Author name: Jack Sullivan

 This is Isaiah Rynders.  Pay no attention to his benign — some might say “honest” — face.  Rynders, who owned multiple saloons in New York City and rose through ruthless tactics to become a dominant political force in “The Big Apple,”  has been identified as an instigator of the Astor Place riot of May 10, 1849.  At least twenty-five persons died in that melee, occasioned by a production of Shakespeare’s tragedy, “MacBeth.”  Many believe Rynders bears the blame.

Isaiah was born in September 1904 in Waterford, New York, a small upstate town on the west bank of the Hudson River.  His father, a farmer, was of German heritage;  his mother Protestant Irish.  Although Rynders later would identify as a farmer, his earliest instincts were to embrace a wilder side of life.  We first find him as a youth fetched up on the Mississippi as a riverboat gambler, handy with a blade and accused of killing an opponent in a knife fight at Natchez.

Perhaps escaping the consequences, Ryners returned to New York State.  His sojourn on the Mississippi had taught him something of water craft and he began operating a sloop called the H. M. Whitney, shown above, carrying merchandise up the Hudson River.  That occupation brought him the title, Captain, that would be his for a lifetime.  He soon abandoned the Hudson to become an enthusiastic supporter of New York’s Tammany Hall, where he established himself as one of the most politically skilled organizers in the city.  

The money to fuel his empire of street gangs was Rynder’s ownership of a network of saloons and gambling parlors that supported his “political club” and generated revenue for the notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall.  Rynders originally  operated from a tavern called Sweeney’s House of Refreshment on Ann Street in lower Manhattan before founding in 1843 a saloon headquarters known as the Empire Club at Park Row, the area shown here.

Having gained a reputation for “rough house” intimidation, Rynders was careful to maintain a more civilized veneer.  He was known to be an eloquent speaker with an educated tongue who often injected lines by memory from Shakespeare’s plays in his orations.  Rynder’s also took a personal interest in a rivalry between two actors known for their stage portrayals as MacBeth in Shakespeare’s tragedy.  The rival thespians were the English actor  the American leading man, Edwin Forrest, left, and the English actor William Charles McReady.

As one scholar has set the scene:   “Their rivalry had been simmering for several years. Both were international stars, both had toured to each other’s countries. Forrest, in 1845, had hissed Macready in Edinburgh. Macready was not too interested in engaging in this rivalry and was trying to avoid it, but Forrest wanted to press his point. So when Macready had his own tour to New York in 1849, Forrest’s followers decided to avenge their hero….”

No one was more partisan against the Englishman than Isaiah Rynders.  The Macready performance was to be held at the Astor Place Opera House, an opulent venue shown here.  The opera house had already elicited the enmity of the Tammany boss and his followers for its elitist nature.  Built two years earlier, the opera house had a dress code aimed at wealthy New Yorkers, charged high prices for admission, and made it evident that common folk should stay away.

The rivalry between two actors took on social and political significance. For recently arrived Irish immigrants trying to survive on the lowest rungs of New York society and carrying personal grudges against the English, Macready came to represent everything hated about the overclasses.   To Macready’s fans, the actor represented the glamour of British society in contrast to the ignorant and impoverished immigrants embracing Forrest.

On May 7, 1849, said to have been orchestrated by Rynders, Forrest supporters disrupted a performance of “Macbeth” at the Opera House, pelting the stage with wilted vegetables and rotten eggs. Scorned and embarrassed, Macready vowed never again to perform in New York and packed his bags to head back to London.  Prominent New Yorkers, including Author Washington Irving, convinced the British actor to stay for one final performance three days later.  He agreed.  The word got around to Tammany Hall where Rynders was waiting.

Apparently angered that his earlier efforts had failed, the saloonkeeper is said to have mobilized  a mob of New York gang members and Tammany Hall regulars supporting Forrest.  They gathered in strength outside the detested Astor Place Opera House in a riotous mood. A police cordon around the building prevented them from entering. As Macready performed his “MacBeth” undisturbed inside, the boiling witches’ cauldron symbolized the sense of danger in the air.  After taking a quick final bow, Macready disguised himself and made a hasty exit through the back door of the theatre.  He never again performed on American soil.

As shown above, outside the Astor Place Opera House, tensions were mounting.  The crowds of demonstrators had grown larger and were pushing hard against the police cordon.  Protestors pulled cobblestones from the street, pelting the police officers while shouting threats to burn the theater to the ground.  As it got dark and officials were making no headway with the rioters, they called for military backup.  Already “standing in the wings” at a nearby stable, members of the state militia marched from Washington Square, ordered to disburse the rioters from around the opera house.  That meant guns.

One account:  “Anger turned to panic as thousands pushed and shoved, pulling in and trampling innocent bystanders in their path. By the time the crowd finally dispersed, at least twenty-five people had been shot and killed, some from stray bullets that hit them inside their homes.”   Watching events unfold from a safe location even a hardened Rynders must have been shaken by the outcome.  His reaction to the carnage, however, has gone unrecorded.

Whatever involvement of the saloonkeeper cum political boss had in the Astor Place riots, the disaster apparently inflicted no permanent damage on his ascendancy.  Rynders was involved in the successful presidential elections of Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan in 1852 and 1856 respectively, and in 1857 was appointed by Buchanan as U.S. Marshal for the Southern District of New York.  In the 1860 census, his occupation was listed as “U.S. Marshal.”

Nor did Rynder’s roughneck reputation prevent him from hobnobbing with New York City gentry or at 50 years old marrying one of The Big Apple’s richest heiresses, Phoebe Shotwell, only surviving child of real estate mogul and wealthy importer of tea and spices, John Shotwell.  Through her mother the 20-year-old bride was a direct descendant of English poet Alfred Lord Byron.  Possibly to escape unwanted publicity in New York, the couple married in Washington , D.C. There would be no children.

As a U.S. Marshal, Rynders found himself, possibly for the first time in his life, expected to enforce, not flaunt the law.  Now he was directed to arrest people for offenses he himself once had committed. Things came to a head during the so-called “Dead Rabbits Riot” of 1857 while he was trying to persuade the warring gangs to cease fighting.  Rynders was attacked and pelted with rocks. His reputation as a political strongman in tatters, he was replaced as Tammany boss of the Sixth Ward.

By 1870, Rynders and Phoebe had left New York City and were living in Bergen, New Jersey, where they were running a 100 acre farm raising race horses. According to the federal census that year, their eclectic household of nine included two young women, likely friends of Phoebe; an Irish female domestic servant; three male farm laborers; and a young man identified as a carpenter.  Rynder’s net worth was listed at $32,000, equivalent to $714,000 today.  In the 1880 census, now 75, he was still running the horse farm, assisted by a nephew named Sam Smith.  The household now had four live-in employees, three of them men.

Not long after that census, the aging Rynders with Phoebe moved back to Manhattan, living in the midst of the city where Isaiah had once been a power broker.  There he was encountered on a bus by a neighbor who was a correspondent for the Kansas City Journal.  The journalist recounted in print his conversation with the aged and bitter former political boss.  “No life left,” Rynders complained.  “I wish I was dead….No good to myself or anybody else.  I have outlived every friend I ever had and I have grown old to be neglected by them I have served.”   Rynders alighted at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, shown here, where he spent much of his time in the lobby, apparently looking for old cronies to talk to.

Rynders, age 81, died a little after midnight on January 13,1885.  He had gone out for an evening stroll and shortly after was stricken on the street.  Brought home unconscious by passersby, he died at home.  Newspapers across America carried Rynders’ obituary, one commenting: “There are hundreds of men now living who recall…when this one man seemed absolutely to dictate the vote of New York.”  The “MacBeth Riot” went unmentioned.

