Henry Corbin & the Westerville Whiskey War

 

                 

Early on the morning of July 3, 1875, two explosions rocked Westerville, Ohio. They must have awakened everyone in town, including Henry Harrison Corbin. In that fiercely prohibitionist town he had open the saloon shown above.  Corbin understood the noise. The Westerville Whiskey War had begun in earnest.

Henry was born in May 1834 into a Virginia farming family, the son of William and Barbara Corbin.  His father appears to have been a renter, moving to new land with some frequency.  The 1850 census found the Corbins living in Licking County in Central Ohio.  Sixteen-year old Henry was working as a farm laborer. 

By the 1860 census the Corbins had moved again to a farm in nearby Delaware County.  The 1860 census found Henry still living at home, farming, but he was recorded with assets equivalent to $36,000 today.  He also had married in June 1858, an Ohio-born woman named Phloxena “Polly” Walker.  Henry was 24; Polly was 18. She is shown here in middle age.

The arrival of children in the Corbin household may have prompted Henry to decide to abandon the plow, move into nearby Westerville, and open a hardware store.  It was a good choice.  By the 1870s, Westerville was developing into a modern community. Streetcars ran along the major streets, and a railroad connected Westerville to Columbus,15 miles to the south. As population grew, residents needed hardware.  Corbin’s store was a success and allowed him to purchase real estate around town.

In 1875, Corbin decided to open a saloon in a building he rented at the corner of Knox and West Main Street, shown above.  He did so in full knowledge that it would prove controversial. As early as the late 1850s, Westerville residents had earned a reputation for opposing the sale and consumption of alcohol.  Otterbein College (now “University”), affiliated with the conservative Church of the Brethren, dominated the local culture. Town voters passed a law that banned the sale of "fermented spirits," becoming one of the first communities in Ohio to do so. 

Recognizing that the local ordinance, in fact, could not be enforced, Corbin opened his saloon in June, 1975.   A retrospective news article recalled the scene:  “Westerville residents awoke one morning to find a “LAGER BEER” sign flaunting in their faces….Business during the day was good, but that same night certain unappreciative members of the populace entered the place and emptied the contents of Corbin’s casks and bottles on the floor.”   Undaunted the owner replenished his whiskey and beer and continued in business.

A few days later, on July 1, 1875, at 9 A.M. a crowd estimated at some 1,000 met to protest the saloon. They then marched to 36 West Main and demanded that Corbin close his doors.  He refused.  Many residents wanted him to stay, he contended.  Expecting trouble, Corbin had armed himself with two pistols. The protesters on that occasion limited activities to speeches, prayers and hymns.  The orisons did not move the proprietor.  

The protesters, facing defeat, met again that night in the Presbyterian church where they raised $5,000, equivalent to almost $120,000 today.  The money was to be used as incentive to persuade Corbin to quit.  But hotter heads were not to be denied.  The next night, the saloon was pelted with stones for half an hour, breaking windows.  Nonetheless, Corbin reopened the next day.

Enboldened, the perpetrators struck again the following night, this time using dynamite in the blast heard all around town.  Corbin’s saloon was bombed, tearing down two walls and blowing off the roof.  Only one room remained intact.

A newspaper photo captured the damage.  The crowd that gathered at the wreckage the next morning noticed that the “GER” had been blown out of Corbin’s large “LAGER” sign, leaving only the “LA.”  Newspapers nationwide dubbed the conflict the “Westerville Whiskey War.”

Despite this setback, Corbin repaired his drinking establishment and tried to stay in business, but ultimately gave up.  Reasons differ for his capitulation.  Some say it was discouragement at being forced into costly court battles; others contend it was a second explosion at his Main Street saloon.  He and his family were reported to have moved at least temporarily to Columbus.

Corbin was a hard man to discourage.  Some said “a slow learner.” Four years after his Main Street saloon had been blown up, he was back in Westerville, having bought and renovated the Clymer Hotel, a small hostelry on North State Street, shown here.  Expecting that a hotel setting would discourage an explosive response, he opened a saloon in the basement. 

