The Highs and Lows of Louisville’s Pattersons

The label on a whiskey bottle that opens this vignette is an important part of a story that involves an immigrant father, William Patterson Sr., and his son, William Patterson Jr., both engaged in the distilling business in Louisville, Kentucky.  Both men experienced success mixed with failure, one with tragic consequences.  Both Pattersons, however, must be reckoned among the “whiskey barons” of that state.

Shown here, Patterson Sr. was born in 1813 in County Tyrone Northern Ireland, likely of Scottish heritage, the son of  William and Mary Louisa Culver Patterson. His family apparently were reasonably affluent, allowing him to attend local elementary and secondary,schools and go on to higher education.  He then entered the Greenwich, England, Royal Navy College with the goal of becoming a naval officer.  After losing his right eye in an accident and having no chance at a military career, he became an apprentice to a London manufacturer.  Tiring of that occupation, at age 25 Patterson Sr. emigrated to America.  He headed to Eastern Kentucky, settling in Louisville.

Patterson Sr. almost immediately began working in the iron and steel industry.  Because of his ability he rapidly rose to ownership and, a biographer commented, “soon amassed a large fortune.”  In 1848 he was helped along the way by his marriage to the daughter of a wealthy local merchant.  She was Mary Culver, likely a distant cousin, a woman who would bear him eight children, four girls and four boys.  Among the latter was William Patterson Jr.

As his family grew, the members watched the Patterson fortunes rise and fall.  With the outbreak of the Civil War, although technically part of the Union, Kentucky was riven with conflict.  The result resulted in ruin for Patterson Sr. He lost his business and post-war was required to go to work for an iron and steel works in an adjoining county.  When that company shut down a year later, the Scots-Irish immigrant, in a startling change of occupation, bought an interest in a Louisville distillery.

It was the Swearingen & Biggs whiskey operation, called Mellwood Distillery. “Beginning on a small scale it became one of the largest and most successful institutions in the state.” Shown above, insurance records indicate a large facility built of brick and equipped with a fire-proof roof.  The property contained seven warehouses, one a “free (no federal regulation) that stood 70 feet southwest of the still and six “bottled in bond” warehouses, all within 300 feet of the still. The Mellwood Distillery could mash 1,200 bushels of grain daily and had the capacity to hold 65,000 barrels of aging whiskey.  Later the warehouses would be expanded slightly to 70,000 barrels. [See post on Swearingen and Mellwood, October 8, 2015.]

Although Patterson Sr. continued his interest in distilling, his entrepreneurial spirit also led him to found the Louisville Mantle & Casket Company.  Not long after, however, bad health caused him to end his business career.  For the next five years he lived as an invalid attended by wife Mary and six children still at home.  On January 29, 1891, Patterson Sr. died.  The cause given was apoplexy, probably a stroke.  His death was expected and his family was gathered at his bedside as he peacefully expired at the age of 78.

The Louisville Courier Journal headline of the news read:  “A Highly Respected Citizen Passes Away.”  The story continued: “During his long residence in this city Mr. Patterson had formed extensive acquaintances. He was a man of conscientious character, and during severest hardships in business, his friends never deserted him.”  Patterson’s funeral took place at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, his pallbearers drawn from the Louisville business community.  He was buried in Cave Hill Cemetery where many of the city’s “Whiskey Barons” are interred.

His father’s interest in the liquor trade was carried on by William Patterson Jr., his eldest son, who was 36 years old when his father died, and already involved in Louisville’s whiskey industry.  Widely known as “Billy,” Patterson Jr. began his career at the age of 16 when he went to work for a distillery, likely Mellwood.

He proved to have ample business acumen.  Before reaching 21 he already had amassed a considerable fortune by buying old malt from local distilleries and selling it at a profit.