Note:  I first was brought to this story of the New York City saloonkeeper and political boss by the book, “American Walks into a Bar:  A Spirited History of Taverns, Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops” by Christine Sismondo, Oxford University Press, 2011.  With further research I found a considerable amount of information online about Isaiah Rynders and his reported role in the New York “Macbeth” riot.

Foreword:  The 19th Century increasingly was one of labor unrest in America.  Dissatisfaction by workers with pay and employment conditions boiled over into clashes between the laboring population and those who hired them.  Violence often resulted, particularly among miners and longshoremen, occupations that required back-breaking and dangerous work.  Saloon owners often were involved   when their drinking establishments became meeting places for aroused workers and union organizing. 

When Emanuel A. Mitterer left his native home in the Austrian Alps about 1888, he found his way to a gold strike boom town in the Colorado Rockies called Altman.  With a population of some 1,200, Altman was a ramshackle settlement, houses and commercial buildings largely thrown together of rough timbers.  There Mitterer opened a saloon.

While Mitterer tended a busy bar, trouble was brewing in prosperous Altman.  The miners were making $4.00 a day for an eight hour day in the mines — a hefty paycheck in those days.  The wages attracted many jobseekers to the site. Early in 1894 some mine owners took advantage of the labor surplus to mandate that the work day would be increased from eight to nine or ten hours, with no pay increase. Miners were given the option of keeping the eight-hour work day with a pay cut of fifty cents a day. 

The potential decrease brought violence to the Cripple Creek District and particularly to Altman, headquarters of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), a labor union not averse to using dynamite to get its way.  Some mines shut down and others were hit with explosions.  Violent incidents in the vicinity of Mitterer’s saloon multiplied as armed strikebreakers hired by the mine owners made their camp above the town. The ingenious miners rigged up a catapult capable of hurling dynamite into their camp.  The strikebreakers skedaddled.  Colorado’s governor called in the state militia to replace them, the tent encampment shown below.

Miners in Altman responded to the military occupation by barricading Altman and announcing they had seceded from Colorado.  Shown here is a detail of a fund-raising flyer developed by the WFM.  It outlines the grievances claimed by the union.  In the end the mine owners were forced to capitulate completely as lost revenues mounted from gold not being mined.  The miners went back to work, usual hours, usual pay.  Shortly after,  Altman suffered a devastating fire and Mitterer moved on.

Clashes between miners and mine owners in Colorado often involved armed intimidation, “stalag” conditions, shootings, and even murder.  Charles Niccoli, an Italian immigrant saloonkeeper, was in the thick of it all.  Most Colorado miners lived in company towns, renting company houses, buying food and supplies in company stories and drinking at saloons controlled by the company.  Law enforcement officials, school teachers, doctors and even priests all were company employees.  Charles Niccoli likely was not an employee.  His ability to rent the saloon quarters was predicated, however, on his being on good terms with Victor-American Fuel Company.

That mining company had a reputation for paying low wages and a lack of attention to mine safety.  The death rate for miners in Colorado was over twice the national average.  Shown here is a photo of a draped corpse from a 1901 disaster that killed a number of miners.  The political power of Victor-American and other coal companies allowed them to hand-pick coroner’s juries that virtually always absolved them from blame.

In 1913 dangerous working conditions triggered a strike among the miners, many of them members of the United Mine Workers (UMW).  When the strikers set up a camp outside the mine perimeter, Victor-American Fuel imported strikebreakers, largely immigrant labor from Southern and Eastern Europe, many of them Italian.  As the months progressed, violence between the strikers and the company’s militia, sometimes known as “death squads,” escalated.  As shown here, the hired guns were well armed and drove armored vehicles.  

The 1913-1914 Colorado Coal War was one of the most violent events in American history.  The strike resulted in 66 deaths and a number of wounded.  The UMW lost the battle but in a broader sense, it was a victory for the union.  The strike helped to galvanize American opinion and led to reforms in labor relations, ultimately assisting the miners at Victor-American’s facilities and other Colorado mines. 

Through this tumult Niccoli refused to go against the mining bosses — and it cost him when the violence spilled over into his own family.  In October 1915, seven coal miners, armed with guns and knives, stormed into his saloon.  A pitched battle ensued in which one man was killed and Charles’ brother, Frank Niccoli, was stabbed three times in the back with a butcher knife.  Although badly wounded, he survived.

Today in the San Pedro district of Los Angeles a central open space is designated Pepper Tree Plaza.  A metal plaque there identifies one spot as the former site of the Pepper Tree Saloon, a drinking establishment whose place in California history revolves around its role in the formation and development of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).

Founded about 1890, the Pepper Tree was adjacent to the port of San Pedro and became a favored “watering hole” for thirsty stevedores and other dock workers.  When saloon ownership devolved to Caspar McKelvy,  a former miner who had lost a finger in his toils, he welcomed union organizers to make the Pepper Tree Saloon their informal headquarters.  It is the building touched by the fourth tall mast left below.

Labor unrest was on the increase along the waterfront.  Longshoremen up and down the Pacific Coast were engaging in strikes and other actions, sometimes resulting in clashes with ship owners and police.  As a gathering place for San Pedro’s stevedores, the Pepper Tree became a hotbed of labor activity that sometimes could spill over into violence.   A photo here shows the arrest of a striking dock worker.

With the coming of National Prohibition in 1920, McKelvy was forced to close down the Pepper Tree Saloon.  The space then became a union hall.  In use throughout the 14 “dry” years, the building was the site of the first meetings of the ILWU.  Capable of tying up all West Coast shipping the union became a powerful (and controversial) force.  When the 1890 Pepper Tree building was torn down to create a community plaza, the name was retained to memorialize the historic saloon.

Note:  Longer posts on each of these vignettes appear elsewhere on this blog at Edmund Mitterer, February 14, 2021;  Charles Niccoli, February 2, 2018, and The Pepper Tree, November 25, 2018.

. 

 

Educated at leading American universities in multiple areas of engineering and earning a law degree, Henry Shepard “Harry” Barton likely was the most highly educated distiller in pre-Prohibition Kentucky and possibly America.  Moving from academia to making whiskey, Barton is said to have studied hard in order to learn proper distilling technique.  But what had Barton’s education taught him about romance?

Harry Barton was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in October 1873, the son of Frances Pierce and Samuel Bailey Barton.  A prosperous farmer, the father had been born in Pennsylvania from a family that could trace its ancestry back to an officer in the Revolutionary War.  As Kentucky opened its lands to settlers from the East, Samuel migrated there and claimed a substantial acreage of fertile farmland.  Harry’s mother was a New Yorker who had married Samuel about 1860.  Over the next 15 years the couple would have three children, daughters Mary and Atlanta, and a dozen years later, Harry.

From the beginning the parents apparently recognized that the boy was gifted with unusual intelligence.  At a time when most farmers’ sons quit school at 16 or earlier, they mustered the resources to send the boy through secondary education and onto some of America’s most prestigious universities.  After graduating from the University of Louisville, Harry studied electrical engineering at Rose Polytechnic University in Terre Haute, Indiana, shown here. That was followed by courses in civil and mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  By this time Samuel Barton had died and some of his estate may have settled on Harry. Still collecting knowledge, the youth then went east to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he earned a law degree.  He was admitted to the Kentucky bar in 1900 at the age of 27.  

There is no indication that Harry Barton ever practiced law.  By now related through marriage to one of Kentucky’s premier whiskey making dynasties, he gravitated to distilling.  His sister Atlanta had married James Thompson, an Irish immigrant whose cousin was George Garvin Brown [See post on Brown, January 9, 1920]. With help from Brown, Thompson opened a liquor house in Louisville, purchasing bulk whiskey and creating a blend he called “Old Thompson.”

