Foreword: Pre-Prohibition distilleries were dangerous places. Machinery often lacked safety guards, heavy barrels rolled about, buildings were ramshackle withdangerous upper floors, fires were a constant threat, and explosions all too frequent. This website has recorded many distillery worker deaths. But even the owners were not immune from danger. This post chronicles four “whiskey men” who perished within their own premises.
Kentuckian Henry E. Pogue had a talent for making whiskey. About 1865 he went to work at the Old Time Distillery in Maysville. Pogue later became chief distiller and in 1876 purchased the facility. Shown here, the distillery had a mashing capacity of 300 bushels per day, and there were three bonded warehouses with capacity for storing more than 10,000 barrels. By 1900 the H.E. Pogue Distillery, below, was producing fifty barrels of whiskey daily and as one newspaper account put it: “It is said by those who know that there is no better distillery in Kentucky.”
Then tragedy struck. On a Friday morning in November 1900, Henry Pogue I was making his rounds in the distillery when he became immeshed in machinery. A biographer vividly told the rest of the story: “…In the twinkling of eye, death struck him, the immortal soul had fled, and what had been a stalwart, hopeful and successful man, had become a quivering mass of crushed bones and mangled, bleeding flesh.” Pogue’s death sent shockwaves through the community and devastated his family.
He already had turned over many management responsibilities to his son, Henry Pogue II, shown right, an heir who was well equipped to carry on the work his father had begun. Eventually this Pogue enhanced production to 2,000 gallons of whiskey daily and carried a normal inventory of 15,000 barrels being aged. Employment during peak periods reached 100 workers. Then, improbably, tragedy struck again. Henry II was working at the distillery in 1918 when he too was killed in an industrial accident. He was only 60 years of age.
His son, Henry Pogue III, who had worked in the distillery, was then in military uniform. When World War One broke out, he enlisted and was in Europe when news came of his father’s unfortunate death. Released from service, Henry III returned home at the age of 24 to take the reins of distillery management — but only for a year until shut down by National Prohibition. He later sold out.
Worthy of a novel, the Hungarian-born five Woolner Brothers — Jacob, Ignatius, Adolph, Samuel and Morris — held sway among Peoria, Illinois, distillers for almost 45 years. Their history, however, was not without trauma. In the spring of 1881, the Woolners’ main distillery burned. Most of the buildings were destroyed; as shown below, only the still house stood after the blaze. The brothers immediately began to rebuild.
Amid the rubble the Woolners found that two tubs of fermented mash had been left virtually untouched. After slight repairs to the tubs it was decided to run the contents through a repaired still: “…The boilers were cleaned and refitted, the pumps rigged, and the distillation commenced.” It was a terrible mistake.
As the Chicago Tribune told the story: “Without a moment’s warning, a loud explosion was heard, the gigantic tub swayed and careened over, and a rush of steam escaped from the lower chamber, carrying everything before it. Men were picked up and hurled, scalded and parboiled, from twenty to forty feet away, and ruthlessly bruised with falling bricks and timbers.” Of eighteen men injured in the blast thirteen died, many painfully.
Ignatius Woolner, 41, the brother who likely was supervising the operation, was badly burned and died that night. In addition to his grieving brothers, Ignatius left his widow, Rosalie and three children, Adolph, 20; Sopha, 14, and Hanna 9. He was interred in Peoria’s Springdale Cemetery in a plot where other Woolner brothers also now are buried.
One of the first children to be born of Jewish parents in Oregon, Solomon “Sol” Blumauer rose to prominence in Portland as a whiskey dealer, businessman, pillar of Judaism, community leader and automotive pioneer, only to suffer a tragic and somewhat mysterious death at the age of 66. He is shown here at the wheel of an early automobile.
In 1899 Blumauer bought into the whiskey trade, becoming a partner in a company subsequently called Blumauer & Hoch, destined to become the largest wholesale liquor house in Oregon. With the coming of National Prohibition, the canny Blumauer successfully switched to popular soft drinks. Even as he got older he continued to be at the head of the company, directing its activities with what contemporaries termed “decisiveness, initiative and keen sagacity.”
On February 23, 1928, a tragic event occurred. Blumauer’s demise was described in one Portland newspaper: “At about eleven o'clock he had gone up to the second floor of the firm's warehouse and office building at Nos. 428-430 Flanders street, and his disappearance was not noted until the arrival of a man shortly before one o'clock to keep an appointment with him. Search was then begun and carried forward on all three floors before suggestion was made that he might have fainted and slipped into the shaft. Falling forward, Mr. Blumauer is believed to have slipped through the narrow opening and plunged to the bottom of the shaft.”
Thus ended the extraordinary career of Sol Blumauer at the age of 66. How and why he might have fallen into the elevator shaft was never thoroughly explored. It was accepted as an accident and nothing more. He was buried in the family plot in Portland’s Beth Israel Cemetery. His passing was mourned by many in the Portland community who had known him as a benefactor and leader. Regrettably, Sol never lived to see the end of National Prohibition that might have launched him once again into the whiskey trade at which he had been so successful.
Note: Longer posts on each of these whiskey men may be found on this website: The Pogues, November 1, 2015; the Woolners, July 8, 2021, and Sol Blumauer, June 12, 2012.