Unlike his father, who primarily was an investor, Patterson Jr. was full bore into the whiskey trade.  In 1866, J. G. Mattingly, of a noted distilling family, had built a distillery  on Rudd Lane in Louisville, calling it The Marion County Distilling Co.  In December 1887 the plant and brand were sold to Patterson Jr. and two partners.  By the following year, the distillery was turning out 5,000 barrels of whiskey a year.  Insurance records indicate that the property included four warehouses, all brick with metal or slate roofs.  Three were bonded with one “free” warehouse located 115 feet north of the still.  A cattle shed and a six-story aging facility adjoined the cistern room.

In addition to his own warehouses, Patterson Jr. was making use of other storage opportunities.  Louisville investors in 1884 had built a large warehouse, shown here, on Main Street, a block from the area known as  “Whiskey Row.”  It principally provided public storage for aging whiskey as well as tobacco and other local manufactures.  The company also came to own a similar warehouse in Bremen, Germany, the city shown below, that allowed local distillers to ship their whiskey abroad.  Because of taxes, it was cheaper to age whiskey out of the country and pay import duty.  The cost of transport across the Atlantic was relatively inexpensive and the sloshing inside barrels on the high seas was generally believed to enhance quality.

Patterson Jr. was among the Louisville “whiskey men” to take advantage of the opportunity.   The note that opens this post tells the story.  The bourbon had been distilled by Patterson’s Marion County Distillery in 1894, sent to Bremen by ship in February 1902, returned to the U.S. in 1906, and bottled in July 1911.This 17-year-old, well-traveled bourbon subsequently was put on sale in New York City by liquor dealer C. A. Van Rensselaer, shown here.

Annual production of the Marion County Distillery put Patterson Jr. squarely in the ranks of the whiskey-making elites of Kentucky.  He featured a number of house brands, none of which he copyrighted.  They included “Old Patterson,” “William Patterson Rye,” Marion,” and “Portland.”  He had, however, arrived on the Kentucky whiskey scene as a major player at a difficult time.   There was a growing glut of whiskey on the American market.  According to industry spokesmen, Kentucky distillers by 1895 had 85 million gallons of whiskey in bond, worth $34,000,000 that they feared “cannot be gotten rid of.”

Patterson Jr. was a member of  a small group of leading distillers who met at Louisville’s posh Gall House Hotel in July 1895 to discuss the crisis.  As the board of managers of the Kentucky Distillers Association their purpose was to discuss endorsing a yearlong shut down of the state’s distilleries.  “To further manufacture whiskey means further glutting the market and a ruinous slackening of profitable business.”  Characterized as a “strike” by the Louisville Courier Journal, the board unanimously voted to propose that Kentucky distilleries shut down for a year beginning in July 1896.  The action, it was claimed, would yield between $20 million and $25 milllion additional value to the bonded whiskey stocks currently on hand.

In order for this strategy of “shut-down” to work, however, ninety percent of Kentucky’s distilleries would be obliged to comply.  The advocates expressed the hope that the state’s liquor dealers also would agree with the yearlong “dry” period. Advocates, however, were hard-pressed to declare any advantage for dealers.  Since the objective of the strike was to raise the price of whiskey from the distilleries, the increased cost would be felt in the first instance by the dealers.  A dissenting distillery owner also argued that an increase in the price of whiskey to the consumer would have the effect of leading the drinking public to consume the “cheapest and impurest” whiskey, and encourage dealers to compound and mix their own liquors.  He argued that “the man who drinks will drink whether the drink be fine or bad.”  In the end the one year strike fell far short of enlisting the necessary numbers of cooperating distillers.  The proposal failed and the glut of whiskey continued.

The resulting downturn in the profitability of Patterson Jr.’s Marion County Distillery continued into the 20th Century.  By 1905 he decided to sell out to the Whiskey Trust that was taking advantage of the downturn in the profitability of Kentucky distilleries to buy them up.  Although the Trust’s strategy was to close many of them, it kept the Marion County Distillery open and producing until the advent of National Prohibition.  The property was razed in 1904.

