Grocers as Whiskey Men

               

Foreword: Today only sixteen states allow grocery stores to sell distilled spirits, popularly known as “hard liquor.”  In the rest of the Nation such sales are strictly illegal. But it was not always the case.  Before National Prohibition (1920-1934), it was common for grocery stores to sell whiskey and other forms of liquor.  Booze usually was a major profit center for such establishments.  Some grocers even had their own “house” brands of whiskey, mixing them up and bottling them in a back room.   Following are vignettes of three pre-Prohibition grocers for whom alcohol was a major commodity.  

The Peebles Family fashioned a Cincinnati business that

not only advertised itself as the “largest distributor of pure food products in the Ohio Valley”  but also boasted of being “largest handlers of pure, ripe, old, mellow whiskies in the United States.”  True claims or not, the Joseph R. Peebles Sons Company epitomized how liquor sales meant profits and success for a pre-Prohibition grocery store.

Shown here, the founding father, Joseph R. Peebles, proved  to have a genius for the mercantile trade. He had an eye for “fancy” groceries, buying pricey English and French goods, fine foreign wines, and stocking an array of whiskeys and other liquors.  After his early death his son, Joseph S. Peebles, proved equally astute. As the business continued to grow, a need was felt for larger quarters and the company relocated to the ground floor of Cincinnati’s prestigious Pike’s Opera House.

The space created by this move allowed Peebles to market his own brands of whiskey, likely bought from Kentucky distillers by the barrel, blended, decanted into bottles and sold.  House brands included “Peebles Sweet Hickory” and “Peebles Old Cabinet.”  The liquor department is illustrated above.  The company also claimed to be authorized bottlers for “Mellwood" and “Normandy” whiskeys.  Those were premium brands from the Louisville-based Mellwood Distilling Company, owned by George Swearingen. [See my post on this organization, October 8, 2015.]  An illustration of Peebles’ wholesale operation prominently featured Mellwood Bourbon. 

Business was carried on under the Peebles name until 1931 when the economic pressures of the Great Depression are said to have forced its closing.  Said one observer:  “The ‘fancy groceries’ that Peebles was noted for became luxuries that few could afford….”  Just as important, I would contend, was the advent of National Prohibition that earlier cut off Peebles’ highly profitable trade in alcohol.  Whiskey and wine had been the company’s life blood; termination after 91 years in business may have been inevitable after alcohol sales were banned in 1920.

Seated in the photo above, I believe, is Adolph Moll, the old gentleman with a cap, surrounded by the elegant St. Louis grocery store he had established years earlier and worked hard to make successful.  Note the displays of potatoes, onions and other produce in the foreground and then the bottles of whiskey and wine that seem to climb every pillar in the store.  Moll knew that although bushels of veggies made money, liquor made him a lot more.

Following the Civil War, Moll in addition to his grocery opened a warehouse on North Seventh Street in St. Louis.   The facility gave him space for mixing his own batches of whiskey, using raw product gathered from a variety of Missouri and Kentucky distilleries.  Much of it was sold at wholesale in large ceramic jugs bearing his label. 

For his retail trade, Moll featured two proprietary whiskeys, “Old Bob Pepper,” and “Delmar Club Rye.”  He advertised Old Bob Pepper as aged four years and sold it for $2.00 a gallon.   For his Delmar Club label, Moll issued a shot glass that would have been given to saloons and restaurants carrying the brand.  Moll never bothered to trademark either whiskey. 

Known as the “Grocery King” of St. Louis,  Moll was hailed as an immigrant arriving with few resources who succeeded through intelligence and hard work.  “All who knew him say he earned every cent of his comfortable fortune and built up his business on business lines and not by speculation,” opined the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in Moll’s 1898 obituary.  The newspaper failed to mention that the much of that “comfortable fortune” could be attributed to alcohol.

In his 1905 book, “A History of the New California:  Its Resources and Its People,” author Leigh Hadley Irvine devoted two and one half pages to Thomas B. Hall, a highly successful Sacramento grocer and liquor dealer, whose civic accomplishments included forming a state military unit and serving as its commander, helping to write the Sacramento City Charter, and playing a key role in settling large tracts of California acreage to land-hungry farmers.

After clerking in a Sacramento grocery for seven years,  Hall with a partner co-founded a store known as Hall, Luhrs & Company.  As shown here on a trade card, the firm specialized in ham and rye — not rye bread, but rye whiskey.  In 1882 Hall and his partner bought out an existing dealership and made liquor a major element in their business.   They used the brand names, “Derby Brand,”  “Double Stamp,” Old Log Cabin,” and “Pride of the West.”  Their flagship was “Snow Flake Whiskey,” advertised as Kentucky bourbon with the claim:  “Unrivaled for purity, mellowness and bouquet.”  

Bottle collectors know Hall, Luhrs & Co. as a prolific distributor of whiskey, with at least five embossed round quart bottles, several mini-cylinders and at least one pumpkinseed flask.  As many wholesale liquor dealers did, Hall, Luhrs also issued advertising shot glasses as giveaway items to saloons and other establishments carrying their brands of liquor.

Hall, Luhrs first location was at the corner of Third and K Streets in Sacramento, but by 1883 increased business volume required larger quarters.  As a result the following year the company moved into a spacious building on Second Street, shown here.  It was specifically erected for the partners and occupied under a longterm lease.  The Sacramento Daily Union described the facilities in glowing terms under the headline “A Splendid New Structure for the Firm of Hall, Luhrs & Co.”   

The prosperity of the company allowed Hall to embark on a series of community  betterment activities for which he became widely known in Sacramento and throughout California.  With the coming of National Prohibition, Hall, Luhrs Co. was forced to shut down its liquor sales.  Snowflake Whiskey as a brand disappeared and was not revived after Repeal.  The grocery company survived until 1928.  

Note:  These three grocers/whiskey men have been profiled in longer posts on this blog:  Joseph Peebles, August 6, 2019;  Adolph Moll, September 11, 2016; and Thomas Hall, May 1, 2015.