In early September, a mysterious theft of two 26 pound kegs of gunpowder from a Westerville hardware store occurred.  On September 15, 1879, at 2 a.m, another explosion shook the town “with earthquake violence,” said a local newspaper: “The noise was heard seven or eight miles away; some accounts said it was heard in Columbus.”  The explosion threw Henry Corbin out of bed and knocked out two of his teeth.  The hotel-saloon, as shown here was made uninhabitable, an adjacent house sustained damage and nearby stores had windows blown out.  Hopes gone, the Corbins moved permanently to Columbus.

The Town Council offered a reward of $300 for information leading the arrest of those responsible, paltry beside the $5,000 raised to run Corbin out of town.  In 1923 an anonymous article appeared in a United Brethren publication in which an individual confessed to the bombing.  He claimed he did it to protect a friend studying for the ministry who like to drink there, presumably to keep him on the straight path to “taking the cloth.”

In any war, there are losers and winners.  The clear winner was Westerville, now nationally known as “Dry Capital of the World.” Describing its residents as "socially clean and morally upright," the Anti-Saloon League in 1909 moved its headquarters there from wicked Washington, D.C.  Westerville became the publishing center for the Leagues’ anti-alcohol pamphlets, books and posters, including one entitled “Death, Defects, Dwarfings in the Young of Alcoholized Guinea Pigs.”  Women were key employees in the printing processes.

After abandoning Westerville, Corbin apparently lived the rest of his life in Columbus with wife Polly and his family. In neither the 1900 nor 1910 Federal census does he appear to have had an occupation.  Henry died in October 1910 at the relatively young age of 52, after a two-year siege of heart disease. He was buried in Mount Calvary Cemetery, Columbus.  His and Polly’s grave monument is shown here.

Until recently, Westerville remained “dry” well after the repeal of National Prohibition and into the 21st Century.  Today the town celebrates its heyday by sponsoring an Anti-Saloon League Museum.  Moreover, a large sculpture in front of City Hall appears to show a liquor barrel that has been blown to pieces, suggesting techniques similar to those that destroyed Corbin’s saloons during the Westerville Whiskey War.

Note: This vignette was drawn from a rich trove of material abut the Westerville Whiskey War. Two principal sources were an undated story from the Westerville Monitor headlined “Townspeople Dynamite Saloon and Drive Wets Out of Westerville for Good,” and an October 8,1987, article from “The Public Opinion” publication of the Westerville Library written by Harold Hancock of Otterbein College. Renovated as shown below, Henry Corbin’s first (bombed) saloon building still stands in Westerville.  In recent times plans have been announced to use it as a drinking establishment.

 

 

Abe Trattner and his Pennsylvania “Wet” Hotel

During the early decades of the last century the sale of liquor was being attacked  by prohibitionists in many ways and on many fronts — nationally, statewide, and in hamlets as small as Delta, Pennsylvania.  Located in York County, 30 miles southeast of York City, Delta and its Auditorium Hotel had attracted the attention of the Anti-Saloon League — regrettably for Abe Trattner, liquor dealer, realtor, and co-owner of the hotel.

Tiny Delta was a site for hotels primarily because it was a railroad crossing. The Peach Bottom Railway entered the hamlet in 1876 and ran its line to Red Lion and York City. From the South, the Maryland Central Railroad reached Delta in 1883 and began operating trains in 1884 from there to Bel Air, Maryland, and Baltimore  Catering to travelers and licensed by the county, the Auditorium Hotel, shown here, featured a bar and restaurant where whiskey and other alcohol were readily available.

In the Spring of 1914, prohibitionists staged a large rally in Delta and submitted  a petition of 345 names, mostly from women, demanding that the Auditorium and another hotel be denied liquor licenses.  Three hundred protesters, likely abetted by the Anti-Saloon League, chartered a special train and filed into a York City courtroom to make their point:  “They brought overwhelming proof that both proprietors had violated the law,”  according to “The American Issue,” an organ of the League.  Things looked bleak for Trattner and his partners.