Patterson Jr. pivoted to becoming a whiskey wholesaler, operating from locations in the 200 block of West Main Street, a denizen of “Whiskey Row.”  As National Prohibition loomed ever larger on the horizon, he advertised as a mail order house seeking to serve “dry” cities and towns.  When Congress passed new legislation to outlaw that practice and the Supreme Court upheld it two years later, Patterson Jr.’s days selling whiskey were over.

He became despondent.  At 61 years old, this once recognized millionaire Kentucky “Whiskey Baron” was found dead in the bathroom of his residence.  He had committed suicide by cutting his throat with a razor. It lay on the floor by his side.  That morning he had told his wife he was going to shave himself.  When he had failed to emerge from the bathroom two hours later, his wife, alarmed, went looking for him and discovered his body.  Although medical aid was summoned, Patterson Jr. already was dead.  The Coroner was summoned and ruled the death self-inflicted.

Friends of Patterson Jr. told the press that he had been despondent for some time because of business losses and attributed his suicide to that cause.   After a funeral in Calvary Episcopal Church, he was interred in Cave Hill Cemetery. His grave, shown right. is adjacent to that of Patterson Sr.  Both men had faced the highs and lows of doing business in post-Civil War Kentucky.  For one of them the experience had proved fatal.

Notes:  The major source of information about the Pattersons are articles from the Louisville Courier Journal, the city’s leading newspaper.

 

 

  

Mike Owens and His Revolutionary Bottle Machine

Foreword:  The late 19th Century was a time of many important inventions, among them the light bulb, the automobile, and telephone.   None was more important to the whiskey trade, however, than the automatic bottle machine.  Before its coming all glass containers had to be blown one by one by hand at the potential health peril of the glassblower.   After its advent,  glass containers proliferated in the whiskey industry and costs plummeted. The man responsible for this invention, Mike Owens, is recognized here as a pre-Prohibition genius.

On February 26, 1895, a Toledo, Ohio, glassworks employee named Michael J. “Mike” Owens, shown right, was granted a patent on his machine for blowing glass and 2,000 years of making bottles other ways went crashing into shards.  Early next year  we celebrate the 125th anniversary of that defining moment in glass manufacturing.

Glassblowing as a technique is believed to have been invented by Syrian craftsmen in the first century B.C. somewhere along the Syro-Palestinian coast.  The rise of the Roman Empire served to spread the technology to other areas and blown glass became common for household and other uses.  Over two centuries, techniques for glass blowing were tweaked but did not change significantly.  The worker attached molten glass on the end of a blowpipe and with his breath pumped air into the blob until it reached a desired shape. After the glass had cooled it was broken away from the pipe, rough edges smooth and, voila!, a bottle.

Growing up Mike Owens knew a lot about blowing glass.  Born on January 1, 1859 in West Virginia, he was the son of an Irish immigrant coal miner.  Sent early to work for the family, by the age of fifteen he became a glassblower in a Wheeling WV factory.   Through intelligence and hard work he advanced to master glass worker, leaving his native state to help organize a glass company at Martins Ferry, Ohio.

Owens’ reputation soon reached north to Toledo, Ohio, where rich and well-born Edward Drummond Libby, left, had taken control of a glass factory and in 1888 offered Owens a better paying job.  His talent evident, within three months the Irishman was managing the glassworks department.  Several years later he approached Libby to say that he had idea for an automatic bottle machine and asked for money, time, and assistance to bring it to reality.

Many industrialists might have scoffed and told Owens to get back to work.  Libby, for whom my aunt, Nell Sullivan, was a secretary, was an enlightened entrepreneur. (Around my Toledo home we always referred to him reverentially as MR. Libby.)  He gave full backing to Owens and on February 26, 1905, the inventor was awarded Patent No. 534,840 for a glassblowing machine, the drawing shown here.  In the paperwork accompanying his application, Owens stated:  “My invention relate to an apparatus for blowing glass and has for its object to perform mechanically, what has heretofore been done manually.”

