Born into an immigrant Scottish family, brothers Thomas, James and John Gaff found opportunity in America’s midsection to create a business empire of extraordinary size and breadth. Founded on revenues from distilling whiskey, Gaff enterprises encompassed a brewery, a fleet of steamships plying the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, Indiana grain and hog farms, a Louisiana plantation, a silver mine in Nevada, turnpike construction, railroad financing, banking, and likely the world’s first ready-made breakfast cereal.
The Gaff saga began in 1811 when James and Margaret Wilson Gaff pulled up stakes in Edinburgh, Scotland and emigrated to the United States with their three-year-old son, Thomas. The family settled first in New Jersey where James was born in 1817 and John in 1820. Subsequent moves took the Gaffs to upstate New York and then to Brooklyn where Margaret’s brother, Charles, was operating a distillery. There he taught his nephew Thomas the distilling business.
Armed with that knowledge Thomas, eventually accompanied by younger brothers James and John, moved to Pennsylvania. There the Gaff brothers engaged in several businesses, including storekeeping, papermaking, and most important, making whiskey. For a number of years they were highly successful and made money until the financial Panic of 1837 depressed the national economy. About the same time the brothers began having difficulty obtaining sufficient grain for their distilling and found taxes increasing on their liquor, depressing their profits.
The combination was enough to have the Gaffs looking around for other opportunities. Out on the frontier of Indiana, pioneer local businessmen were eager to attract young entrepreneurs with money. They offered the brothers tax incentives and free land to move their activities to Aurora, a small town along the Ohio River in southeastern Indiana. The Gaffs accepted and sent James, shown here in maturity, to established a general merchandise store. Thomas stayed in Pennsylvania to close out businesses there and joined James about 1843. John followed in 1845. After the Gaffs’ father died, their widowed mother and three sisters also moved to Aurora.
Upon Thomas’ arrival, the Gaffs almost immediately began to build a distillery near town on the banks of Hogan’s Creek, a waterway that emptied into the Ohio River. This distillery eventually produced rye, bourbon, and a scotch-type whiskey that the brothers dubbed “Thistle Dew.” The Gaffs also used the brand names “Excelsior," "Howe & Hubbel Excelsior’” "Pleasant Valley,” "Silver Lake,” "Wild Cat,” and "Wild Cat Family Whiskey.” The latter two names showed a certain sly sense of humor since “wild cat” was a name at the time applied to illegal moonshine. The brothers called their distillery “T. and J. W. Gaff & Co.” By 1850 it had become one of the largest in the United States. An illustration of the complex later in the 1800s shows its growth and proximity to the Ohio River.
The success of their whiskey-making spurred the brothers to build a brewery in Aurora, stretching for 300 feet along Market Street adjacent to the Ohio River, an enterprise they called the Crescent Brewing Company. A drawing of the six-story building shows a substantial complex on the slope of the steep riverbank. The entrance was on the third floor. Below at riverside were large stone cellars where the beer could be kept cool. The Gaffs’ primary brand was "Aurora Lager Beer," said not only to be sold in the American Midwest but also exported, including to Germany. The brewery was under the direction of James Gaff.
With their multiplying products, it was almost natural that the Gaffs would gravitate to shipping. They built and owned a fleet of steamboats, among them Diana, Mary Pell, Eclipse, J.W. Gaff, and Forest Queen. Despite the pro-Confederacy feeling among some in southern Indiana, the Gaffs loaned the Forest Queen, shown right, to the Union where it served for a time as General William Tecumseh Sherman's headquarters at Vicksburg, and later successfully ran the blockade there during the Civil War battle. Below are the Eclipse, left, and Diana, the latter involved in perhaps the longest, closest and most exciting contest of the steamboat era. Challenged by the Baltic steamboat in March 1858 for a race up the Mississippi 1,382 miles, the Diana kept pace but lost narrowly.
Meanwhile the brothers were having personal lives. Thomas, for whom there are no known photographs, at the age of 27 in 1835 in Brooklyn married Sarah Darling Whipple, a widow four years older than he. The couple would have six children, only three of whom would live to adulthood. At the outset of their residence in Aurora, the family lived in cramped quarters above a Gaff mercantile store, a household that also included Thomas’ mother, Margaret.
With his growing wealth from distilling, brewing and the fleet of steamboats, Thomas Gaff saw an opportunity to provide his family with a twelve room, three story home on a wooded slope on the outskirts of town, affording a view of Aurora below and a broad sweep of the Ohio River Valley beyond. Completed in 1855, Thomas called his mansion “Hillforest.” Shown here, it is an outstanding example of Italian Renaissance architecture.
