Long before comic book hero Bruce Wayne decided to don the “Caped Crusader” costume to fight crime in Gotham City, a Kentuckian described as being “pulchritudinous in features and magnificent figure” was flying high in Louisville as a crusader for quality liquor. Shown here in winged caricature is Thomas J. Batman, known to some as “Brandy King of the World.”
Born in Louisville. Kentucky, in February 1853, as Thomas Kirwin, the boy was far from any kingdom at his birth. His mother, Mary Ann Batman, died within a year of his birth, only 22 years old. His father, Patrick N. Kirwin, an immigrant from Ireland, married again several years later and sired five more children before he died in June 1865 when Thomas was just 12. Orphaned, the boy then went to live with his maternal uncle, Thomas Batman, who formally adopted him in 1876. In gratitude, Thomas took his uncle’s surname.
According to local directories, Stepfather Batman was a printer. Thomas’s birth father, however, had been employed in a distillery in a city where the whiskey industry was a major economic engine. The young Batman gravitated toward the liquor trade. By the age of 23 he had accumulated enough knowledge of the business and sufficient resources to strike out on his own. With two associates he founded T. J. Batman & Company, Wholesale Whiskeys, located at 37 Fourth Street below Main Street, the latter avenue also known as “Whiskey Row” because of the offices located there of many of America’s leading distillers and liquor wholesalers.
By this time Thomas had married, wedding Elvira Thompkins of Louisville in August 1876. They would go on to have nine children together over the next 20 years of whom eight lived to maturity. A photo of the family shown above discloses the middle age couple, with Elvira still an attractive woman, surrounded by a comely group of their children.
Batman’s initial stab at establishing a liquor business apparently was not a complete success. By the mid-1880s, he had closed the wholesale house and was working as a partner of T. H. Sherley, an established “Whiskey Row” commission merchant at 125 West Main Street. The Sherley company specialized in the purchase and sale of Kentucky whiskeys, as well as conducted a brisk business in apple and peach brandies, as indicated by an 1888 advertisement.
Sherley, formerly an officer in the Union Army, also owned the Crystal Springs Distillery located the corner of First Street and Ormsby Avenue in Louisville.Listed in Federal records as Registered Distillery #3, 5th District, the plant figures in an 1886 photograph uncovered by Michael Veach, whiskey guru of Louisville’s Filson Historical Society. Shown below the photo displays the assembled employees of the distillery. Among other elements, Veach pointed out: 1. The misspelling of “crystal” on the wall. 2. Employees each seeming to hold the tools of their trade, including African-Americans on each side with shovels. 3. The plant mascots were dogs. To that I would add that every man and boy is wearing a different hat, an interesting display of headgear variety.
Veach speculated about the two men standing immediately left of the date on the wall, believing that the man with the full beard is Sherley and to his right with the handlebar mustache is Tom Batman. While the author says he is “not sure,” my analysis is that Veach has made a correct identification. After Sherley retired in 1901, Batman bought out his share of his partner’s holdings. He seems to have sold off the distillery, thereafter concentrating on the brokerage business from his “Whiskey Row” headquarters.
Given the honorific title of “Kentucky colonel” by the state governor apparently for his business prowess, Batman was pictured and extolled in the influential Whiskey & Spirits Bullletin in 1904: “Our friend, Colonel Thomas J. Batman, has always had the apple brandy market of the country in his grasp, so much so, on numerous occasions, he has been dubbed ‘The Brandy King,’ but lately he has been spreading out. He is now posing as one of the heavy whisky brokers of the trade and has been instrumental in engineering some very important whisky deals. The colonel says brokerage business in the whiskey line reaches into every part of the country, and is now larger than his brandy business.” As indicated by the caricature that opens this post, Thomas J.’s visage was a familiar one in whiskey circles.
With his growing prosperity, Batman was able to move his large family into an imposing house at 1143 South First Street, shown here. Still standing in Louisville, the large dwelling is distinctive for its six Ionic columns flanking the front porch. But sorrow was destined to visit the Batman home. After 35 years of marriage, Elvira died in June, 1910 at the age of 56. She was buried in the family plot in St. Louis Cemetery with her grieving spouse and children gathered around. All of them except the youngest, daughter, Kirwin, 14, had reached their majority.
Not quite four years later, in February 1914, Thomas Batman remarried. His bride was Libbie Kirwan, born in Louisville in 1868 and 15 years younger than her husband. From her maiden name we can surmise that Libbie likely was a cousin. The couple were married in a quiet ceremony in St. Francis Roman Catholic Church by Father Thomas White. According to a press account, immediately after their marriage the couple left for a trip to the East Coast.
As his children grew to maturity Batman began to take them into his business. Thomas J. Jr., was the first, prompting his father by 1912 to change the company name to ”T. J. Batman & Son.” Later Batman created a new business involving Junior and A. S. Batman, likely Anna Batman, his eldest daughter. It was called the Frishe Distilling Company, an enterprise on which little information exists.
In time becoming an elder statesman of the Kentucky liquor industry, Batman must have experienced with concern the growing clamor for National Prohibition as state after state and locality after locality went dry under the relentless pressure of the Prohibition lobby. It would appear that he continued to do business from his offices in the downtown Tyler Building until 1920. After that Batman fades from Louisville’s business scene and its city directories.
In retirement Batman lived long enough to see prohibitionary fervor wane and the impending revival of the liquor industry. As he aged, he had suffered multiple heath problems, diagnosed as heart disease and hepatitis. In early 1933 Thomas Batman, while under a doctor’s care, continued to decline and died at home on March 29, 1933, at the age of 80. He was buried at St. Francis Cemetery next to Elvira.
Note: This post was drawn from a wide range of sources, from which two stand out: The Whiskey and Spirits Bulletin that regularly featured Batman in its articles and Michael Veatch’s “Images of the Past,” an online article that featured the photo of the Crystal Springs distillery staff.
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