In order to assure a continuing supply of whiskey for his brand Thompson was on the lookout to buy a distillery of his own.  The opportunity came when Richard  Monarch, a Kentucky “Whiskey Baron” with lavish spending habits, found his debts exceeding his assets by $1 million dollars ($25 million in today’s dollar) and declared bankruptcy. [See post on R. Monarch, Jan. 4, 2017.] In 1901 Thompson bought the Monarch Distillery in Owensboro, Kentucky, and promptly asked brother-in-law Harry to take charge.   Despite Barton’s lack of experience in the distilling industry, Thompson was banking on his intelligence and studious temperament to carry the day.  He had made a wise choice.

Barton promptly moved from Louisville 105 miles west to Owensboro.  There he found a distillery with a mashing capacity of 750 bushels per day that was suffering from several years of uncertain management — and went back to school:  “To perfect himself in the distilling technique and in the knowledge of fermentology, Mr. Barton studied and worked under the direction of eminent chemists.”  Now known as The Glenmore Distillery, the facility under Barton’s care quickly gained a reputation for making high quality whiskey.  The facility became one of the largest distilleries in Kentucky.  Shown below, it was said to be capable of producing 720 barrels of whiskey a day.

This quantity of production made possible a blizzard of new brands for Thompson, including “Owensboro Club,” “Anchorage,” “Old Cabin Brooks,” “Old Happy Days,” “Kentucky Midland,” “Old Prescription,” “Kent,” “Tom Hardy,” “Two Naturals,” and “Short Horn Club.”  In tribute to Harry’s success another brand was named “H.S. Barton.”  Labels such as “Kentucky Beauty” and “Kentucky Tavern” would be credited to “H.S. Barton, Distiller.”  Harry was advanced to vice president of Thompson Distilling, a position he held for the rest of his life.

Despite his growing wealth and prestige in the Kentucky distilling community, Barton must have felt something missing in his life:  the companionship of a woman.  Living in a rented room in an Owensboro boarding house, he went home at night to a solitary and likely lonely existence.  Enter Anne Lee, shown here.  Anne was the daughter of Joseph Lee, the mayor of Owensboro from 1884 to 1890.  Three years younger than Barton, she worked as a stenographer and clerk in her father’s insurance business.

When and where the couple met is lost in the mists of history.  The romance that ensued, however, would be a lasting one.  Yet for unexplained reasons the couple never married.  Early in the 20th Century, a liaison such as theirs must have caused considerable consternation and disapproval in Owensboro.  Two biographies by descendants on Ancestry state that Anne was Harry’s wife.  The distiller’s obituary in the local newspaper indicated — correctly — that bachelor Bolton never married.

The photograph above indicates the aplomb with which both families apparently accepted the relationship between the two.   It shows four adults sitting together obviously having a good time.  At left is Harry Barton who is holding the arms of his sister, Atlanta.  Facing her is a smiling Anne Lee, backed by her married sister, Forrest Lee Sweeney.  It appears that whatever the relationship between Harry and Anne, it was all in the family. 

 

Barton branched out into other activities.  Major operations like the Glenmore Distillery used thousands of glass and ceramic containers monthly.  Kinks in the supply lines could cause serious disruption in production and sales.  Apparently having difficulty receiving the quantity, and perhaps the quality of whiskey jugs required, Barton founded the Owensboro Clay Products Company.An outdoorsman, he also undertook the promotion of a small lake as a private retreat about 25 miles from Owensboro.  Shown below, the place was known as the Indian Lake Club.

  

Unlike the vast majority of other distillers who lost their livelihood with the coming of National Prohibition, Barton stayed engaged in making whiskey throughout the 14 “dry” years.  Federal regulations authorized six licenses to continue to make whiskey for “medicinal purposes.”  The Glenmore Distillery in Owensboro was fortunate to obtain one of them.  Throughout Prohibition, local directories continued to identify Barton as “distiller.”   With Repeal in 1934, he once again moved to increase production.

The era of Repeal, however, was not without its challenges.  In 1938 a fire virtually gutted Glenmore Distillery.  Four warehouses, the bottling house and a shipping building were destroyed, 33,000 barrels of whiskey burned and a substantial stock of bottled goods lost. The flaming whiskey set the Ohio River on fire and spread the conflagration to the Indiana shores, incinerating several barns.   Under the guidance of Bolton, Glenmore survived.  The distillery itself was saved and quickly resumed production.  To prevent future disasters the warehouses were rebuilt a distance from the main plant.  Dike were built along the river to prevent fiery spillage from reaching shore. 

As he aged, Barton’s health declined although he continued to hold the title of vice president of the Thompson company.  In early December 1941, after an extended illness, he died and was buried in Louisville, the city of his birth, in Cave Hill Cemetery, a place of rest for many of Kentucky’s “Whiskey Barons.”  Shown here is the tall obelisk that marks his grave.  Anne Lee, who died 15 years later, never having married, is buried separately at the Rosehill Elmwood Cemetery in Owensboro.

Whatever the arrangement between Harry and Anne may have been in life, the provisions of Bolton’s will left no doubt of the bond between them.  The legal document revealed:  “Paragraph 2 of the will establishes a trust with a life estate in one Anne Lee.”  While she lived, Harry’s entire inheritance was hers.  Bolton’s next of kin were twelve nephews and nieces, all of whom might have expected a bequest.  Yet they made no move to challenge to challenge their uncle’s will, indicating their recognition of the important role Anne Lee had played in Barton’s life.

Note:  This post, including images, was gathered from multiple Internet sources.  Barton’s obituary from the Owensboro newspaper was particularly helpful as was material on the Barton “find a grave” site.

Addendum:  Just one day ago this Internet site reached the mark of 1.3 million “hits” from viewers worldwide.  Once I would have thought this an impossible number, but it more than validates my belief that many individuals are interested in the universe of distillers, dealers, brokers, saloonkeepers and bartenders who personified the American whiskey trade in the days before National Prohibition in 1920.

 In the early 1900s a 27-year-old blacksmith named Jefferson Price (J.P.) Lightner commissioned a showboat seating 300 patrons and as its captain plied the lower Mississippi River and Louisiana bayous bringing food, libations and entertainment to the locals.  Shown here, cigar in hand and very much the impresario, Lightner subsequently sold the boat in favor of founding the river community of Illmo, Missouri.  In coming ashore he brought similar attractions, including liquor, to the new town.

Called “Cap” for much of his life, Lightner was born in December 1863 in Lewis County Missouri, the son of Olivia Spence and Montgomery G. Lightner. His father was a blacksmith who moved frequently from town to town before he died in 1880.  Jefferson then was only 17.   The son took up his father’s trade, in 1889 recorded as a blacksmith in Quincy, Illinois.

How Lightner in so short a period could move from shoeing horses to owning and operating a showboat has not been adequately explained.   Likely constructed in one of several shipyards along the Mississippi, the craft had to be built to owner specifications, reflecting the degree of interior luxury.  The typical steamboat, in current dollars, cost about $500,000.  Contrary to popular notions, as depicted in the illustration here, showboats did not have their own locomotion because  boilers took too much space away from entertainment uses.  Instead the craft were pushed by regular steamboats.  

Cap’ named his boat “Lightner’s Floating Palace” but after he sold it new owners renamed it the “New Era Floating Palace,” as shown in the photos above.  The “pusher” boat was the “Mary Stewart” out of Cincinnati.  But how did Lightner, from a working class background, get the money to build a “floating palace,” termed a “major boat of the period”?  The answer is not evident but may have something to do with his marriage in 1894 to Rosa Lee Corkins in New Madrid, Missouri, another Mississippi River community.  She was 19; Lightner was 31.  Rosa Lee’s father, Fred, an immigrant from Ireland, may have been the source of some of the money.