The ten acres of ground on which the house sits were equally impressive. Influenced by Italian landscaping, the hillside behind the house had formal gardens, a lake, gazebo, terraced gardens, and baths. The ravines of the landscape influenced the use of a rusticated footbridge and a grotto built of local stone to form a barrel vault. On the hill above were vegetable gardens, vineyards, orchards, and pasture land.
Meanwhile brother James Gaff at 28 had married Rachel Susannah Cornwell, an Indiana native who was 18 when they wed. They would have six children, three boys and three girls. He anticipated his brother by building a large home in Aurora before the construction of Hillforest. It was located at Fourth and Main Streets in Aurora. James called his abode “Linden Terrace” named for linden trees he had imported from Germany. Although the home later was razed, a photo suggests that it too was done in Italian Renaissance style.
Sometime in the late 1860s, James moved his family to Cincinnati where he engaged in a partnership with Charles and Julius Fleischmann who had emigrated from Germany to the United States to make yeast. Impressed with the brothers, James helped bankroll their efforts in a business called Gaff, Fleischmann and Company, Manufacturers of Compressed Yeast. The investment seemed like a failure until, as a gamble, a pastry shop and restaurant were set up at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition with the yeast used in the baking there. The product revolutionized the industry and made James and the Fleischmanns multi-millionaires.
Because distilling was in James’ blood, he convinced the brothers to make liquor — yeast being a component — and again invested with them. About 1872 the trio founded two distilleries in nearby Riverside, Ohio. Fleischmann distilleries gained a national market by being the first American operation to produce good gin. Rivaling imported Dutch and English gins and less expensive, Fleischmann’s gin proved very popular, amassing more profits for the partners. James Gaff also had a quarter share in the Boone County Distillery, located at the hamlet of Petersburg, Kentucky, a short 25 miles from Cincinnati.
Meanwhile back in Aurora, Thomas was busy investing Gaff family funds in a diverse set of enterprises including the Treasure Hill Silver Mine in Nevada, a strike that between 1867 and 1880 yielded silver valued at the current equivalent of $500 million. Through Thomas the family also was engaged in farming operations, raising cotton and selling horses, owning a plantation in Louisiana, and dealing in land in three states. They owned a foundry and machine works and financed turnpike and canal construction. Thomas was one of the original stockholders of the Ohio and Mississippi Road, a line that subsequently became the B & O.
Perhaps the Gaffs’ most historic business venture resulted from a grain mill that they built in Columbus, Indiana, some 65 miles west of Aurora about 1867. They needed it to grind corn being used in their brewing process. The mill created corn grits in the form of uncooked flakes. Eventually the prospect dawned on the Gaffs of selling the product directly to the public. Cerealine, as it was called, has been cited as the first dry breakfast food in America, predating Kellogg by several years.
Besides their many enterprises, the Gaff brothers were heavily involved in Aurora civic affairs, backing the town's first utility company, the Aurora Gas and Coke Company, and founding in 1856 the First National Bank of Aurora with Thomas as president. Moreover, the Gaff distillery was issuing its own currency, a bill that included two comely women and one of its steamboats. Thomas also helped to organize Aurora's school system, served on the City Council with his brother James (John was mayor), and, with his brothers, bought Aurora a fire engine and town clock.
An 1880 history of Indiana's eminent and self-made men captured Thomas Gaff's wide range of interests, both business and philanthropic, noting: “His executive ability is remarkable. No transaction within the range of his complicated affairs escapes his observation. He is generous, and ready to relieve the deserving poor. Few men have been more liberal in the contributions to religious and charitable objects."
Although Thomas was among the incorporators of the Riverview Cemetery in Aurora, the Gaff brothers and families are buried in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, their monument shown here. The first brother to go was James who died in January 1879 at the age of 62. He was followed in death only a month later by John, 59 years old, who apparently never married. Thomas, the eldest, lived to be 76, passing in April 1884.
After Thomas’ death, the Gaff business empire was directed by Thomas T. Gaff, a son of James, who continued add to the family fortune primarily in distilling and the Gaff heavy machinery business in Cincinnati. Appointed by William Howard Taft as a commissioner for the construction of the Panama Canal, this second generation Gaff later moved to Washington, D.C. Thomas Gaff’s Hillforest mansion home remained in the family until it was sold in 1926. Today it is maintained by Aurora townsfolk as a museum and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Note: This post is drawn from a variety of sources, a primary one being an unsigned Park Service document nominating Hillforest for the National Register. The paper contains a great deal of information about the Gaff family and an extensive bibliography.
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