecoaches, riverboats, the Pony Express, and the first transcontinental railroad. Chevalier carried on business there at 56-58 and 44 K Street for more than a decade. Among featured brands were “Chevalier Ginger Brandy", “Hebe,” "Old Emmet” and “Relief."

In the meantime Fortune was enjoying a family life. About 1851 he married Adelia, an immigrant from France and a woman 14 years his junior. Their first child, Albert, was born in 1852, followed by Morris in 1857 and George in 1863.

The 1870 federal census found the family living with Adelia’s mother and three servants, the latter including a Chinese cook named “Ah Fi.”

That same year apparently because of the expanding nature of his business over much of the West Coast, Chevalier made a final move to San Francisco. With his brother, Albert, he set up a wholesale liquor house at 614 Front Street. After several years, needing more space, the business moved to 520 Washington St. Fortune also bought an interest in the Castle Distillery in Kentucky and established the firm as the sole West Coast agents for “Old Castle” a brand name that Chevalier later bought outright. He registered the name in 1872 and again in 1905 after Congress strengthened the trademark laws.

Shown above, Chevalier’s Old Castle Whiskey bore a paper label that depicted the image of a castle standing in defiant isolation on a rock. Originally the label covered a clear glass bottle with little to recommend it. Later his containers became some of the most interesting of all the West Coast “picture whiskeys.” As shown here, they date from about 1890 to 1919, a span of almost 20 years and are eagerly sought by collectors. The bottles replicate in their embossing the castle on the paper label and come in several shapes and varying shades of amber.

Those bottles with the maker’s mark “PCGW” on the base, as shown here, were manufactured by the Pacific Coast Glass Works, that began production in 1902 and closed in 1910. Similar to the embossing is the etching on an Old Castle Whiskey shot glass that Chevalier issued.

As many in the liquor trade, F. Chevalier Co. also sold a line of highly alcoholic “medicinal” bitters, called “Crown Stomach Bitters,” as sole agents on the Pacific Coast of H. Delaney, the manufacturer in Cincinnati, Ohio. Fortune packaged this product in a square amber bottle, above, that also is considered rare by West Coast collectors.

In 1875 for several years, Chevalier took on a partner who was experienced in the wine business and the company name became Chevalier and Compte. By 1880 a scarcity of wines due to the phylloxera epidemic in France and other parts of Europe caused a boom in Napa Valley wine production. Chevalier bought a vineyard near St. Helens, California, in the foothills of Napa County. There he built an imposing barn and a chateau, shown here, to rival those of his competitors in the neighborhood. According to accounts Chevalier’s land was 40 acres of which about 25 were “under vine.” His private roads were lined with olive trees and extensive gardens with winding paths along terraces, pools, and stone stairways. There Fortune produced his Chateau Chevalier wines, according to one account“well known and appreciated locally as well as in the eastern states.”

As he aged, Chevalier continued to provide direction to his firm, bringing his youngest son, George, into the business and gradually entrusting him with management responsibilities. Fortune died in 1899 at the age of 84. At that point George Chevalier was fully capable of running the major enterprise his father had built. In 1888 F. Chevalier & Co. opened an adjunct office at #209 of the Commercial Block in Portland, Oregon. The company also maintained traveling agents covering the entire Pacific Coast and a cadre of resident agents in the East. Once again needing more business space George made another move, this time to 9 - 15 Beale Street. This allowed him to oversee the manufacture of a a line of cordials, liquors, cremes, syrups, and fruit juices. Despite these product lines, F. Chevalier Co., remained first and foremost, according to a 1905 account, “primarily whiskey merchants.”

Although the F. Chevalier Co. continued to be listed in San Francisco directories until 1919 and the advent of National Prohibition, George appears to have sold at least part of the business, including the vineyards, as early as 1918. Even so, the firm drew an accolade in a history of California: “The F. Chevalier Company, of San Francisco, which is now one of the most complete wholesale liquor houses in the west, is likewise one of the oldest firms of the kind on the Pacific coast, and it has a history of as long-continued and successful existence as can be instanced by almost any commercial enterprise in California.”

Fortune Chevalier went almost halfway around the earth seeking his fortune in the gold fields but instead found it — as noted on his letterhead above — in the “U.S. gold coins” he extracted from those who purchased his “fine wines, cognacs and liquors.” In that gold Fortune found his fortune.

Note: Much of the information for this post and photos of the labeled bottles came from an article by Ben Kutzkey of Bishop, California, that ran in Bottles and Extras, the magazine of the Federation of Historical Bottle Collectors (FOHBC) in March-April 2008. Color photos of bottles and the sign are from the Peach Ridge website of Ferdinand Meyer V, president of the FOHBC.

Known as among the wildest of Wild West communities, Dodge City, Kansas, had a reputation for frequent murders and casual justice. Neither seemed to deter Henry Sturm, a immigrant saloon keeper and liquor dealer, who faced off in Dodge against two formidable opponents — a gun-toting gang led by Bat Masterson and later fanatic prohibitionists in the sway of hatch-swinging Carrie Nation.

Sturm was born in Germany in 1837 and received his early education in local German schools. At the age of 14 he left home and set out for the United States. Fourteen was the youngest an unaccompanied youth could book such a passage, indicating Henry’s strong desire to settle in the New World. The next twenty years of his life are unrecorded but my speculation is that he was working in the mercantile trades, including sales of alcohol. According to a biographer, in the mid-1870s Sturm settled in Junction City, Kansas Territory, in government employment, possibly as a storekeeper.