In a sense, Abe had been heading for a conflict with “dry” forces for some years.  Born in 1868 in Galicia, Austria, he was the eldest child of Isaac and Bella (Durst) Trattner.   With four younger siblings his parents brought him, about age 15, to the United States, settling in York, Pennsylvania.  There Isaac ran a grocery store.  Although Abe’s early employment is lost in the mist of history, he likely began his career working for his father.  The 1900 Federal census lists his occupation as “traveling salesman.”

Apparently tiring of life on the road, by 1905 Trattner had established an office at 38-40 East Market Street in York where he dealt in real estate and insurance, as well as providing small loans, as indicated by an ad in a local business directory.  York teemed with real estate offices and Abe may have found it difficult to crack the market,  By 1909 he was listing himself as a general merchandise “broker.”

The following year in March, his mother Bella died.  Several months later Abe, a bachelor of 42, in York married a woman seventeen years his junior  She was Esther Bauer, an immigrant from Hungary.  Apparently their marriage was childless.  His nuptials may have persuaded Trattner to seek a more profitable occupation.  By 1911 he was advertising as a “Wholesale Dealer in Beer, Wine and Liquors,” located at 144 South George Street.  The real estate business now was “in the rear.”  Abe and Esther lived above the store.

Instead of the crowded real estate field, Trattner had emerged as one of only two liquor wholesale houses in York.  He was buying whiskey by the barrel from Pennsylvania distilleries and decanting it into gallon and larger ceramic jugs with his label and selling them to local saloons and restaurants.  There the liquor  would be poured into smaller containers to be sold to customers, either by the drink or in glass flasks.

As shown here on his billhead, Trattner had been designated by the Anheuser-Busch brewery of St. Louis as its local agent, signing him up as a member of its network of dealers across America.   Having purchased the appropriate machinery,  Abe was able to bottle Budweiser and other beverages on site. A Trattner labeled bottle is shown here along with a detail of its embossed label.

Continuing to expand his enterprises, Abe looked to Delta and the Ambassador Hotel that recently had come up for sale.  The family already had a hostelry in York, appropriately named “Trattner Hotel.”  It was run by Abe’s younger brother, Harry.   Partnering with Theodore Helb, characterized by prohibitionists as “the big millionaire brewery boss of York,” Trattner invested heavily in the hotel, sharing a mortgage of $10,250  — equivalent today to about $205,000.

Now Trattner found the Ambassador’s liquor license under heavy attack.  According to the opposition, Abe was overheard talking to his attorney about how much the hotel would be worth if the court refused the license.  His response was quoted as a curt, “Not a damn.”  This response seemingly defined the stakes as the crowded courtroom was hammered to order in York City in February 1915.  Local judges Wenner and Ross presided.

After several days of testimony, the judges rendered their decision, noting:  “If this were a mere question of majorities, we would, of course, be obliged to refuse this license, but the law does not permit the case to be decided on that ground alone.”  On the other side was the need to accommodate travelers by rail who regularly stopped overnight in Delta.  The only other hotel in town was dry, the court noted, and evidence existed that “…a large majority of the strangers and travelers stopping there prefer a licensed hotel, where liquors can be procured, to the temperance house.”  With that justification, the judges awarded the Ambassador Hotel an extension of its liquor license.

The Anti-Saloon League, having targeted the situation in Delta, was outraged.  Its American Issue publication trashed the Ambassador Hotel as “an old frame shell” without any substantial value if it was denied alcohol sales and suggested that financial interests and political influence had leveraged the decision.  Trattner was fingered as exerting “a mighty political influence in the county.”

Whatever lay behind the decision, its effect was short-lived.  Although the Anti-Saloon League had been bested in Delta, five years later it triumphed when National Prohibition was enacted.  The Ambassador Hotel went dry. Trattner was forced to shut down his liquor house.  After initially concentrating again on real estate, by 1931 Abe was listed in business directories owning and operating a storage company.

Trattner lived long enough to see Repeal but did not revive his liquor business, dying in 1939.  Following a Jewish funeral service, he was buried in in the South Hills Hebrew Cemetery in York, the grave shown here.  Abe’s confrontation over the Ambassador Hotel with the Anti-Saloon League was only a small blip on the prohibition screen but it reveals the lengths to which the Drys would go, even in tiny Delta, Pennsylvania.