However the financing worked, Lightner’s tenure at the helm of the show boat was no more than four or five years.  He and subsequent owners featured music and vaudeville acts.  The photo above of the showboat has a band assembled on the front deck.  Note that the ensemble is made up of both men and women, most of whom would have other duties aboard such as waiting tables, cleaning, loading supplies and other the menial duties required to keep things shipshape.  Staff turnover must have been frequent.  A 1908 ad by a subsequent owner put out a call for “coronet, trombone, drums…other musicians and vaudeville people.”  Applicants were asked to contact the showboat as it docked at specified towns in Louisiana Bayou Country. 

By this time Cap’ Lightner was firmly rooted on land.  During his travels up and down the Mississippi, he caught wind of a proposal to create a new river town to take advantage of a railroad terminal being built in Missouri to serve a new rail bridge from Thebes, Illinois.  After the span was constructed it was discovered that an earlier terminal site was unsuitable and it was moved two miles inland to what earlier had been farmland.  A small settlement grew up around the terminal initially called Whippoorwill’s Hollow.  

Aware of the potential of the site, Lightner bought 80 acres of land there, likely with proceeds from selling his showboat.  Others investors followed.  Property owners laid out the streets and blocks, built a bank, grocery, general store, barbershop, pool hall, hotels and saloons.  Dissatisfied with the original name, they changed it to Illmo, symbolizing the bridge link from Illinois to Missouri.  Through much of this period Lightner served as mayor.

Lightner also was actively pursuing his  own enterprises, a majority of them in the hospitality and entertainment sectors.  Harking back to his life on the water he built a hotel three stories tall shaped like a ship that covered two blocks.He called it “The Ark.”  Although I can find no photo of this unusual hostelry, a similar hotel, shown below, exists in Estes Park, Colorado.  The 1910 census record found Cap’ and Rosa living in The Ark with a servant and 14 roomers, virtually all of them railroad workers.  Nearby, Lightner built a three story opera house.  It featured a movie theater on the first floor, a dance floor on the second and a lodge hall on the third.

Much of Lightner’s attention was directed toward the whiskey trade.  He operated a saloon bearing his name as well as a retail liquor business that sold package goods locally but emphasized mail order sales.  Missouri was a reliably “wet” state flanked by states and localities that had banned alcohol.  Federal law protected interstate commerce in liquor and Lightner, with both railroad and water shipping available, took full advantage of mail order sales as indicated by the whiskey jug shown below left.  As shown right, he was not without local competition for that market.

Lightner was known for his avid promotion of projects that he deemed would benefit Illmo.  When the town’s brick kiln seemed likely to go out of business in 1919, he helped form a stock company that bought the enterprise, erected a second kiln, hired a manager, and kept the furnaces fired for another decade.  Realizing that Illmo lacked a burial grounds, he and Rosa Lee donated the land for what is known even today as the Lightner  & St. Joseph Cemetery.

Despite the best efforts of Lightner and his colleagues at building Illmo into a thriving city, its longterm fate was firmly tied to the railroad industry.  Although it continued to grow into the mid-1920s, the town stagnated after the Missouri Pacific Road pulled out of space it leased in the terminal. In 1980, by a vote of residents, after 75 years Illmo, the  town Cap’ Lightner helped create, ceased to exist. It now is a neighborhood of Scott City, Missouri.

When that occurred the showboat captain come ashore had been dead almost 50 years.  An inveterate cigar smoker,  Lightner developed cancer of the tongue and throat.  It proved incurable and he died in September 1931 at the age of 68 years, eight months and one day.  He was buried in the cemetery that bears his name.  Rosa Lee would join him there 18 months later.  Their joint gravestone proclaims Cap’ Lightner “Founder of Illmo.” 

 Note:  This vignette was occasioned by seeing Lightner’s whiskey jug, deciding to do some research, and finding that in addition to being in the whiskey trade he earlier had been captain of a showboat and later founded a town.  A hint on the Internet indicated that a photo of Lightner (with his cigar) existed.  As a result, I called the Scott City Library where Librarian Joyce Luten with assists from other staff was very helpful in locating  and sending the image that opens this post.  My sincere thanks go to Joyce and everyone else involved.

 

Foreword:  As in the past when in doing research on a “whiskey man,” I come across an existing article that tells his story as well or better than I could, I seek permission to reprint it on this website.  So it is with an article on a celebrated black bartender named Tom Bullock.  Researched and written by Michael Jones for the Louisville Tourist Bureau and entitled “The Life and Legacy of Tom Bullock,” it is a good narrative of the black bartender’s life.  With slight editing Author Jones’ article follows:

The best way for a modern cocktail enthusiast to appreciate Bullock and his career is to consider them in the context of the time in which he lived. Bullock was born in Louisville, Kentucky in October 18, 1872, less than a decade after the Civil War. His father, also named Thomas Bullock, was a former slave who fought for the Union Army and worked as a furniture mover after the war. The 1880 Census shows the older Bullock living with his wife, Jennie, and their three children – Tom, 7; Lena, 6; and Clarence, 1.

Louisville was a Union stronghold during the war, but the city became a magnet for ex-Confederates after the fighting ceased. The Louisville & Nashville Railroad controlled the only working tracks to the Deep South, so the River City became a major center of trade. By 1870, the city’s population had increased more than 48 percent to 100,000 people.  The former rebels soon took over Louisville’s culture. Historian George C. Wright wrote, “It seems that a part of the ‘rite of passage’ into the business world of the city was to have been an officer of the Confederacy. Nearly all of Louisville’s journalists, lawyers, realtors, and merchants were former rebels.”

One of the Southern traditions that blossomed in Louisville after the Civil War was the use of African American bartenders….”In the North, black bartenders were seen as competition and shut out entirely. In Southern-leaning cities like Louisville and St. Louis, the situation was different. They had a history of using African Americans in all types of serving positions,” said cocktail historian David Wondrich,

Bullock learned his bartending skills at the Pendennis Club, Louisville’s elite private club, where he started out working as a bellboy. The Pendennis Club was founded in 1881. The club did not move to its current home at Second and Muhammad Ali until 1928. When Bullock worked there, it was located in a downtown mansion formerly owned by William Burke Belknap, founder of the Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company. President Chester A. Arthur dined there in 1883 when he came to Louisville for the Southern Exposition.

There is a curious news item in the February 26, 1904, Courier-Journal that might explain why Bullock left the Pendennis Club. The headline read, “Pendennis Club Sued.” The story relates that “Clarence Bullock, a Negro waiter, sued the club for $5,000 damages” after his knee was cut by glass while opening a bottle of club soda for a club member. For whatever reason, Bullock left the Pendennis Club to work at a competing private club, the Kenton Club; a short-lived rival started in 1885 by businessmen denied membership to the Pendennis.

Bullock left Louisville to work in a railroad car bar. For a while he was living in Cincinnati with his brother Clarence and working on the rails. According to the introduction to his book, he also spent some time working in Chicago. But eventually he settled in St. Louis, where he lived with his widowed mother and tended bar at the exclusive St. Louis Country Club.