He first came to Dodge City about 1876 when he was 39 years old, a distance of about 210 miles, to establish a wholesale and retail liquor store. In some ways Dodge offered better opportunities than Junction City. Buffalo hunters and traders made it a frequent destination. More important, the town was a stop on the Santa Fe trail. According to one observer, "If you stood on the hill above Dodge City, there was traffic as far as you could see, 24-hours a day, seven days a week on the Santa Fe Trail.” When the railroad arrived in 1872, Dodge’s commercial base became firm, as indicated by a photo of downtown by 1880.

On the negative side, in 1876 here were nineteen places licensed to sell liquor in Dodge City, then a town of only twelve hundred residents. Shown here is the interior of a typical Dodge City saloon. During summer months when transients poured through town business was brisk. For the rest of the year saloons and restaurants depended on the inhabitants — one watering hole for 60 people. The residents did their part — one year the local press reported 300 whiskey barrels had been emptied.

Such reports did little to raise the reputation of the town. A Kansas newspaper in the 1870s reported:“Kansas has but one Dodge City, with a broad expanse of territory sufficiently vast for an empire; we have only room for one Dodge City; Dodge, a synonym for all that is wild, reckless, and violent; Hell on the Plains."

Despite these challenges, Sturm prospered. A year after his arrival he bought the Occidental Saloon from Moses Waters and James Hanrahan. It is shown here as reconstructed as part of the “Old Dodge” exhibit. Sturm advertised…”a pint, a keg, or barrel of the very best, old Irish, hot Scotch, six year old hand made sour mash Kentucky copper distilled bourbon or old Holland gin.”

Sturm also became the agent for Schlitz beer out of Milwaukee. With the coming of the railroad, it became possible to fresh shipments of brew regularly. According to accounts, Sturm once unloaded an entire boxcar of Schlitz into his ice house and sold it to a horde of cowboys, resulting in a epidemic of drunkenness in Dodge.

Now firmly established in business, in 1878 Sturm took a bride. She was Regina Berg, originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, where Henry may have worked for a time, and of German immigrant parents. The difference in their ages was notable. He was 42, she was 18. They would have a family of three girls. In the meantime, Henry was gaining a local reputation for fair dealing and probity that saw him elected twice as Dodge City’s treasurer and at least once as councilman. “Mr. Sturm is a fair, square and honorable man,” opined the Dodge City Times in 1883.

His civic work brought him increasingly into efforts to tame Dodge City’s image as a lawless Wild West frontier town. It violence was brought home to him in early September, 1879, when, following an altercation, a tailor shop owner sitting on a bench next door to Sturm’s saloon was brained with a rifle by a drunken antagonist.

Sturm’s sternest test came during what was known as “The Saloon War of 1883.” The conflict began when authorities arrested three women singers at Luke Short’s Long Branch Saloon. When things escalated, Short was banished from Dodge. Himself quick with a gun, Short was backed by gunslingers like Bat Masterson, shown here, described at the time as “one of the most dangerous men in the West.” Repairing to Topeka, Kansas, Short and Masterson assembled a gang of gunslingers with the purpose of returning to Dodge and getting revenge.

Sturm put himself on the line, signing an anti-gang telegram on May 13, 1883, to a reluctant Kansas governor, George Washington Glick, asking for state troops. He also signed an anti-gang article sent to the Topeka Daily Capitalnewspaper. When Masterson and Short threatened to bring their rowdies to Dodge by train, the local sheriff enlisted local guns. High tension gripped the town for days. In the end, the issues were negotiated and no shots fired. Masterson returned to Dodge a year later where he opened a short-lived newspaper, principally it seems to justify his position.

Meanwhile another even more serious challenge had arisen for Sturm. Kansas always had harbored a prohibition-leaning population, individuals who saw in liquor the cause of the unrest and violence that marked the state’s history. In 1881, those forces pushed through a relatively weak “temperance” law. It did virtually nothing to curb the sale of alcohol through store or saloons. Proprietors like Sturm annually paid a small fine and kept the doors open. The meantime the German immigrant was pursuing other avenues. He built a bottling plant where he manufactured a range of soft drinks, including soda, mineral waters and cider. He owned two ice houses, respectively 20 by 230 feet and 30 by 50 feet and regularly stored 400 tons of ice to supply the city

In 1885, however, a new law, one with real force, was enacted by the State Legislature. Sturm and his colleagues had no choice but to shut down their watering holes. He advertised the sale of eighty barrels of four-year-old whiskey and other liquor. He even sold the bar fixtures. The law, however, still allowed the sale of alcohol for “medicinal, mechanical, and scientific purposes.” Henry Sturm became a “druggist” with permission to sell alcohol for those purposes, locating the new enterprise just down the street from his old saloon. His druggist’s permit, recently donated to a Dodge City museum, was dated Nov. 30, 1885.

One author has described this blatant effort to circumvent the prohibition laws:“…Druggists equipped their shops with a rude plank or bar, set up whiskey barrels to accommodate the legions of suffering who daily arrived for medical aid.

….The most preposterous device of the time, not uncommon, was the ‘refillable prescription for chronic alcoholism.’” While Sturm also served his brands of soft drinks in his drug store, liquor was its mainstay — as it was for hundreds of similar enterprises throughout Kansas.

Carry Nation, the crusading prohibitionist, had recently moved back into Kansas and led the campaign to close those establishments, wielding a hatchet as she went from town to town, shouting at proprietors, “Stand aside, you felonious purveyor of bottled drugs from Hell!” Although no evidence exists that she ever visited Dodge City, her rampages made news throughout America. Sturm could never be sure she would not show up at his front door someday, swinging her hatchet.

