Hiron Corbin: Cincinnati “King” of the Whiskey Mini

 

Hiron Corbin clearly had something to prove.  Given an unusual first name by his parents, born in a small village and educated in a one room school house, Corbin washed put of the Union Army after five months and was burned out in the Great Chicago Fire of 1870.  Working hard at making his mark, Corbin found that the key to recognition was moving to Cincinnati and giving away whiskey in small ceramic jugs.

The son of John and Mary Etta Corbin, Hiron was born in November 1843 and received his early education in Armada, Michigan, a farming town of 800 residents about 40 miles north of Detroit.  During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Armada had a stagecoach stop, an opera house, a theater, seven grocery stores, three hotels, three hardware stores, a lumberyard, a grain mill, two implement dealers, a bakery, five doctors, several blacksmiths shops, and a drug store. It also held the school house where Corbin got his basic education.  When he was old enough the boy was put to work on the fields, captured in the 1860 federal census as a 17-year old “farm laborer.”

Corbin also achieved some musical education that resulted with the nineteen-year-old enlisting for three years as a bugler when the Civil War broke out.  Inducted in Armada in August, 1862, he under went basic training in Detroit with the Fifth Michigan Cavalry, Company E, only to be honorably discharged the following December.  Such early separations were common in the opening days of the conflict as many soldiers contracted diseases deemed by army doctors to be permanently disabling.  Many years later Corbin would apply for and receive a pension.

After his discharge Corbin’s whereabouts become hazy.  He is known to have moved to Chicago where, according to city directories, he was employed as a clerk.   A brief synopsis of his life indicates without specifics that at the time of the Great Chicago Fire of October 1870, “he lost heavily.”  Following the disaster, Corbin moved into the Ogden House, a mansion become a rooming house. Shown here, the building had been saved from the conflagration by citizens draping it with sheets reputedly soaked in water and cider. 

During this period, Corbin was twice married.  His first wife was Elnora Woodbeck, to whom he was wed only a short time before her untimely death, perhaps in child birth. She was only 21.  Four years later Corbin remarried  Catharine Ophelia Hicks, 22,  of Chicago.  They had no children, but adopted a daughter named Veda.  The Corbin marriage would endure for 46 years until Hiron’s death.

Corbin’s immediate post-fire years are lost in the mists of history. The next glimpse of him is in 1895 when he would have been 51 years old, living in Cincinnati and “come lately” to its booming liquor industry, at the time deemed the largest in the Nation.  As a newcomer to an already overcrowded field of self-described distillers, wholesale and retail liquor dealers, pharmacies with proprietary brands, and saloons bottling their own liquor, Corbin faced the daunting dilemma of finding a way to distinguish his whiskey from this wall of competition.  He chose the path of merchandising his whiskey by giving away samples, thousands of them, in small ceramic jugs, each holding a swallow or two of his alcoholic wares.

Corbin was not the first liquor dealer to employ this method of advertising.  Giving away “mini jugs” to advertise was a fairly standard practice in the trade and at the time perfectly legal in most states and locales (although not today).  The former farm boy from Michigan took generosity to a new level, however, issuing a wide variety of small pottery containers containing his liquor.  His flagship brand was Hoffman House, named for a New York City hotel that advertised itself as a “favorite family hotel” but was widely known for its lavish display of nude paintings and statues. (See my post of October 4, 2023).  Corbin issued at least one saloon sign in the undress genre, shown left.

Shown here are a variety of mini jugs Corbin issued under the Hoffman House brand name, a label he did not register with the Federal Patent and Trademark Office until 1906.  These minis came in two versions, blended whiskey and rye.

In addition to Hoffman House whiskey, Corbin featured almost a dozen other brands, including “Buckeye Rye,” "Frank Gibson's Old Rye", "H F C & Co.", "H. F. Corbin's Old Windsor,” "King Rex,” "Lenox Club,” "Old Windsor Club,” "Palisade Club,”  “Robin Hood,” “Old Howard,” and “Herrmann.” 

The proprietor issued mini jugs for many of those labels.  Corbin trademarked only H.F. C. & Co. and Robin Hood, even then waiting until 1906 after Congress had strengthened protections.

Middle aged when he entered the crowded liquor field in Cincinnati, Corbin continued to guide the fortunes of his liquor house for two decades until 1912 when he turn over management to others and retired with Catherine Ophelia to a home in Port Huron, Michigan, forty miles from his home town, Armada.  Their Port Huron house, still standing, is shown here.

As Corbin reached 70 years his heath began to falter.  In May 1914, he was diagnosed with a inoperable malignant growth in his throat.  Lingering for seven months Hiron Corbin died in mid-December 1924.  After a funeral at his home, he was buried in the nearby Richmond Cemetery.  His widow would join him there two years later.  Note that Corbin’s grave, shown below,  is flanked by an American flag, noting his service (albeit brief) in the Civil War.

Hiron Corbin’s mini jugs, seemingly existing by the hundreds and frequently on auction sites, provide a continuing reminder of this Michigan farm boy with an unusual first name who achieved a modicum of success and fame in the whiskey trade by “thinking small.”

Note:  This post was assembled over many years as additional Corbin mini-jugs came to the surface and it became evident that he was far and away the most prolific distributor of these miniature advertising items, not only in Cincinnati but in the Nation.