The St. Louis Country Club has a golf course designed by Charles B. Macdonald, who is considered the father of American golf. Among Bullock’s regular patrons was George Herbert “Bert” Walker Sr., an American banker and businessman. He was the maternal grandfather of President George H. W. Bush and a great-grandfather of President George W. Bush, both of whom were named in his honor. Walker, who besides siring presidents… was president of the U.S. Golf Association. The Walker Cup, a competition between American and British golfers, is named for him. In his introduction to “The Ideal Bartender” Walker wrote of Bullock, “For the past quarter of a century he has refreshed and delighted the members and their friends of the Pendennis Club of Louisville and the St. Louis Country Club of St. Louis. In all of that time, I doubt if he has erred in even one of his concoctions.”

“The Ideal Bartender” itself was born out of controversy. During the 1912 election there were persistent rumors that Theodore Roosevelt was a secret drunk. After hearing a Roosevelt speech in Marquette, Iron Ore editor George Newitt penned an article that declared, “Roosevelt lies, and curses in a most disgusting way, he gets drunk too, and that not infrequently, and all of his intimates know about it.”

Roosevelt sued for libel. During the testimony for the suit the former president conceded that in the years since he had left the White House he drank two Mint Juleps. One occasion was at the St. Louis Country Club, and he claimed to have only taken a couple of sips. This led to a playful editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on May 28, 1913. 

The writer contends that Bullock’s drinks are so good Roosevelt couldn’t be telling the truth: “Who was ever known to drink just a part of Tom’s? Tom, than whom there is no greater mixologist of any race.”…. Regardless of how much of the julep he drank, Roosevelt won his libel suit and all the attention translated to national fame for Bullock. With the help of patrons like Walker and August Busch Sr., CEO of Anheuser-Busch, he was able to publish his recipe book.  

[Bullock’s 1917 book, the last to be published before National Prohibition, has been reprinted numerous times because it has long been out of copyright.  Various editions are shown through this post.]

Bullock became particularly famous for his Mint Juleps. “The Ideal Bartender” contains two recipes – Kentucky Style and St. Louis Style. The former is the familiar Mint Julep he probably mastered at the Pendennis Club. The other recipe includes gin, lemon and lime juice, and Grenadine, a non-alcoholic bar syrup. In a nod to Busch, “The Ideal Bartender” also includes a drink called Golfer’s Delight that used Bevo, a non-alcoholic beer that Anheuser-Busch developed in anticipation of Prohibition.

Bullock was at the height of his popularity in 1917. Then America did the unthinkable and outlawed alcohol. Missouri was actually one of the last states to adopt Prohibition. It was rejected in the 1910, 1912, and 1918 elections. However in 1919, the Missouri General Assembly accepted prohibition by ratifying the 18th Amendment. Thereafter, Bullock is listed in the St. Louis City Directory as working a laborer or a butler, but most cocktail writers believe he continued to serve alcohol. He remained employed for several years by the St. Louis Country Club but they were not specific about his duties.  Bullock mysteriously disappears from the public record after 1927. It is generally accepted that he didn’t die until 1964, but almost nothing is known about the years in between.

  

“The Ideal Bartender” celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2017, and Bullock seems to be as hot as ever. Planter’s House, a cocktail bar and restaurant in St. Louis, named a Bullock Room in his honor. And in 2013, D’USSÉ Cognac established the Tom Bullock Award for Distinguished Service in Washington, D.C.  In 2019, a mural [shown below] dedicated to Tom Bullock was installed on the side of a prominent Louisville restaurant, just down the street from the site of the original Pendennis Club.  Artist and Louisville native Kacy Jackson designed the mural which depicts Bullock serving up an Old Fashioned cocktail.

Notes:  Through the good offices of Jordan Skora of Louisville Tourism, I have been in indirect touch with the author of this post, Michael Jones. Jordan has provided his response: “Thanks. I’ll take a look at it, but I’m for anything that gets Bullock’s name out there.”  And my thanks to you, Michael, for bringing Bullock to the fore.

”

 

Foreword:  During the three decades from 1890 to 1920, the globe exploded with dozens of expositions, known popularly as “world fairs.” They included a whopping 31 during that period held in the United States alone.  Compare that number with none—zero—on these shores during the past 30 plus years — and only a few abroad.  In their heyday, however, expositions drew considerable public attention.   Presented here are vignettes of three pre-Prohibition “whiskey men,” each with a particular role in such extravaganzas.

Edmund Roche was a beneficiary.  Roche owned a saloon and liquor house in Aberdeen, North Dakota, when prohibitionary laws forced him to shut down.  He quickly uprooted his family and moved 700 miles east to America’s second largest city — Chicago.  He clearly had been saving his money because on his arrival he announced that he was looking to purchasing an established liquor business.  Enright & Kelly, founded in 1877, had operated successfully for two decades at 226-28 Kinzie St. but were in trouble with Chicago authorities for illegal sales.  The partners sold out to the newcomer who promptly renamed the business the “E.H. Roche Company.”

Roche was made for Chicago — and Chicago for Roche.  The era was one of exuberance in the “hog butcher for the world,” as Carl Sandburg termed the city. A program cover projected the self-proclaimed “Metropolis of the West” with its global aspirations in the arts, science and industry. That drive that would culminate in the Columbian Exposition of 1893, a World’s Fair of a proportion and impact seldom, if ever, to be equaled in the United States. 

The exposition drew millions to Chicago and filled the coffers of enterprises like Roche’s with an avalanche of cash.  Roche was quick to catch the flavor of Chicago, symbolically naming one of his flagship whiskeys “World’s Fair Rye.”  He also issued a colorful paperweight that advertised the liquor house and and carried an attractive color picture of the Columbian Exposition main building.

Roche’s profitability triggered his interest in opening liquor enterprises in other cities.  He opened an outlet in Des Moines, Iowa, and subsequently operated three stores in Detroit.   By the mid-1900s Roche also had become the president of the Hendryx Distilling Co.  Despite the name of the firm, he was not a distiller, but a rectifier, that is, blending and compounding whiskeys on one of the floors of his building at 170 East Ohio Street in Chicago.  All would be closed after 1920 with the coming of National Prohibition.  In the meantime, however, the Chicago World’s Fair had been very, very good to Edmund Roche.

Joseph Beck & Sons were participants.   They were not the only whiskey men to display their wares at the Paris Exposition of 1900, but the New York City distillers/rectifiers appear to have been the smallest company among the pioneering exhibitors who made “so fine a showing,” who won a plethora of medals, and who brought American whiskey aggressively to the attention of the European Continent.

That World’s Fair had been announced by the French government as a celebration of the dawning of the Twentieth Century.  Countries from around the world were invited by France to showcase their achievements and products. An official of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Dr. H.W. Wiley, decided that the Paris Exposition was a perfect time to show Europeans the decided benefits of  American made alcoholic beverages.  Using his contacts in the liquor industry, Wiley collected commitments from fourteen “leading houses,” including the Becks, to submit their whiskeys for exhibit in Paris at the United States pavilion.

Shown here, the whiskey exhibits were displayed in two cases, each six feet square and eight feet high, and facing on the two main isles.  While some ten distillers displayed their wares together in Case 108, the Becks invested in a much larger exhibit and shared Case 107 with only two other distillers. The Becks’ exhibit featured rank after rank of the company’s flagship brand, “Beckmore.”

The American whiskey exhibit was cited by Wiley as having the unique merit of being the only one containing more than one display in which every exhibitor secured an award. Bestowed by the tasting judges of the Paris Exposition, one-third of the whiskeys received gold medals and the others silver or bronze.  

Joseph Beck & Sons  were awarded a medal for “merit and quality” for their Beckmore brand whiskey,  It is unclear, however, if this represented a gold medal or a lesser silver or bronze. The rank apparently made no difference to the Becks.  They made the success of their Paris excursion a centerpiece of their subsequent merchandising, displaying the honor on their letterhead, whiskey labels, and advertising on shot glasses given to favored customers. 