This possibility may have been part of his motivation for helping to build an church in Dodge City. With beer shipments no longer arriving regularly, one of his ice houses became superfluous. He had it torn down and donated the stone to build St. Cornelius Episcopal Church, completed in 1898. Shown here, the small edifice has been described as a “little gem — the most artistic building in Dodge City.” Still standing, the church architecture has been compared the chapels of rural England.

In middle age Sturm developed health problems. In March 1886 Denver newspapers noted his arrival, “a prominent merchant from Dodge City” for unspecified medical treatment. In 1897 at the age of 60, he died and was buried in Dodge City’s Maple Grove Cemetery, Section 3. Regina would join him there 50 years later. Shown here is their joint tombstone.

In a town filled with colorful and flamboyant characters, Henry Sturm stands out as the kind of solid citizen that help build respectability for Western towns. The statement he signed onto about the Luke Short and Bat Masterson gang set the tone: “The occasion or what the press have called trouble is…a clearing out of an element composed of bold daring men of illegal profession who, from toleration from the respectable portion of the community, are allowed to gain a prestige found difficult to unseat. This element has to be banished….”

Foreword: The history of the liquor industry in the United States traditionally has been dominated by men, particularly in the era before National Prohibition was imposed in 1920. Over time as I have profiled more than five hundred “pre-pro” distillers, whiskey wholesalers and saloonkeepers, I have found five women whose careers in whiskey were truly outstanding and deserve special recognition. In keeping with my effort to bring a more analytic perspective to groups in the whiskey trade, I present these women:

Mary Dowling from Anderson County, Kentucky, not only owned and ran major distillery, shown here, she found a way to stay in the liquor business after 1920 and, in effect, thumbed her nose at Prohibition. Kentucky-born to Irish immigrant parents, at seventeen she married a distiller at least 17 years her senior who saw her intelligence and brought her into the business. When he died, she inherited his interest in the Waterfill & Frazier distillery, bought out his partners, and ran it successful for two decades.

Her success, however, came to screeching halt with the imposition of National Prohibition. Federal records shown her withdrawing large quantities of whiskey from her bonded warehouse in the run up to the ban on alcohol. Some of this whiskey she is reported to have sold to those Kentucky distillers fortunate enough to be licensed to sell liquor for “medicinal purposes.” Other stocks, she successfully “bootlegged” for four years until Federal agents arrested her.

After authorities were unable to convict her, Mary Dowling hatched a new -- and more successful -- business plan. About 1926 she hired Joseph Beam, one of Kentucky’s premier distillers but now out of work, to dismantle the distillery, transport the pieces to Juarez, Mexico, reassemble it there, and resume making whiskey. Mexico had no prohibition so the liquor production was completely legal. Using several strategies to get her whiskey legally over the border to American consumers, she continued to operate until she died, four years short of Repeal.

Mary Jane Blair also was a Kentuckian who in 1907 inherited her late husband’s share of a distillery, this one in Marion County, shown below. She promptly bought out his partners and changed the name to the “Mary Jane Blair Distillery.” Although the greater part of her life had been spent in the Blair home as housewife and mother, evidence is that she took an active role as president of the company, one that distilled about five months in the year. Limited production was not unusual in the Kentucky whiskey industry, some distillers believing that fermentation was done best only in certain months. As the distiller Mrs. Blair hired W. P. Norris, a well known Marion County whiskey man.

For the next seven years, with the help of a son, Mary Jane Blair operated the distillery, considerably expanding its capacity. By 1912 the plant had the mashing capacity of 118 bushels per day and four warehouses able to hold 9,000 barrels. The Blairs produced whiskey sold under several labels; the flagship was “Old Saxon,” as illustrated here by a back-of-the-bar bottle. About 1914 the family sold the facility. Mary Jane Blair died in 1922 at the age of 76.

Lovisa McCullough was a strong women’s rights advocate who successfully ran a liquor wholesale business in Pittsburgh following the death of her husband, John. A 1888 Pittsburgh directory under the heading “Liquors, Wholesale,” lists forty-nine such establishments in the city. All of them save one are readily identifiable as male-run companies. The exception is “McCullough, Louisa C., 523 Liberty Av.” That same year Lovisa became a delegate from Pittsburgh to the historic founding meeting of the International Council of Women (ICW) devoted to women’s suffrage. It is a safe bet that she was the only liquor dealer at the convention.

Obviously a woman of great energy, Lovisa McCullough threw herself into other causes. A lover of animals, she was a longtime member of the Humane Society and served on the board of the Pittsburgh chapter. She also was among women who worked toward buying up and preserving the grounds and structures at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where Gen. George Washington and his troops passed the winter. A true “Daughter of the American Revolution,” Lovisa’s grandfather may have been among those soldiers.

In 1893, after more than a half century of operation, the McCullough liquor dealership disappeared from Pittsburgh business directories. Its demise cannot be explained by National Prohibition that still was years away and Pennsylvania was “wet” until the end. Lovisa may have found her passion for feminist and other causes eclipsed her ardor for keeping alive the liquor enterprise. Or it may have been advancing age. Lovisa died in 1917, about 82 years old, and was buried beside her late husband in Allegheny Cemetery.

Mary Moll, living in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, earned this tribute from a local newspaper: Mrs. Moll, when she took possession of the business, had many obstacles to overcome but, being a woman of wonderful business tact, she bravely fought the many unpleasant features connected with the business and successfully built up a trade far superior to any in this country.”

