Against a backdrop of anti-Semitic violence in Russia, some fifty Jewish men, women and children, taking advantage of the opening of previously Indian lands, arrived in the United States beginning in the 1900s to homestead the area around Lead, South Dakota. Among them was a young adventurer named Jacob Kozberg, shown here, who rejected farming in favor of striking gold, only to find it — not in the ground — but by selling whiskey.
The Jewish refugees included members from the same Russian shtetl (village), many related. They were headed by a strong but erratic leader named Harry Sinykins, who had suffered brutal beatings during the pogroms. After gold strikes in South Dakota, the U.S. government had broken Indian treaties to open up reserved lands for sale to white settlers. After a brief sojourn in Iowa, the Russian Jews, mostly farm families, responded by moving there.
Jacob Kozberg, then in his early 20s, was part of the migration. I believe the photo above shows him as he prospected for gold, looking like a true Western man, with horse and saddle, wide brimmed hat, cowboy boots, and smoking a cigar. When the search for gold proved unsatisfactory, Kozberg migrated to Lead, shown below as it looked in 1912. This city by reason of large gold strikes in the vicinity had grown from 1,400 in 1880 to more than 8,200 by the time the young man arrived.
The failed prospector quickly befriended a local Irish saloonkeeper and liquor dealer named Chris Crosby, the proprietor of a successful Lead retail establishment called the “Family Liquor Store. “ Crosby advertised his business in a 1914 ad as “Refitted and Restocked with the Finest Lines of Wines, Liquors and Cigars.” As partners, Crosby and Kozberg opened a combination saloon and liquor store they called “The Lobby Liquor House.” Below is a photo of the Lobby’s interior with Kozberg standing behind the bar.
The partners packaged their Lobby Liquor House whiskey in gallon jugs for their wholesale trade. Those containers would have been decanted into smaller ones by customers in Lead’s many saloons and restaurants. Shown below, the jugs came in white and brown glazes with elaborate labels advertising Crosby & Kozberg as “Wholesale and Retail Dealers in Assorted Liquors and Cigars,” located at 7 North Mill St. in Lead. The jugs are prized by collectors today as examples of Redwing antique pottery.
Despite his busy life tending to the Lobby Liquor House, Kozberg found time to find a bride. She was Ruth Sinykin, eight years younger than he. Shown here, Ruth was the daughter of Harry Sinykin who by then was living in St. Paul, Minnesota. In a ceremony held in Lead and officiated by two rabbis, the couple enjoyed a “pretty wedding” as reported by the Lead Daily Call: “The hall where the wedding took place was beautifully decorated in pink and white, while rainbow colored gowns of the attendants completed the picture.” Three hundreds guests were served dinner indicating the affluence that quickly had accrued to the recent refugees.
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The bride’s brother A. T. “Ted” Sinykin was Kozberg’s best man and soon to be partner in operating the Lobby Liquor House, above. Shown here, Sinykin, in a 1917 sales agreement with Crosby, applied for a transfer of the alcohol license for the saloon and liquor establishment to himself. As part of his application Sinykin presented a bond from the American Surety Company of $2,000 (equivalent to $51,000 today). The bond was accepted by the County Commission and the transfer granted. The name on the Lobby’s jugs became Sinykin.
Perhaps sensing the immanence of statewide prohibition in South Dakota, Kozberg appears to have become a “silent partner” to his brother-in-law, turning over management to Sinykin while he looked to nearby Minnesota, a state that continued to be reliably “wet.” There Kozberg came to own and operate a business he called the St. Paul Liquor House, located at 200 East 7th Street in the Minnesota city.
Shown above are two artifacts from that establishment. The first is a two-inch high shot glass that advertises Kozberg’s enterprise as carrying a “complete line of wines and liquors.” A book of matches from the company recommends two two brands, likely proprietary to the liquor house: “Golden Age Whiskey,” advertised as “Smooth and Mellow Rich,” and “Kentucky Star Whiskey,” one we are admonished to “Try It - Be Convinced.”
Kozberg had only a few years to sell liquor in St. Paul before the 1920 imposition of National Prohibition. His liquor house disappeared from city directories only to be replaced by a business called The LaSalle Wholesale Drug Company that Kozberg and another relative of his wife, J. L. Sinykin, established in St. Paul. Sinykin was manager; Kozberg, secretary. The principal objective of this enterprise was an elaborate illegal plot to circumvent Prohibition.
The scheme worked this way: Kozberg and Sinykin, operating as druggists were allowed to purchase large quantities of denatured alcohol. This product is ethanol alcohol with additives to make the alcohol poisonous, bad-tasting, foul-smelling, or nauseating and as a result to discourage recreational consumption. The partners then provided the unpalatable liquid to co-conspirators at the Minneapolis Bluing Company, an outfit that had the capacity to re-distill the alcohol to drinkable form. The LaSalle outfit then marketed the alcohol, sharing the profits with two blueing company executives.
For a time those profits were enormous, estimated at $75,000 a month, the dollar equivalent today of $1,113,000, more than $13 million a year. In time federal officials enforcing prohibitionary laws caught up with Kozberg and Sinykin. They were arrested, tried and convicted. In addition to paying hefty fines, the two men, by family lore, did some prison time.
Upon his release, Kozberg returned to St. Paul where he resumed his role as a local businessman. The 1930 federal census found him living there with wife, Ruth, and two young daughters, Pauline 13 and Betty 6. The family was attended by a young Irish maid. The census recorded Kozberg as the proprietor of a St. Paul cosmetics factory.
Apparently the consequences of his efforts to subvert Prohibition having been a life-changing experience, Kozberg gave up his rowdy ways and settled into the role of a St. Paul businessman, owning and operating the Ideal Leather Manufacturing Company and becoming active in the local Masonic Lodge and Shrine. When he died at age 74 in October, 1962, at St. Luke’s Hospital in St. Paul, Kozberg was remembered in the press as a “prominent local businessman.” Prohibition long since had been repealed and his troubles with the law apparently forgotten. His funeral services were held at St. Paul’s Temple of Aaron and burial at the graveyard of that Jewish synagogue. On his gravestone Jacob Kozberg is remembered as "beloved husband and father."
One Kosberg legacy has continued to stir controversy. His riches allowed him to be a principal investor in the formation of a 6,000 acre ranch in South Dakota owned and operated by members of the Sinykin family. This huge spread had once been Indian country, part of a reservation snatched from Native Americans by white settlers with government approval.
Rebecca Clarren, a Portland-based journalist and descendant of the Sinykins, has sought out the descendants of the Lakota families displaced by the duplicitous federal policies that provided her ancestors with homesteads and ranches. Clarren’s finding have been published in her 2023 book, “The Cost of Free Land.” It documents how one persecuted and displaced group aided and abetted in the displacing of another.
Notes: This post has been gathered from a variety of sources, including Sinykin family photos. The narrative about these Jewish immigrants in which Jacob Kozberg is featured as a central figure may need amendment. I hope some descendant will see this post, provide material as necessary and correct any errors.
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