Edward E. Bruce was an organizer.  Although Bruce accounted himself an Omaha  wholesale druggist, his advertising emphasized his wines, whiskey and brandy.  His flagship brand was “Country Club Bourbon” that he sold in stoneware jugs.  His whiskey likely was obtained from distilleries in Kentucky. He also may have done some “rectifying,” that is, mixing several whiskeys to improved taste and smoothness.

Bruce was well-known in Omaha business circles, according to a contemporary account, a gentleman respected for his ability, enterprise and ingenuity. A co-founder of the National Association of Wholesale Druggists,  he also was a  member of the Omaha Grain Exchange Board. Presumably as a result of his strong business reputation, Bruce was tapped by Omaha’s gentry to be a principal officer for a world’s fair known as the “Trans-Mississippi International Exposition.”  This event was inspired by leading Nebraskans to illustrate the “progress of the West.” It highlighted the 24 states and territories west of the Mississippi River and was meant to spur economic development. 

Held a mere five years after Chicago’s highly successful 1893 Columbian World’s Fair, the Trans-Mississippi Exposition ran from June to November 1898.   Bruce held the pivotal position of exhibits manager for the Exposition, an extravaganza that stretched several miles.  He was pivotal in choosing and managing 4,062 individual exhibits. The success of his efforts can be measured in the 2.6 million people who visited during the six month run of the fair.  Constructed quickly of flimsy materials, none of the Exposition buildings survives today.

Note:  Each  of these “whiskey men” has been given more elaborate treatment in prior posts on this website:  Edmund Roche, February 25, 2015;  The Becks, September 3, 2015; and E.E. Bruce, May 18, 2011.

 For years I have been collecting the images of trade cards that Charles Rebstock,  St. Louis distiller and philanthropist, issued during his lifetime.I first told Rebstock’s story on this website on September 6, 2011, but on a careful perusal of these advertising artifacts, it occurs to me that their themes reflect in additional ways this whiskey man’s personality and life experience.  They also indicate the ability of Rebstock, shown here, to combine both artistic and business sense.

Many of Rebstock’s trade cards feature the forms and faces of young girls, often interacting with birds, butterflies, or flowers.  Never boys.  My thought is that these images in emotional ways relate to his wife, Pauline, a St. Louis-born girl only about 20 years old when they married.  Charles was ten years older. They had no children. After Pauline died at age 36 in 1893, he never remarried.

Possibly in an effort to assuage his grief, not long after Pauline’s death, Rebstock took the first of two long “around-the-world” ocean voyages.   The trade card here may represent the various type of marine craft that he employed in his extensive travels, including a masted schooner, sailboat, steamboat and lighter.

Rebstock is accounted to have visited Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa.  When he found a country he particularly liked, he made his stay a prolonged one.  From his trade cards, Turkey may have been among them.  Two images reflect that interest, one of a horseman in a fez galloping over a landscape and a second entitled “Turkish Ladies Sport.” 

Another of Rebstock’s favored countries may well have been Spain.  At least two of his trade cards featured bullfight scenes.  In one the matador has made a sweep around the bull with his red cape while a picador on horseback prods the doomed animal with his lance.  A second card finds the bull slain and being dragged  out of the stadium.

 

Those cards that appear purely decorative may also have a meaning.  The one at left of a boater approaching a stone bridge carries the logo of the Cliff House in Deadwood, Dakota Territory.  Three others shown here also carry customer names.  The towns noted —  Perrysville, Missouri, and Fairbault and St. Peter, Minnesota — all are relatively small, indicating that Rebstock was making such communities the objects of his marketing efforts for “Stonewall” whiskey.  The reverse of the hand and flowers trade card contains a long verse in celebration of the brand, ending:

A man’s a fool to live in grief,

When he can get complete relief,

And feel as happy as a clam, 

Drinking “STONEWALL” by the dram.

Rebstock also was providing individualized calling cards for his traveling salesmen when they visited towns around the Middle West. Each carries the likeness of the “drummer.”  At left is Rebstock’s younger brother, Edward; at right,  John C. Hochmuth,  a longtime company sales representative.

The meaning of the final trade card is puzzling without understanding the back story.  It depicts two young women with a magnifying glass examining the head of a man sitting on a shoreline contemplating a beached and presumably wrecked ship.  The image may seem less strange upon learning that Rebstock in 1880 commissioned a Mississippi steamboat to be built in St. Louis.  Carrying his name, the packet was intended to carry his whiskey to customers along Mississippi and its tributaries.  The venture proved unprofitable and three years later Rebstock sold the ship.  It later burned and was junked.  I surmise that the seated figure represents Rebstock himself, comically having his head examined about his venture into steamboats.

Those who profess to know about such things claim that the motto of the Purcell family inscribed on its Irish coat of arms translates from the Latin as “Success or Perish!”   Likely not aware of that challenge, James “Jimmy” Purcell operated four drinking establishments in and around pre-Prohibition Grand Junction, Colorado.  Purcell, shown here, epitomized the Western saloonkeeper as an astute businessman, successful in an environment where “perishing” was always a possible outcome.

Born in Racine County, Wisconsin, on Christmas Day in 1858 Jimmy was scarcely out of the womb when his family moved further west to Iowa.  The federal census in 1860 found the family there, living in Anamosa, a town reputedly named for a Native American princess.   His father Michael’s given occupation was “laborer.”  While still his late teens, Purcell moved west to Leadville, Colorado, apparently to try his hand at mining.  Subsequently he moved further west to Colorado’s Red Mountains region when he operated a string of pack horses, likely involved with the mines there.

In 1882 Purcell, now about 24, arrived in Grand Junction, Colorado, the year it was incorporated.  Situated at the confluence of the Grand (now Colorado) and Gunnison Rivers, Grand Junction was becoming the center of a major fruit-growing region, including wine grapes, and the largest city in Western Colorado.  Purcell was an early purchaser of Grand Junction real estate and his occupation was listed as “Gambler” in the 1885 Colorado census.    His card playing at the Senate Saloon was documented as early as 1883.  Said not to be a drinker, but an excellent card player, his acquaintance with Grand Junction’s busy saloons seems to have begun by gambling in them.

Circa 1890, Purcell made his first foray as a saloon proprietor, co-owning the Bank Saloon at the southeast corner of 3^rd and Main Streets with a man named Fredericks.  This enterprise apparently was not a success and three years later disappeared from business directories. Undaunted, soon the young man was back in the liquor trade.  With a new partner in about 1895 he took over management of the Senate Saloon, below, a popular Grand Junction drinking establishment where he had played poker.  Three years later the partner died and Purcell became the sole proprietor.  His motto, prominent on his letterhead, was “We look to quality in everything.”

The role of saloonkeeper in the Old West was not an easy one.  The saloon played a multifaceted role in the life of a town that required of the proprietor a particular array of skills.  He had to be a genial soul, eager to greet old-timers and newcomers alike to his place, while always on the alert for the kind of trouble that a mixture of guns and booze could bring.  Grand Junction was not Deadwood or Tombstone, but the local press not infrequently recorded violent events connected with saloons.  Jimmy’s Irish personality quickly made him a popular figure among townsfolk.

A saloonkeeper also had to be known as generous, buying drinks for regular customers when the situation seemed to demand it.  Like other proprietors, he gave out bar tokens from his establishments. Here Purcell appears to have been particularly free-handed  While most saloonkeepers gave out tokens worth a few cents toward drinks, this Irishman gave out tokens worth $1.00 — equivalent to at least $22 in today’s dollar.