With that announcement, two centuries of making bottles by human breath came to an end, except for artisanal purposes.  By automating the manufacture of glass containers Owens helped eliminate child labor in glassworks — a practice of which he was well aware.   Two diseases were eliminated that plagued the workers, an inflammation of the the lungs and digestive tract and clouding of eye lenses, both resulting from exposure to hot gases.  

On the economic front, the cost of glass bottles was reduced by 80%, leading many canners, brewers and distillers, to move rapidly to machine-made containers.  At the same time, however, it left many glassblowers and their helpers unemployed since the mechanized process needed many fewer workers.

Within three years of the invention, the early Owens machine produced an estimated 105 million bottles.  As he gained experience with the process, this mechanical genius continued to improve on his invention, ultimately producing the “Owens Automatic Bottle Machine.”  It is shown below, one of the rare views of the inventor with his brainchild.  By 1915 this machine increased production numbers to over one and one half BILLION bottles manufactured annually.

Owens was fortunate that Edward Drummond Libby was an individual of integrity. A lesser man might have tried to marginalize the unlettered inventor and “stolen” his invention.  Libby, on the other hand,  encouraged Owens to continue inventing, financed his efforts and advanced his name to the forefront of American industrialists. Note Owens Bottle Machine Co. (now Owens-Illinois), Libbey-Owens Sheet Glass Co. (later Libby-Owens-Ford), and Owens-Corning Fiberglass.

In 1915 the Franklin Institute of Pennsylvania awarded its coveted Elliott Cresson Metal to Owens.  Established by philanthropist Cresson in 1848, the medal was awarded annually  “for discovery or original research adding to the sum of human knowledge, irrespective of commercial value.”  Because of its “novelty and utility” the automatic bottle machine earned Owens the honor.  Seen here front and reverse is the Cresson Medal.

 As additional evidence of the importance of Owens's machine to the industry, within 20 years nearly all bottles manufactured in the United States, like this Libby “glacier glass” example, were produced automatically.  Standardization of bottle sizes and quality led to high-speed filling capabilities in industries that used  glass containers.  As a result, the bottle machine had a huge impact on food, soft drink, pharmaceutical, and alcoholic beverage producers.  Shown below are glass paperweights issued by the Owens Bottle Machine Co., depicting early  glass blowing mechanisms.

In the summer of 1956, I worked as an intern at Owens-Illinois in Toledo, writing items for plant newspapers.  As a result I was allowed on the factory floor to see the contemporary version of the Owens machine in action.  It was an unforgettable experience.  The heat and glare of the molasses-like glass, the long mechanical arms reaching into the inferno and scooping up a blazing orange glob, blowing air into the molten mass, shaping it in a revolving mold, dislodging the glass as it cooled, and reaching back for more — it was an unforgettable experience.

Mike Owens died in Toledo on December 23, 1923, at the age of 64, having revolutionized an industry.  His passing came unexpectedly. He was attending a meeting of Owens Bottle Company directors when he got up, walked a few steps, sat down in a chair, complained of feeling ill, collapsed and died within 20 minutes.  He was buried in Toledo’s Catholic Calvary Cemetery, his gravesite shown here.

In a memorial booklet to Owens, Libby providrd this tribute:  "Self-educated as he was, a student in the process of inventions with an unusual logical ability, endowed with a keen sense of far-sightedness and vision, Mr. Owens is to be classed as one of the greatest inventors this country has ever known.”   Libby commissioned a pressed glass bust, shown below, given to a limited number of Owen’s relatives, associates and friends.

The Love and Death of Maria Rupp, Saloon Keeper

This is the true story of a brutal and senseless murder.  It is also the story of a love that extended beyond the grave.  At the center is a beautiful young immigrant German woman calling herself Maria Rupp who ran a saloon in Sacramento, California. The statue shown here is from her grave. Its hands broken off by vandals, its face disfigured, this damaged angel captures the tragedy of Maria’s murder.