Like the other women here, after her husband died in 1891 Mary inherited his wholesale whiskey trade but also his three daughters from a prior marriage. They are shown at the family home, Mary at far right. Rejecting advice by friends to sell the business, she set out not only to run the liquor dealership, but also to expand it. Her first instinct was to go on the road as a “drummer,” and give customers and potential customers her personal attention to make sales. The strategy worked and she was credited with ultimately tripling the business. After three years, however, Mary tired of traveling. Looking at the costs-benefits she concluded she could build her trade more effectively by staying home and working to keep prices low.

Eventually, Mary Moll was selling three hundred barrels of whiskey a year. Although not a rectifier, that is a dealer mixing and blending her own brands, she was decanting the barrels into her own embossed glass containers, shown left. Those barrels would have resulted in her selling 53,400 quarts of whiskey, an impressive number for any liquor house. Mary Moll died in 1910 while still running her business. She was 64.

When her husband died in 1912, Catherine Klausman was left with five minor children, a saloon, a liquor store, and a small hotel, together known as “The German House,” shown here. She hesitated not a moment in taking over their management. As a result, “Mrs. Klausman” as she was respectfully known in St. Mary’s, Pennsylvania, put her mark on selling whiskey. With the help of her bartender, Mrs. Klausman not only kept all the businesses open, she prospered by selling both at wholesale and retail her own brands of whiskey.

Taking a leaf from the liquor wholesalers and rectifiers of the time, she bought whiskey from both Pennsylvania and Kentucky, sometimes blending the spirits, bottling them and then applying her own labels. My favorite is Mrs. Klausman’s “Corn Whiskey,” with its predominantly yellow label showing a rural distillery and a shock of corn, a design worthy of one of the big liquor outfits.

In 1920, however, National Prohibition brought a close to the thriving business she was doing in whiskey sales. Moreover, the hotel bar no longer could serve alcohol. Regardless of these setback, she persevered in running the German House through the 1930s. No evidence exists that after repeal of National Prohibition in 1934, she went back to liquor sales. When Catherine died in 1963, at the age of 88, she was buried next to her late husband in the St. Marys Cemetery. The German House remains standing today as part of the town’s historic district on Railroad Street.

These five women helped pave the way for the many women who have engaged in the whiskey trade since Prohibition and today fill some of the top spots in the Nation’s liquor industry.

Note: Author Fred Minnick has written an interesting book on “Whiskey Women,” detailing the effects that women, past and present, have had on the American distilled spirits business. It was through his writing that I came upon Mary Jane Blair. Minnick failed, however, to pick up on his radar the other four. I am hopeful that this piece will bring these other outstanding “whiskey women” the attention they also justly deserve. For those interested in reading my fuller biographies of each woman, they are: Blair, June 2, 2014; Dowling, January 22, 2014; Klausman, Dec. 12, 2015; McCulloch, Jan. 14, 2017; and Moll, Oct 28, 2015

It was not uncommon for the proprietors of successful liquor houses to accumulate considerable wealth that they eventually invested in real estate development, banking institutions or new technologies like the automobile. A handful, however, made a reputation for having lavished their excess cash on fine art. Among them was Franklin O. Day, shown right, whose collection was accounted among the most notable of St. Louis, Missouri.

How Day became a connoisseur of fine art is not entirely clear. He was born in Burlington, Vermont, in October 1816 of native Vermonters Polly Mary and Alfred Day, a merchant whose ancestors came to America in 1634. The Days believed their family originated in Wales, not Ireland where the name is common, it originally having been written “Dee” but pronounced “Day.”

Day received a public school education but left off formal learning in mid-teens to work in his father’s dry good store. Apparently looking for larger opportunities at the age of 17 he went off to New York City where he found similar employment. The sudden death of his father in 1835 when Franklin was 19 called him back home to settle his father’s estate and run the business. When an business venture in a nearby town failed, Day reputedly with only $200 in his pocket headed West, settling in St. Louis.

Arriving in the Missouri town about 1842 or 1843, he soon found employment with T. S. Rutherford, a wholesale dry goods merchant. Within several years Day had so impressed his employer that he made him a junior partner. Within four years, Day had “so distinguished himself for efficiency” that he was made a full partner and the company name changed to Rutherford & Day.

Now an established St. Louis businessman, in 1849 Day found time to wed. His bride was Lavinia M. Aull, who had been born in Lexington, Missouri. In quick succession they had two sons, Frank P. and Harry. In succeeding years they would have two more children, Annie and Laurence.

Still restless at 38 years old, the excitement of the California Gold Rush (1848-1855) captured family man Day’s imagination. St. Louis was the starting point of many of the expeditions west and fortunes were being made herding livestock west across the plains to mining sites and boomtowns. Dissolving his partnership with Rutherford and kissing his family goodbye, in 1853 Day left on a cattle drive to California, a wearisome journey of almost six months, only to arrive “too late to reap the expected profit,” according to a biographer.

The returns were sufficient, however, for him to return with some money to St. Louis. There in 1855 he joined in a wholesale liquor business with Charles Derby, who earlier had established the enterprise at an address on the North Levee along the Mississippi, the area shown above as it looked at the time.

The company was called Derby & Day and featured several proprietary brands, including “Derby and Day Whiskey, “Superior Rectified,” and “Sunny South.” The latter was the firm’s flagship brand, sold in ceramic jugs and clear glass bottles. The company in 1873 trademarked both Sunny South and Derby and Day.