 

The best proprietors, like Purcell, knew that providing customers with comfortable and attractive surroundings was an important element in a successful drinking establishment.  The photo below of the interior of the Senate Saloon shows it to be a substantial cut above the average ramshackle cowboy/miner watering hole. The bar itself was an expensive item, made in the East and shipped by rail to Grand Junction. When Purcell opened the fourth of his saloons, the Brown Palace, he took those furnishings with him, redecorating the Senate Saloon with new bar fixtures.

Finally, a successful saloonkeeper had to be a good manager, able to insure the smooth running of his business.  A key issue for Western saloons was insuring sufficient flow of supplies, particularly of liquor and food.  Although Grand Junction, with regular railroad service, did not face the kind of isolation of some Mountain West saloons, the owner faced daily challenges in assuring sufficient food and drink.  Purcell seems to have been up to the task, capable of operating multiple sites simultaneously.

Shown here, for example, is an ad for his Senate Saloon and Annex Bar, opened in 1904, promising “fine wines and liquors,” including standard brands of bourbon and rye—“shipped from bond.”

The Brown Palace was the fourth and last of Purcell’s saloons.  Shown below, it was located in Palisade, Colorado, about 12 miles northeast of Grand Junction. Boasting vineyards and fruit trees, Palisade was known as the “Peach-Growing Capital of Colorado.” This prosperous community appealed to Purcell as a place to open a third saloon.  

As he had for The Senate, he issued embossed glass whiskey flasks in pint and half-pint sizes that advertised the drinking establishment. Those can be dated to a narrow time frame.  The Brown Palace was open only between 1905 and 1908 when Palisade, despite its wine-making industry, opted to go “dry.”  Purcell was left running his Senate Saloon at 413 Main Street and the Annex Bar at 209-211 Colorado Avenue.  But not for long.

Just a year later the Anti-Saloon League, grown strong in Colorado, helped force an election on banning alcohol in Grand Junction.  The result of the vote was 1,480 to 1,009 in favor of prohibition.  Saloonkeepers were given only ten days to unload their stocks of alcohol.  Those days proved to be extremely busy ones for Purcell and other saloonkeepers of Grand Junction as residents rushed to buy provisions for a potentially arid future.

A final attribute of a successful Western saloonkeeper was the ability to take setbacks in stride.  Here again, Jimmy Purcell met the test.  While prohibition left other Grand Junction former saloonkeepers with no occupation, Purcell was able to sustain a “dry” Senate as a cigar, tobacco and billiards hall during ensuing years of local and National Prohibition.  As an agent for the Adolph Coors Company, his survival was assisted by owning the franchise for Coors malted milk products.  His pre-prohibition saloon success also allowed him to acquire and lease out Main Street properties to others.

Prohibition also likely gave Jimmy more time to enjoy family life.  On January 7,1896, at the age of 37, he had married Mary Louise (called “Louise”) Stoeckle, 29, in Doniphan, Kansas.  Their first child, Margaret Mary, was born about two years later to be followed in 1902 by a son, Carl James.  The 1920 census found the family living at 754 Chipeta Avenue in Grand Junction.  With them was Louise’s older sister, Margaret Stoeckle. 

“When the stock market crashed in 1929 and the banks closed, Jimmy continue to cash people’s checks and otherwise give them credit.  There was likely a business angle to this, but he was in a position to help others out and didn’t hesitate despite the significant uncertainties. 

“Throughout his life, Irishmen were mostly considered minorities and many faced discrimination. Jimmy bridged that gap among ethnicities and was respected by all.  Many of his tenants were minorities, including of Japanese descent, and he employed people of many backgrounds.”  

                  

In 1902, Minneapolis liquor dealer Joseph M. Davis, proprietor of the popular “Silver Pitcher” brand of whiskey, could sense that profits were declining.  When he investigated he found an unexpected drain on his revenues.  It turned out to be his trusted bookkeeper and company cashier, Fred Pratt.  The incident highlights a persistent problem faced by whiskey men — employees tapping the till.

Born in 1856 in St. Petersburg, Joseph, shown here, embarked from Hamburg , Germany, with his father Abraham and other family members to arrive in the United States in 1864, according to passport records.   His father changed the family name to “Davis” upon landing and settled immediately in Minneapolis where Joseph would spend the rest of his life.

Joseph Davis’ initial years largely have gone unrecorded.  Still a youngster on arrival, he would have been educated in local schools.  His early employment  may have been in the liquor trade.  In 1887 at the age of 31, he married Rose, who also had been born in Russia.  She is shown here from a 1924 passport photo.  The couple would go on to have a family of three children.

In 1890, the 34-year-old Davis opened a saloon and wholesale/retail liquor house at 107 Washington Avenue North.  He featured a variety of whiskey brands including “Sheridan Rye” (shown here),  “Bon Bon Rye,” “Gateway,” “Georgie,” “J. M. D.” (his initials), “Josephine,” “Knight’s Pride,” “Mount Curve Rye,” “Old 89 May Dew,” “Old Union, “Queen Quality,” “Rocker Rye,” and “United States Reserve.” 

“Silver Pitcher” was his flagship label and the only brand Davis bothered to trademark.  He advertised the whiskey heavily through giveaway items provided to wholesale customers such as saloons, restaurants and hotels.  His gifts included back-of-the-bar-bottles.  As shown below, they featured a variety of shapes but all advertised Silver Pitcher Rye.  Davis could also provide a silver plated pitcher for bar use.  It was used to hold tea or water for the bartender to supply to customers upon request. 

As a result of Davis’ merchandising strategies, his business grew rapidly.  Deciding he needed accounting help in the heavily regulated and taxed liquor trade, he hired a bookkeeper.   Enter Frederick “Fred” Pratt.  Born in New York City in September 1870, Pratt apparently arrived in Minneapolis early in the 1890s.  Although he was only 22, Davis hired him.  Apparently Pratt’s work performance was exemplary and by 1894 he also had been made the liquor house cashier. 

Single and living in rooming houses during his first years in Minneapolis, Fred met a local woman, Clara Maire.  They fell in love, and married in November 1896.  Their first child, Helen, was born in 1898 and a second, Frederick Jr., two years later.  This growing family increased Pratt’s financial needs, including the cost of renting a comfortable home at East 33rd Street and South Fifth Avenue, believed to be the house shown here. 

With the onset of the Twentieth Century, Davis began to notice that returns from his liquor business had dwindled.  Suspicion fell on the bookkeeper/cashier.  Unwilling to confront directly an employee whose record heretofore had been unblemished, the owner hired a private investigator who subsequently presented solid evidence that Pratt had been “tapping the till.”

On April 4, 1903, Sergeant Ginsburg from the Minneapolis “Bunco Squad” arrived at the liquor house and arrested Pratt on a charge of embezzlement.  The amount he was accused of stealing was not disclosed.   Brought into court Pratt was found guilty and sentenced to three and one-half years in the penitentiary.  That venue almost certainly was the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater, about 25 miles east of Minneapolis, shown below as it looked then.

The prison was close enough for Clara and their children to visit Pratt during his incarceration, apparently standing by him as he served time.  Upon his release, the family reunited and the couple later had a third child, a son.  As an ex-convict, Pratt apparently had difficulty re-establishing himself in Minneapolis.  City directories gave his occupation as a house painter in 1908, grocer in 1910, real estate agent in 1911 and contractor in 1916.

Meanwhile, Joseph Davis found his business challenges increasingly coming from prohibitionary movements.  By 1915, when some Minnesota localities had banned alcohol under local option laws, he changed the name of his establishment to the “J. M. Davis Mercantile Company” and was emphasizing mail order sales to surrounding “dry” states.  A shot glass advertised the existence of a free catalogue of mail order offerings.