Maria was born Mary Schleider in Hesse, Germany, about 1832.  What little we know of her background was revealed in a deposition given by Eliza Green, hired to work in the saloon, who declared she was Maria’s half-sister. Her sibling she said had emigrated to America in 1855, embarking on a ship from Brussels, Belgium, at the age of about 22.  Perhaps drawn to Sacramento by the news of gold strikes, Maria began running a saloon there in January 1856.  She was accounted a beautiful young woman and talented pianist.  Said to be “a darling of Sacramento’s close-knit German community,” her Sacramento Beer Saloon on K Street, below, was prosperous. 

The historical record does not disclose when Maria changed her name or how an immigrant girl would have the resources to open and run a drinking establishment.  A clue to the latter may be in a statement by Mark Twain who called Sacramento “the City of Saloons.”  In 1866 Twain wrote:  “…I have been in most of the saloons, and there are a good many of them.  You can shut your eyes and march into the first door you come to and call for a drink and the chances are you will get it.”  He implied that a Sacramento “watering hole” could be established for minimal capital.

Quite naturally, Maria attracted considerable attention from the largely male. population of Sacramento but her affections were reserved for another relatively new man in town.  He was Francois Noiset, an immigrant from French-speaking Belgium, a medical doctor about two years older than she.  Although most of the men who frequented her Sacramento Beer Saloon were aware she and Francois were planning to marry, one man — Peter Metz, sometimes given as Welz — refused to accept her intent.

Little is known of Metz’s background, other than he was an immigrant from Germany, that he was in his early 30s, and by occupation he was a cook who may have worked for Maria in the past.  He had developed a mad passion for her that she had rebuffed repeatedly, citing her engagement to Dr. Noiset.  Half crazed by her rejection, on November 18, 1857, Metz told people that Maria had agreed to marry him, fantasizing that he soon would take over her saloon business.   When met with scepticism, he avowed:  “If she did not have him she would not marry anyone else.  She would die first.”  After drinking heavily Metz told his hearers that he would go over to Maria’s “ to see if the business was all right.”

Much of this may have been bravado on Metz’s part.  John Andrew, one of Maria’s bartenders, testified that upon arriving at the saloon, Metz approached him to inquire about a knife he had misplaced there the previous evening.  Having found the blade and stuck it on a shelf, the bartender returned it to Metz who claimed it was his.  After retrieving the knife, the erstwhile suitor joined a group of patrons standing around the piano where Maria was entertaining.  He threw his arm around her as if to give her a kiss, but instead cut her throat.  Dropping the bloody knife, Metz headed for the door unimpeded.

The bartenders and patrons immediately were occupied with the dying Maria. In his deposition, patron Louis Noll attested:  “I was present and saw Peter Metz while Madame Mary was singing and playing upon the piano, put one of his arms around her neck and with the other hand inflict a stab in the right breast or side, with a butcher knife.  I saw him pull the knife out and throw it on the floor…”

Noll then recounted how he had picked her up in his arms from the piano, as she fell back, and placed her on a chair, shortly after carrying her upstairs to a bedroom.

Marie was bloody but conscious enough to say “get a doctor.”  The patron sent for the task initially could not find one but upon going to the Western Hotel, located a physician.  Precious minutes went by until a doctor appeared but found there was nothing he could do.  Fifteen minutes later the lovely and talented Maria Rudd, 25, was dead, the victim of a deranged suitor.

 Meanwhile her killer walked to a friend’s house where he spent the night.  The next morning, telling his host what he had done, Metz was advised to give himself up to the local sheriff whose men were even then scouring Sacramento to find him.  If not, the friend told him, he would raise a “hue and cry” about the fugitive’s whereabouts and an angry crowd would hang him on the spot.  Thus warned, Metz went to the sheriff’s office that morning and surrendered.

