During the 19th Century America teemed with farmer-distillers, agriculturalists who used surplus grains to make a little whiskey on the side, almost always relying on urban liquor dealers to sell it. A notable exception was Francis W. Thorla from a rural corner of southeastern Ohio. Thorla had an inventive, imaginative side that led him to sell his products himself with illustrations like the one that opens this vignette.
The Thorla family had a long and distinguished American heritage. As shown here, the family founder, George Thorla, arrived a century before the American Revolution. His grandson, John Thomas, born in New England in 1748, served as a soldier in the War for Independence. His son, Richard, Frank’s father, was reckoned a pioneer when he left New Hampshire and settled on a plot of land on the Ohio River near present day Marietta, Ohio. A born adventurer, he subsequently pushed further west, going down the Ohio and up the Mississippi in a pirogue as far as the Kaskaskia River in 1818. Forced back to Ohio by a bout of malaria, Richard bought a quarter section of land (160 acres) on Dye’s Fork, a stream that runs through Brookfield Township, Noble County. In time a settlement known as Renrock grew up there. It is shown below.
There F. W. “Frank” Thorla was born in May 1832, one of five children from Richard and Camilla, herself noted as an Ohio pioneer originally from New Hampshire. Young Frank likely received the standard education of the time in a one room school house, the standard text being the McGuffey Reader, being produced downstream in Cincinnati. While apparently showing a lively imagination as a youth, Thorla initially never strayed from the family farm. He is recorded there in the 1860 federal census at age working as a farm hand for his widowed mother.
In 1858 at age 26 he married Sarah A. Stevens of Noble County, who was 21 and likely the sister of the wife of his older brother who had inherited the Thorla homeplace. Frank subsequently moved with Sarah to a farm two and one-half miles from Renrock where they raised a family of six children: Silas, born in 1850; Ellsworth, 1862; Florence, 1867; Linda, 1869; George, 1872; and Milo, 1872.The 1880 census found the Thorlas all living on the farm with two field hands boarding with them.
Although distilling does not show up in the biographies of his forebearers, Thorla, possibly spurred on by the need to provide for his growing family, tried his hand at making whiskey. Not only did he demonstrate a remarkable talent for making good liquor, he had a genius for marketing it. Shown here is his whimsical letterhead in which he clearly has taken on merchandising his rye whiskey as well as making it. While many farmer-distillers of his time were content to sell their products to wholesalers dealers to blend, bottle, label and sell, Thorla was taking his cues from Pennsylvania distillers like Overholt and Large who were growing rich while marketing their own whiskey. Like them too, Thorla was using rye grain as the basis of his liquor rather than the corn popular with distillers in western Ohio.
Thorla also may have been selling by mail order. Shown here is a clip from a company envelope that contains another imaginative drawing, this time of the distilling process, depicting the “worm,” a pot still and buckets. My surmise is that Thorla was heavily engaged with his distillery during his lifetime with his farm principally the means to grow rye for the mash.
This farmer-distiller also used his imagination to join the legions of Ohio residents (think of the Wright Brothers) who were inventing things right and left. For Thorla, appropriately it was an instrument for tossing hay, patented on January 18, 1870. Shown here, he called it “An Improvement in Horse Hay-Forks.” He described the invention this way: “My invention has for its object to furnish an improved horse hay-fork, simple in construction, easily operated, and effective in operation, being so constructed as to be readily-thrust into the hay, and which will hold the load securely until it is discharged.” No evidence exists that Thorla’s invention was ever put into industrial production.
Thorla died in May 1905 at the age of 73, his burial monument shown above.
His whiskey legacy lived after him. Shown here is the label from a bottle of rye named “Old Thorla.” It was issued by a Zanesville, Ohio, merchant named J. Adam Sauer, who called himself “Successor to F.W. Thorla.” The 50 mile distance between Noble County and Zanesville indicates that the farmer-distiller’s customer base ranged far beyond Renrock. Note the Thorla slogan: “Good as the best and better than the rest.”
Another “successor to F. W. Thorla" was his son Silas. This eldest son went on to be a well-known figure in southwestern Ohio, highly regarded as a businessman (maple sugar), photographer, author and raconteur. It was he who chronicled the story of the Thorla family and the community known as Renrock. Silas also is said himself to have done some distilling, obviously a skill learned from his father.
Note: This vignette has been drawn from a number of sources, triggered by seeing a copy of F.W. Thorla’s interesting letterhead. Much of the story of the Thorla family comes from History of Noble County, Ohio, Published by L.H. Watkins & Co. of Chicago, 1887.
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