Epitomized by the elaborate bank check shown below, the Derby & Day firm was highly lucrative. Said a biographer: “This enterprise…prospered, and from quite a moderate beginning grew to be one of the largest interests in the city, its name being a synonym for careful, judicious management and honorable dealing.” It also was making Day rich. The 1870 census found the Day family at home, the four children apparently in school, and five servants in the house. They included a seamstress, a cook, two house maids, and a carriage driver.

Increasingly Day was associating himself with St. Louis business leaders in such projects as the St. Louis bridge, shown right, and investing in the Merchants’ National Bank, Franklin Savings Bank, and Boatmen’s Insurance Company. At the same time he also was alert to a trend among leading wealthy St. Louisans to spend their excess riches by investing in works of art.

A 1911 History of St. Louis, described this phenomenon: “…The collection that came to be formed, as a result of the newly-awakened interest, gave by reflex influence a strong stimulus to that interest. The earliest of these collection worthy of mention began to be formed in the years immediately succeeding the close of the [Civil] war. A number of these have come to include not merely an extended array of pictures for which large sums of money have been paid, but pictures which, with very few exceptions, are genuine works of art of a high order of merit.”

That depends. Although the Impressionist movement was in its initial stages, few if any St. Louis collectors were interested in anything earlier than the 1930-1870 French Barbizon School. As for Franklin Day, his taste was clearly toward the traditionalist French and English salon and genre paintings. His reputation as a collector rested primarily on his purchase of a single painting for $10,000 — roughly equivalent today to $250,000. Painted by a Scottish artist, Erskine Nicol (1825-1905), shown here, the work was called “Paying the Rent,” one of the artist’s depictions of Scotch and Irish peasant life.

Called “clever” by critics, the painting has been described as being…”Laid in the library of the agent of a estate, the tenant farmers are settling their rent with faces in which dissatisfaction is the chief expression.” The oil was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1866 and again at the Paris Exposition in 1867. Despite its reputation as one of Nicol’s most famous works, I have been unable to find an image of the painting and have here added a similar Nicol genre piece to illustrate Day’s taste in art.

Likely because of the price paid, Day’s purchase made headlines in St. Louis newspapers and led to his collection being identified among those which…“contain good and important examples of the work of nearly two hundred of the most celebrated of modern painters.” The whiskey man eventually seems to have tired of Nicol’s work and later sold it to Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad and shipping baron, who displayed it prominently in his New York City museum. I can find no mention of the sale price.

Day was at the helm of the St. Louis liquor house for 29 years. As his sons Frank P. and Laurence matured, he brought them into the employ of Derby & Day, respectively as bookkeeper and clerk. With advancing age, his health declined but he continue to take an active role in running the firm and said to have come to the office a week before his death in February, 1884. He was 66 years old. Day was buried Bellefontaine Cemetery of St. Louis, Block 55, Lot 1414. Shown here, a large marble monument crowned by three statues of toga-covered figures marks his grave, an arresting work of art on its own. Franklin would be joined there two years later by his widow, Lavinia.

The last entry for Derby & Day Co. in local directories appears to be 1890, two years after Franklin’s death. Later directories show Frank P. and Laurence working at other occupations.The fate of Day’s art collection so far has escaped my research. I find no indication of a museum collection. Most likely it was sold at auction by his heirs and the individual works scattered widely.

Note: The details of Franklin Day’s life were contained in the History of Saint Louis City and County: From the Earliest Periods, Volume 2, by John Thomas Scharf published in 1883. A lengthy article in that book made special mention of the whiskey man’s interest in fine art.

Most pre-Prohibition liquor wholesalers featured a few proprietary brands of whiskey in their product lines, usually with one or two flagship labels that they featured in their advertising. A handful of proprietors, however, thought there was profit in featuring a wide ranging list of whiskeys. Among that group, Abraham and Isaac, the Rheinstrom brothers, seem to have been champions. They featured 51 of their own brands and issued shot glasses advertising many of them.

The Rheinstroms were immigrants from Bavaria, Abraham born in 1845 and Isaac two years later. Abraham listed his immigration year as 1859 when he would have been about 14; Isaac likely came later. Both fetched up in Cincinnati, Ohio, a city with a heavy German population. Although I have been unable to locate photos of the two, passport applications provide descriptions. Both men were approximately five feet, eight inches tall, with similarly configured faces, except that Abraham was recorded with a broad chin and Isaac’s was given as “small.” Abraham’s eyes were gray; Isaac’s were hazel.

Where the brothers spent their early years in the U.S. has gone undocumented. They first appear in the public record in 1970 when the federal census found them living with Joseph Freiburg, a partner in the well-known Cincinnati liquor house of J. & A Frieburg. The brothers were working for him, Abraham as bookkeeper and Isaac as a clerk. The Freiburg firm was noted for its proliferation of brands, counting twenty-nine proprietary varieties of whiskey in their inventory.

By 1876, the Rheinstroms had left the Freiburgs and had established a liquor outlet at 24 Sycamore Street in Cincinnati. For whatever the reason, over the next few years they more than trumped the number of brands issued by their former employer, marketing at least 50 different labels over the 41 years they were in business.

Among them were: “Aetna,"“Antioch,” "Beacon Light O.F.,” "Breckenridge Club,” "Capital Club,” "Cotton Bale Rye,” "Dave Copperfield,” "Del Monte.” "Delta Club,” "Derby Club,” "Dragon Gin,” ”Dunlap Malt,” "Eagle Malt,”Eagle Planet Gin,” "Eagle's Pride,” "East Port,” "Elk Club Rye,” “Fleetwood,” "General Arthur,” “Georgia,” "Golden Key,” "Golden Seal,”

"Good As Gold,””Hazel Dell White Rye,” "Home Guard,” "Jed Clayton,” "Kriskringle Rye,” “Lewisdale,” “Millville,” "National League,” "Novena Old Rye,” "Old Home Still,” "Old Jed Russell,” Old Reserve Rye,” “Padlock,” “Patriot,” "Santa Claus,” “Security,” "Seward Rye,” “Souvenir,” “Sydenham,” "Talisman Rye,” "Ten Broeck,” "Tom Howe O.P.S.,” "U. S. Mail Box Rye,” "Uncle John,” "Uncle Josh,” "Windsor Club,” and "Ye Olden Times.”