The sheriff transferred Metz to the city jail to await trial.  A coroner’s jury composd of five local men was convened and returned a verdict that Maria had met her death from the effects of a wound inflicted by Metz.  A newsman, visiting him in jail reported that the accused: “…stated that he had been acquainted with the deceased some sixteen or eighteen months, that she had promised to marry him, and obtained $500 of his money.  In regard to proceedings subsequently, his remarks were unintelligible.”

After a trial that lasted several weeks, Metz was convicted of murder in the second degree and sentenced to life imprisonment, to be served at San Quentin, California’s maximum security state prison for men.  When he early demonstrated signs of insanity, he was transferred to California’s first mental hospital at Stockton, shown here.  In a matter of days Metz escaped from that facility.  Spotted traveling north through the state, he was captured in Siskiyou County and returned to the Stockton asylum.  He is said to have remarked “very coolly” that all the return travel expenses “would cost him nothing.”

Several days after Maria’s brutal murder, her many friends and admirerers arranged an elaborate funeral for her. Pallbearers wore white scarves and white flowers. Singing was provided by Sacramento’s German Leider Kranz chorus.  Her funeral cortege stretched several blocks as some 23 carriages and buggies accompanied her body.  She was accorded a Requiem Mass at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, by the pastor, Father Cassin.  Not long after the church would be destroyed by fire.

Dozens of mourners gathered at Maria’s gravesite, marked by two monuments, one the statue of the damaged angel that opens this vignette, the other a cross with an elaborate description memorializing her life.  The site is set off by itself, surrounded by a brick wall and marked by a proliferation of flowering plants and bushes, carefully tended.

Among the mourners on that sad November day was Francois Noiset, anguished by the loss of his Maria.  The doctor remained unmarried and died six years later, apparently of tuberculosis.  Francois is said to have given his body to a medical college but his heart was buried next to Maria’s.  His gravestone is below in two views. One shows it adjacent to her memorial.  The other shows two hands clasped, one larger than the other, and bears the inscription: “To you Maria.”  Separated in life by a cruel murder, the couple are united in death.

Notes:  Visitor to Sacramento can take a tour of the historic Sacramento City Cemetery with docents dressed to resemble the individuals involved.  The Rudd-Noiset burial site is a “must” stop where their story is told.  This article is based on long articles published at the time in the Sacramento Daily Union and the book, “Sacramento’s Gold Rush Saloons,” (2014), by the Special Collections staff of the Sacramento Public Library.

Pocket Mirrors & Pre-Pro Whiskey Advertising

If it had not been for the efforts of a New York inventor named John Wesley Hyatt to find a substitute for elephant ivory in billiard balls, the artifacts shown here would not exist.  As the result of his experiments he created a substance we call celluloid — the world’s first industrial plastic.  

Put into mass production in 1872, celluloid rapidly became popular for its ability to be shaped and to carry elaborate colored lithographic images. In particular it was suited as backing for small mirrors that could be stowed away in a pocket.  Because celluloid took color well it proved a good venue for advertising, as the pre-Prohibition whiskey merchants quickly realized.

Walter B. Duffy of Rochester, New York,made the unsupported claim that “malt whiskey” really was medicine and even convinced some Temperance advocates.   Duffy backed up his fiction by concocting a story that his remedy was made from a formula worked out fifty years earlier by “one of the World’s Greatest Chemists.”  The distiller featured a trade mark of a bearded scientist who apparently had discovered this wonder liquid.  The old gent appeared on many Duffy items, including a giveaway hand mirror.  

Among others who recognized the marketing value of these artifacts were J & A Freiberg whose Cincinnati liquor house enjoyed a 62-year life from just after the Civil War until the coming of National Prohibition.  One of their many brands was “Puck Rye,” a mischievous character in Shakespeare’s play, “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”  Puck is represented here  on a pocket mirror by a small boy with a top hat and whiskey bottle.  