It has been suggested that by adding “mercantile” to his company name, Davis was planning to continue in business with merchandise other than liquor after the imposition of National Prohibition in 1920.  Now 64 years old, however, after 30 years in business Davis retired.  He would live to see “The  Great Experiment” repealed, the Great Depression and World War Two, dying in April 1946 in Florida at the age of 89.  Joseph Davis was buried in Temple Israel Memorial Park in Minneapolis next to Rose who had died 28 years earlier.

Fred Pratt preceded Davis in death, passing in 1943.  He was buried in Lakewood Cemetery of Minneapolis, Section 3, Lot 6, Grave 9.   Whether he and Davis ever met again after Pratt’s incarceration is unknown.  Common to many aspects of American business, their entwined story of trust betrayed suggests why many “whiskey men” chose to put close relatives in positions dealing with company finances.

Note:   This post owes a great deal to a 1987 book entitled “The Bottles, Breweriana and Advertising Jugs of Minnesota, 1850-1920, Volume 2: Whiskey, Druggist, Medicine,” co-authored and edited by Ron Feldhaus. From that volume come some of the information and pictures used here.  The more recent existence of genealogical sites allowed the identification of Fred Pratt as the errant bookkeeper and helped tell his story.

  

 

 

Foreword:   Anyone who delves into its history soon comes to realize how much — shall we call it “blarney” — has always been involved in selling whiskey.  Whether it was linking a brand to an ancient recipe, ascribing it to some historical figure, or claiming it cured serious diseases, distillers, liquor dealers and saloon keepers were notable for stretching the truth, sometimes ruthlessly.  Thus when a pre-Prohibition whiskey man was being candid about his whiskey, it deserves attention.  Following are three examples of “telling how it was,” each with its own perspective.

It has always been a mystery to me how Western saloons, often located in isolated mining camps or other communities with no easy access to the outside world, managed to get the liquor needed to satisfy their thirsty clientele.  For many “Old West” locations, railroads were distant, stage coaches sporadic, and mule trains infrequent.  The answer may lie with Sam Jaggers, a saloonkeeper and liquor dealer in the mining town of Bannack, Montana, during the 1860s.

Bannack Montana

 

In 1903, Jaggers gave an extensive interview to reporters for the Dillon (Montana) Examiner in which he described the life of a frontier saloonkeeper and confided:  “I now want to tell you boys about how we made our liquors…,” adding humorously I suspect, “…and I am sure you will not give it away.”

According to Jaggers, all the liquors coming to Bannack saloons originated from Los Angeles in a form he called “high wines,” in effect, “white lightening.”  “Once the high wines had been safely landed in our cellars, us saloon keepers set about making various liquors demanded by the horny-handed miners….If a man wanted any kind of liquor, he got it, and it did not make any difference whether he asked for whiskey, brandy, rum, gin or some brand of wine, he got it, and it all came originally from the same barrel.”  The taste could be altered, Jaggers said, by the amount of fusel oil the proprietor added, a mixture of alcohols extracted from the fermentation process.

Remembering events in 1867 Jaggers continued, “…There was a whiskey famine in the territory and for while it seemed as if a dire calamity was staring the country in the face.”  Hearing that there were two barrels of whiskey for sale at Deer Lodge, Montana, Sam in haste made the 115 mile journey there on horseback and bought the whiskey for $750 in gold dust— equivalent to $16,500 today.  One of the barrels was good stuff, he related, but the other was the worst whiskey he had ever tasted.  While the liquor was being delivered, Jaggers got an idea.  He bought two cases of peaches and returning to Bannack mashed them into pulp and dumped them into the rot-gut, mixing them well.  “…The result was it was converted into a whiskey that miners would walk ten miles after the close of a hard day’s work in order to pay 25 cents for a sample of it.”

In Gardnerville, Nevada,  Chris J. “Big Swede” Jesperson, a saloonkeeper described as always “out of humor and a grouch for fair” was asked by a young Easterner what kind of whiskey he stocked.  Jesperson answered with a response captured by a reporter for the Gardnerville, Nevada, Record Courier of February 18, 1908:

 “Why you rosy cheeked lummox, we’ve got all kinds of whiskey; we’ve got common ordinary, everyday whiskey, the kind that killed father at the age of 95.  We’ve got wisdom whiskey, the kind that makes the absorber think he’s backed Solomon off the map.  Throw some of it under your belt and in ten minutes you’ll be wondering why they didn’t make you president instead of Teddy.  We’ve got whiskerbroom whiskey, the kind that makes you throw a fit on the floor and when you get up you dust your clothes off with a whiskerbroom.

“We’ve got honest whiskey, the kind that causes a man to pay debts when he’s drunk, and to kick him all over the lot when he’s sober.  We’ve got fool whiskey, the kind that causes your dear neighbor to lead you off somewhere in Pine Nut Hills and whisper in your waiting ear a piece of news that was all over town the day before.  Then we’ve got lovin’ whiskey, the kind that makes some lobster crawl up to you, put his arm around your neck and blow a breath into your face that would drive a turkey buzzard away from a dead coyote or stampede the employes of a glue factory.

“We’ve got fightin’ whiskey, the kind that gets action on Tobe Ward [a race horse] or make an Antelope Valley cowboy haul out his sixshooter and plug out the lights.  We’ve got crying whiskey, the kind that makes a tenderfoot shed tears of anguish and sorrow whenever he hears a funny story.  We’ve got sporting whiskey, the kind that makes you want to tackle the wheel or craps.  Why, gol durn it, we’ve got the biggest stock in Nevada.”

The ultimate in candor about whiskey came from Pierre Lacour, a New Orleans entrepreneur.  The secret behind Lacour’s liquor was that it did not require any whiskey at all, just raw alcohol he called “neutral spirits.”  Lacour’s book, “The Manufacture of Liquors, Wines and Cordials without the Aid of Distillation,” first published in 1853, listed dozens of “recipes” for making liquor without the onerous and time consuming process of distilling.  Among them are instructions for making three American whiskeys:

1.  Old Bourbon Whiskey:  Neutral Spirits, four gallons; refined sugar, three pounds;  dissolved in water, three quarts;  decoction of tea, one pint; three drops of oil of wintergreen, dissolved in one ounce of alcohol; color with tincture of cochineal, two ounces;  burnt sugar, three ounces. 

2.  Monogahela Whiskey:  Neutral spirits, four gallons; honey three pints, dissolved in water, one gallon;  rum, half gallon; nitric ether, half an ounce. This is to be colored to suit fancy.  Some customers prefer this whiskey transparent;  while some like it just perceptibly ringed with brown; while others, again, want it rather deep, and partaking of red. [The red would be supplied by crushed, dried cochineal bugs, shown here, an insect that lives on cacti in Mexico and Central America.]

3.  Oronoko Rye:  Neutral spirits, four gallons; refined sugar, three and a half pounds, dissolved in water to dissolve three pints;  decoction of tea, one pint; burnt sugar, four ounces; oil of pear, half an ounce, dissolved in an ounce of alcohol.

Michael Veach of the Filson Historical Society and an expert on whiskey history suggests the important of understanding what Lacour, Jaggers, and perhap even Jesperson, were imparting with their candor.  First, they tell us some of the ingredients being used to concoct knockoff whiskey in the pre-Prohibition era.  Second, they suggest that the validation of a whiskey was not how and of what it was made but the reaction of the customer on the barstool.

Note:  Longer articles on each of the three whiskey men featured here may be found elsewhere on this blog:  Sam Jaggers, December 12, 2019;  Chris “Big Swede” Jesperson, May 1, 2021, and Pierre Lacour, December 20, 2021.