Rheinstrom Bros. trademarked only three labels — Aetna in 1876, Padlock in 1894 and Jed Clayton in 1908. A few brands had been trademarked by other whiskey houses, namely Capitol Club by Bowlin of Minneapolis, Elk Club by Meyer & Co. of Pennsylvania, and Fleetwood by Guggenheim of Cincinnati. Moreover, some of these brand names are very close to those of whiskeys from other Cincinnati wholesalers and a question arises if they were intended to confuse buyers. Yet I find no trademark infringement actions against the brothers.

To advertise this blizzard of brands, Abraham and Isaac issued a large number of shot glasses, some them scattered through out this post. These would have been given to saloons, restaurants and bars that featured the company whiskeys and other liquor. To the extent there was a flagship brand it was Jed Clayton Rye, marketed through newspaper ads, in colorful saloon signs, and the metal match holder that opens this article.

In addition to massing numbers of brands, Rheinstrom Bros. made an extraordinary number of moves over its business life, likely needing more and more room as its business expanded. After one year on Sycamore, the liquor house moved to 57 East Second Street and two years later to 56-58 East Third. By 1883 the Rheinstroms were back at 57 East Second, two years later moving across the street to 54-64 East Second, then back to East Third.

By 1893, the company had a Martin Street address, a facility shown above. It also was home to the “Eagle Liqueur Distilleries,” a wholly owned Rheinstrom subsidiary. From the drawing above it appears to have been a major “rectifying” operation, blending whiskeys for wholesale. With the acquisition by 1897 of a Front Street plant, shown below, the Rheinstroms seemingly also were doing their own distilling.

Meanwhile each brother was having a family life. In 1875 Isaac at the age of 28 had married Augusta Goldsmith, ten years his junior, a woman born in Kentucky of German immigrant parents. The couple would have two sons, Maurice born in 1877 and Robert in 1882. Abraham was a bachelor of 36 when he finally took the plunge, wedding Minna Wise, a native of Chicago and 17 years younger than he. They would go on to have a family of three daughters and two sons, both of whom, Harry and James, would later join the liquor house.

Followng 33 years at the helm of Rheinstrom Bros., Abraham, while on a trip to Maine, died, age 64. After his brother’s death Isaac, possibly to compensate Abraham’s family, appears to have given over management and possibly partial ownership of the liquor house to other interests. Although James Rheinstrom continued to be identified with the company until its forced closing after Ohio voted for statewide prohibition.

Meanwhile, Isaac and his sons moved in a different direction, founding the I. Rheinstrom & Sons Company and the I. Rheinstrom Engineering Company. The former manufactured bottling and conveying machinery; the latter was engaged in fruit canning. Both companies were run out of the same offices, with a factory in Ludlow, Kentucky. Isaac was president of both, son Maurice vice president and son Robert secretary and treasurer.

Isaac lived eleven years after Abraham’s death, passing in February 1920 at the age of 73, having seen prohibitionary forces triumph not only in Ohio but throughout the Nation. He was buried in Section 4, Lot No. 164 of the Walnut Hills United Jewish Cemetery outside Cincinnati, not far from the grave site of his brother Abraham.

Raised on a farm in nearby Georgia, Robert E. Garner found his way to Anniston, Alabama, during the latter part of the 19th Century. Known as “Daddy” there, he created a saloon he called Peerless and a whiskey he named “Old Wildcat.” The whiskey disappeared with Prohibition, but the saloon, shown right, has been revived by his modern counterparts and now is accounted the oldest such establishment in Alabama.

Robert was born in Pike County, Georgia, in 1866, the youngest son of Eliza M. and John Garner, a Civil War veteran. His education appears to have been minimal. The 1880 federal census, taken when he was 14 years old, registered him not “at school” but as “farmer.” Listed with the same occupation were three older brothers, likely the reason for his leaving Georgia. As the fourth in line his chance of inheriting any Garner land were very dim. That same year his mother, Eliza, died and his father appears to have married again.

Garner’s whereabouts for the next few years have gone unrecorded. In the late 1890s he surfaced in Anniston, Alabama, on the slope of the Blue Mountain, about 112 miles from his birthplace. It was a good choice to locate. Named “The Model City” by Atlanta newspaperman Henry W. Grady because of its careful planning, Anniston was rapidly becoming the fifth largest city in the state. Though the roots of the town's economy were in iron, steel and clay for sewer pipe, planners touted it as a health spa with several resort hotels easily accessed by rail. Local wealth allowed the building of elegant public buildings, impressive churches, grand mansions, commercial buildings and industrial facilities all set within a carefully conceived landscape.

But even a model city requires a saloon or two and Garner provided one of the fanciest watering holes in town. Built in Classic Revival Gothic style, the Peerless featured a massive mirror-backed mahogany bar, shown here. It had been purchased at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and moved by Garner to the Peerless in 1906. He also bought old church pews, had them sawed in two and fashioned customer booths from them.