Comely women often were depicted on pocket mirrors.  George Alegretti, a grocer, liquor dealer and saloonkeeper in Stockton, California, provided the world with the archetype beauty of the time, replete with bouffant hairdo and bee-sting lips.  Alegretti’s giveaway mirror illustrates in the flowers how well celluloid took delicate colors.

The “Harvest King” mirror presents a photographic image of a woman in advertising its brand of whiskey, said to make “A sick man well and a well man happy.”  This brand originated with the Danciger Brothers of Kansas City who fashioned themselves as the Harvest King Distilling Company.  In fact, they were “rectifiers,” blending whiskeys bought from authentic distilleries.  

Pocket mirrors came in two shapes, both round and ovals, with typical size for the latter at 2 3/4 by 1 3/4 inches. An ad was on the back, a reflective surface on the front.  As shown on this example for “Good Friends” whiskey, often the ovals represented a whiskey barrel with one end devoted to the advertising.  Although Samuel Goodfriend of Wellsburg, West Virginia, meant his to represent comity between Quaker and Native American, they could be passing a bottle.

It is not a coincidence that the pocket mirror for Bald Eagle Whiskey, would advertise the flagship brand of S. F. Petts & Co. The driving force behind the Boston liquor wholesalers, Sanford Petts, was himself a certifiable Yankee Doodle Dandy. Many of his forebears had served General Washington gallantly in the Revolutionary War.  By using the national symbol to sell whiskey Petts was invoking his patriotic heritage.

Originally from Bowling Green, Virginia, Henry Gunst, a Confederate soldier, migrated with his wife and children to Richmond after the war and founded a liquor firm, claiming to be both a distiller and whiskey blender.  Although his partner Straus appears to have exited early, Gunst kept the original name.  The liquor firm advertised widely in regional newspapers and claimed outlets for its whiskey and other liquor in the Mid-Atlantic region and as far south as Florida.  Gunst also carried on a vigorous mail order trade, particularly in states and localities that had enacted anti-liquor laws.

 

John Casper, a well-known distiller in North Carolina, was dislodged from the state by prohibition laws.  He thereupon moved some of his operation to Arkansas, as the “proprietor” of the Uncle Sam Distilling Company in Fort Smith. An ad for this firm indicates he took Casper brands like “Gold Band” and “Golden Rose” whiskey with him.  His pocket mirror is unique for showing a primitive still.

Calvert Whiskey was named after Lord Calvert, the first governor of Maryland.  It was a brand from the Maryland Distilling Company, under the leadership of Albert Gottshalk with his son, Joseph.  Organizing about 1894 and closing only with National Prohibition, the Gottschalks successfully marketed Calvert Whiskey to become a highly popular national brand.

The Orinoco brand of whiskey, advertised by a pocket mirror, was created by an Irish immigrant named Edward Quinn in Alexandria, Virginia. His son, also named Edward, subsequently took the label over the border to Washington, D.C. where he established a saloon and liquor store on Pennsylvania Avenue.  When as a young father he died about 1911, his widow sold the business to another local Irishman named D. J.O’Connell.  O’Connell also got the rights to the Orinoco brand name and made the most of it.

James Maguire was thumbing his nose at the notorious “Whiskey Trust” when he refused to buckle under to the monopoly and issued his Montezuma Rye. Retail customers could buy Montezuma Rye in glass bottles, sized from quarts to flasks, or get their liquor in an attractive canteen sized metal bottle that carried a bronze plaque on each side.  McGuire also featured giveaway items to customers, including pocket mirrors.  Through the excellent color qualities of celluloid, the mirrors provided an effective merchandising tool.

Longer post on many of the “whiskey men” here may be found elsewhere on this website: Duffy, April 12, 2022; Freiberg Bros., February 3, 2014; Danciger, January 26, 2012; Petts, July 4, 2011; Gunst, August 3, 2011, Gottschalk, November 5, 2018; Casper, June 30, 2011; Quinn/O’Connell, June 25, 2013; McGuire, Nov. 18, 2017.