A model city also needs its own brothel and there again Garner did not disappoint. He set aside the entire second floor of the Peerless for that purpose. There were four rooms, each with its own ornamented fireplace, and a fifth bedroom in a loft accessed by a ladder. Watching over this red-light establishment was a formidable madam named Lucinda Talley who sat at the head of the stairs to screen visitors. She was known for running a strict enterprise and carrying a gun.

It is something of a mystery how Garner earned the nickname “Daddy.” No record exists of a marriage or any children. It occurs to me that the ladies upstairs might have bestowed that name on him as the boss male of the Peerless and it stuck.

Meanwhile, Garner himself was busy building a wholesale liquor trade, supplying whiskey to other saloons and restaurants in Anniston. Obtaining whiskey by the barrel from distilleries in Maryland, Virginia and elsewhere, he decanted it into a range of ceramic jugs for sale. Examples appear throughout this post. Garner also featured his own proprietary brand, “Old Wildcat,” at the Peerless bar and sold much of it in half-pint (seven ounce) glass bottles that were blown at a glass factory 42 miles east of Anniston in Tallapoosa, Georgia, one reputedly owned by Garner himself.

Although Anniston had flirted from time to time with banning alcohol through “local option” laws, for most of Garner’s first fifteen years in business he faced no restrictions on liquor sales. In 1915, however, Alabama voted a complete ban on alcohol. Enforcement was spotty and he apparently continued to bootleg liquor through the Peerless.

Meanwhile Garner had faced a setback when his Tallapoosa glass factory burned, taking with it whatever Old Wildcat was on premises. That was followed by the death of Lucinda Talley in 1919, reputedly shot by mistake by a policeman who was chasing a fleeing suspect trying to take refuge in the second floor bordello. That same year Garner died at the age of 63 and was buried in the Mount Olive Baptist Church Cemetery in Pike County. His unusual gravestone is in the shape of a couch and the inscription mentions him only as a son.

In death, Robert Garner left behind a reputation as a philanthropist in Anniston. Never having married and with no children as heirs, he left his considerable fortune to the creation of a new hospital, an original structure having been outdated and later burned. Using his money the city fathers built a new municipal institution and named it Garner Hospital, shown below. The building now serves as a nursing home.

The Peerless Saloon for a time was a jewelry store,sat empty for years, and at one point faced demolition until 1985 when it was placed on the Register of Historic Places by the National Park Service. The building subsequently was restored to its original luster by new owners and is considered the oldest saloon in Alabama. The upstairs was renovated into one large room that has a billiard table and a 1890s decor. It can be rented for events. Downstairs the new owners have preserved the period look. Robert “Daddy” Garner, if he walked in the Peerless today, likely would feel comfortable taking his place behind the mahogany bar.

Foreword: This is the third in a series of posts that examines the activities of whiskey men that previously have been profiled, grouping them for analysis under various headings. In this case the common thread in their life stories was loving fine art and having the financial resources derived from liquor sales to be able to collect it. The four men featured here geographically were spread from coast to coast but seemingly shared an appreciation of beauty.

The whiskey man most closely connected with the art world — then and now — was William Thompson Walters, shown here in a full-length portrait by the French artist, Leon Bonnat, who was a friend of Walters. Born in a small mining town in mid-Pennsylvania, Walters early on decamped to Baltimore where he open his own liquor house in 1847. Torn in his loyalties during the Civil War and leaving the management of his business to a brother, in 1861 he packed his family off to Paris. Almost immediately Walters and his wife, Ellen, began collecting works of art, scouring Europe from England to Italy for paintings, sculptures, ceramics and other object d’art. They and their money were eagerly welcomed by a host of artists and dealers. Among their acquisitions was Jean-Leon Geromes “The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer,” shown below.

Then tragedy struck. While on a trip to London in November 1862, Ellen contracted pneumonia, and with antibiotics still unknown, died. She was only 40 and left two minor children. Even her death could not prompt Walters to return to the United States. Instead — it has been suggested to console himself — he threw his energies even more fervently into collecting.

Only with the end of the Civil War in 1865 did Walters return to Baltimore. With characteristic vigor he plunged into everyday management of his liquor business. Walters was not a distiller but a “rectifier,” creating his own proprietary brands with whiskeys purchased from Maryland and Pennsylvania distilleries. His embossed bottles carried a panel that said simply “Walters & Co.”

Not satisfied with collecting just for his own pleasure he began to open his house periodically for tours. With his death in 1894, he left his art works to his son, Henry Walters, himself a collector. Henry, true to his father’s interest in opening the collection to the public, created an art galley on Charles street on the edge of downtown Baltimore. The original gallery interior is shown above.

At his death in 1931 Henry gave the building and its contents to the City of Baltimore where it has become the Walters Art Museum. During his lifetime in Baltimore the media frequently played down the source of William Walters’ wealth. Several years ago, however, the Museum ran a newspaper ad headlined “From Rye to Raphael,” highlighting the fact that its founder initially made his fortune selling quality whiskey.

A second Baltimore whiskey man with a yen for art unfortunately was pushed in a different direction by circumstances. He wasNicholas Matthews. Unlike Walters, Matthews was from a distinguished and wealthy old Maryland family. Possibly with family backing in 1888, when he was 30, Matthews opened a wholesale liquor establishment in Baltimore. As shown by his elaborate “art nouveau” letterhead, the company initially was located in a four story building at 128 Calvert Street, a major commercial avenue. For the next 22 years, Mathews operated a highly successful liquor business. His proprietary brand was “Altamont Rye.”

Throughout this entire period, Matthews was buying fine art at a furious pace. Whether his passion stemmed from his upbringing or was encouraged by his wife, Bessie, it is evident that a substantial part of the wealth he was accruing from whiskey sales he was plowing into buying fine paintings, both European and American. Although he was said to have had a particular eye for Dutch painters, he also held a significant number of French artists of the Barbizon School, including Courbet and Gericault.

His collection also included paintings by such well-known American artists as Thomas Cole, William Harnett, Albert Bierstadt, William Trost Richards and Arthur Quartley, the last a close associate of Winslow Homer. Shown above is a painting in the Matthews collection by the noted American landscape artist, George Inness. It is entitled “The Juniata River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.”

In 1912, however, Matthews wholesale liquor business was terminated abruptly and Altamont Maryland Rye disappeared as a brand. Soon after, 134 pieces from his art collection were put up for auction. Before the sale the paintings were exhibited at the American Art Galleries in New York City where they drew national attention and critical applause. But a Matthew museum was never to be. The collection ended being scattered across the U.S.

Shown here is the front page of the auction catalogue. It depicts a painting by the Belgian artist, Frans Synders entitled “The King is Dead, Long Live the King.” The picture is a humorous rendition of a varied group of birds all presumably celebrating after seeing a proclamation of a king’s demise posted on a stump. Why did Matthews sell? A descendant has written me that Nicolas and Bessie divorced about that time and he may have needed the money.

We have neither museum nor auction catalogue to determine the extent of the Franklin O. Day art collection, once accounted among the finest in St. Louis, Missouri. How Day became a connoisseur of fine art is not entirely clear. He was born in Burlington, Vermont, in October 1816 and left off formal education in his mid-teens to work in father’s dry goods store. After an 1842 business failure that left him with $200, Day, shown left, headed west to St. Louis, where he quickly succeeded in business. There in 1855, with a partner, he established a wholesale liquor business called Derby & Day. It featured as its flagship brand, “Sunny South Whiskey.” The firm proved very lucrative.

As a successful businessman, Day was alert to a trend among his St. Louis colleagues to spend their excess wealth by investing in works of art. Although the Impressionist movement was in its initial stages, few if any St. Louis collectors were interested in anything earlier than the 1930-1870 Barbizon School. As for Franklin Day, his taste was clearly toward traditionalist French and English genre paintings.

His local reputation as a collector rested primarily on his purchase of a single painting for $10,000 — roughly equivalent today to $250,000. Painted by a Scottish artist, Erskine Nicol, the work was called “Paying the Rent,” one of the artist’s many depictions of Scotch and Irish peasant life. Called “clever” by critics, the painting has been described as being…”Laid in the library of the agent of a estate, the tenant farmers are settling their rent with faces in which dissatisfaction is the chief expression.” The oil was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1866 and again at the Paris Exposition in 1867. Despite its reputation as one of Nicol’s most famous works, I have been unable to find an image of the painting, instead including here a similar Nicol genre piece to illustrate Day’s taste in art.

Likely because of the price paid, Day’s purchase made headlines in St. Louis newspapers and led to his collection being identified among those “which contain good and important examples of the work of nearly two hundred of the most celebrated of modern painters.” The whiskey man eventually seems to have tired of Nicol’s work and later sold it to Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad and shipping baron, who displayed it prominently in his New York City museum. I can find no mention of the sale price. The ultimate fate of Day’s art collection so far has escaped my research. I find no indication of a museum collection. Most likely it was sold at auction after his death and the individual works scattered widely.

Our final whiskey man cum art aficionado was James J. Kelley. A native of Massachusetts, Kelley early in the 20th Century moved to Seattle, Washington, where in 1903 directories he was listed as a saloonkeeper. By 1906 he had moved to larger quarters that he named “The Art Palace.” He lavishly decorated the walls with large genre paintings bearing such titles as “Halibut Fishing” and “Sheep in the Fold.” The saloon operated along side a wholesale and retail outlet he called the “Family Liquor Store.” He package his whiskey in large ceramic jugs like the one shown here.

His “Art Palace” prospered until 1916 when Washington State enacted stiff prohibition laws that closed all saloons and liquor stores. Whiskey could still be obtained by prescription from a doctor, however, and drug stories proliferated. Among them was the Art Palace that Kelley quickly converted into a drug store. Intermittently in trouble with authorities about the amount of liquor being dispensed as medicine, he somehow was able to keep the establishment open for several months.

In May 1916, however, a corrupt, vindictive mayor personally led a large cohort of police on a heavily publicized raid on drug stores, restaurants and even private clubs. He seems particularly to have singled out Kelley’s Art Palace for his vendetta. Armed with axes and other implements of destruction the raiders demolished fixtures and a large quantity of liquor. They broke down Kelley’s bar and shattered a large expensive mirror. Local press put the damage to the Art Palace at $10,000, the equivalent of more than $200,000 today. Photos here shown what Kelley’s establishment looked like after the onslaught. The art collection was high enough on the walls to be spared.

At that point Kelley exited the drug store trade and became a successful Seattle hotel manager. What happened to his collection of paintings is unclear. The logical answer is that he sold them.

Of the “whiskey men” art collectors only William Walters and his son seems to have been able to mass a collection that continues to be on display. The other three, for various reasons, had their paintings disbursed through auctions and other sales. Ironically, genre paintings — like those that seemed to appeal to all of them — have made a return into public fashion and currently fetch good prices on the art market.

Note: For anyone wishing to read more expansive biographies of these four, they appeared previously as: Walters, October 31, 2014; Matthews, October 7, 2013; Day, June 23, 2017; Kelley, January 2017.

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