Dan Breen and the Wild Side of Life in Texas

    

Born in a small Ohio town into a family of modest resources, Daniel “Dan” Breen, shown here, figuratively “followed the telegraph lines” west to San Antonio, Texas, where he prospered as a saloonkeeper in particularly violent times.

Breen’s 1866 birthplace was Ada, Ohio, a quiet community about 70 miles south of Toledo, a hamlet whose claim to fame is having the shortest name in Ohio.  Dan’s parents were Daniel Breen and Johanna Buckley.   Their 1864 marriage license was unusual since it was applied for by Johanna’s father, Jeremiah, and initially his name was inked in as the groom.   The couple would go on to produce eleven children of whom Daniel Jr. was the second.  The 1880 census listed his father as a railroad worker and “crippled.”

One asset Ada boasted was the presence of a post-elementary educational institution called the Northwestern Ohio Normal School, now Ohio Northern University.   Likely by working his way Breen was able to attend and graduate in 1884 at the age of 18, licensed as a telegraph operator.  That was someone who used a telegraph key to send and receive Morse code in order to communicate via land lines, a 19th Century "high-tech" occupation.  Young men like Breen left farms and small towns  to take high-paying jobs “reading the wire.” In those early days the demand was such that operators could move from place to place and job to job for ever-higher salaries.

Breen followed the telegraph lines out of Ada and away from his immediate family to travel west.  Shown left is a photo of a typical Old West operator, his hat and clothing advertising his professional status.  Dan’s intermediate stops are unrecorded but by 1893 when he was 25, he had located in San Antonio, Texas.  Not long after his arrival Dan married Mabel Donovan, a woman of Irish heritage who had been born in Illinois.  Their only child, a son, would be born the following year. 

At some point Breen exited telegraphy.  In the 1899 San Antonio city directory, he was listed as working in a company called the San Antonio Brokerage Office, in which C.C. Breen, likely a relative, was a partner. It may have been through that occupation that Dan met William R. “Billy” Simms.  

Considered a “desperado” by some, Simms, shown here, was co-owner of the Vaudeville Theater in San Antonio in 1884 when notorious Western gunman Ben Thompson and a companion were shot down at that burlesque house, gambling hall, and saloon.  [See my post on Thompson, September 27, 1917.]  Simms was charged with aiding and abetting the murder.  Considered a friend by Thompson, Billy was accused of having lured him to the scene.  When the accused gunmen were tried in 1887, however, charges were dropped against Simms.  

Perhaps as a way of restoring a more legitimate persona, the native-born Texan subsequently sold the Vaudeville Theatre and with partners opened a new drinking establishment.  Called “The Crystal Saloon,” it boasted impressive crystal glass chandeliers and an elaborate interior, by far the fanciest watering hole in San Antonio and one of finest in Texas.  By the time Breen arrived in town, according to one author, Simms had become: “…One of the leading figures in San Antonio and was a member of the most influential social organizations.  Politicians and businessmen courted his favor and he was consulted on major city projects.” 

Billy Simms must have seen potential in Dan Breen.  When the Texan branched out with a combination saloon and gambling hall named the “Crystal Turf Exchange” he brought the Ada, Ohio, product into the operation as a partner and the manager.  Located on San Antonio’s main plaza, The Turf Exchange may have been a cut or two below Simms’ saloon.  Called a “bookie joint” by some, the business advertised:  “If you want to make a bet on the races, they will accommodate you.”   

More telling was the inclusion of the Turf Exchange in the notorious San Antonio “Blue Book,” a guide to a good time for visitors including information on the location and quality of its brothels.  The author of the Blue Book told readers on the prowl:  “If about town during the afternoon, drop into the Turf Exchange…you can here get some very desired information.”  Simms and his partners in the Turf Exchange were reported to become “very wealthy men.”

Earlier in his career Breen had lived in an apartment with his wife, Mabel, and his son.  His growing wealth now allowed him to buy a spacious home at 518 West Craig Place.  Still standing, the photo here shows how the house looks today.  Breen also used his newly acquired riches to leave the Crystal Turf Exchange and open his own saloon on  Houston Street, below, a major thoroughfare.

  

As seen here from a postcard, Breen’s saloon was itself an upscale place, boasting tile floors, overhead fans in the days before air conditioning, and an ornate bar.  Among the liquors available at Breen’s was “Four Roses” brand, a whiskey originated in Atlanta by Rufus Rose and developed into a national brand by Paul Jones in Paducah, Kentucky, after the Civil War.  As package goods it was available in quart bottles and pint and half-pint flasks.

 

For whiskey over the bar, Dan provided tokens to frequent customers worth, as he put it,  “XII 1/2.”   Customers would know that the reference was to a “bit,” a unit of common currency derived from the early Southwest tradition of cutting a Spanish milled dollar into eight pie-shaped pieces or bits, each worth 12 and 1/2 cents.  “Two bits” made a quarter as that coin sometimes is called today.

Breen’s very simple business card advertised “wine, liquors, and cigars.” The flip side of the card held a verse with a stanza that would prove prophetic:

“Cutoff in the prime of a useful life,”

The headlines glibly say, —

Or “snatched by the grim reaper”

He has crossed the great highway,

They bury him deep, while a few friends weep,

And the world moves on with a sigh.

San Antonio had not yet seen the end of the reckless violence of its past and it would erupt in Dan Breen’s saloon on the night of August 18, 1910.  The shooter was Dennis B. Chapin, a wealthy businessman and public official from Hidalgo County, located about 230 miles south of San Antonio near the Mexican border.  

Chapin, shown here, had been the kingpin of developers who laid out a new community at a crossroads that eventually became the county seat.  Because of his leadership, residents named the town “Chapin” in his honor.  For several years he served as a Hidalgo County judge and recently had been nominated without opposition to the Texas legislature.

Chapin’s target that night at Breen’s was Oscar J. Roundtree, shown here, an Arizona Ranger from 1903 to 1906 and a Texas Ranger from 1906 until 1910.   Roundtree's service with the Rangers was unblemished and he bore a good reputation.  After resigning as a lawman the previous January, he had been living in San Antonio for about four months.

An altercation began after Chapin and a friend entered Breen’s about 9:30 p.m. and encountered Roundtree.  After Chapin invited the former Ranger over for a drink, the two had a heated argument over what the newspapers called “old troubles.”   Drawing his eight-shot 45-caliber Colt, Chapin fired at Roundtree five times.  One bullet hole was found in the ceiling of Breen’s saloon, two in the walls, one in a rear screen door, and one squarely in the center of Rountree’s forehead that tore through his brain and exited back of his right ear.

Roundtree died at the San Antonio hospital the following morning.  Later examination found that he had a pistol in his back pocket but had not had an opportunity to draw it. Unmarried, he was buried in the Sonora Texas Cemetery.  Chapin was arrested immediately  and spent six days in jail until a judge granted his release on $15,000 bond.  

During his trial the following December, Chapin claimed that Roundtree was working as bodyguard and pistoleer for a hostile former business partner.  According to press reports Chapin told the jury:  “Roundtree was hired to murder me.  I know what I am talking about, because I have copies of a cypher translated, which he sent to his employer while spying on my actions.”   Perhaps awed by Chapin's position and wealth, the jury believed him and after deliberating only 20 minutes voted to acquit.  Breen’s reaction to the violence committed in his saloon has gone unrecorded.

Chapin, however, did not go unpunished.  His political career was at an end and his reputation in Hidalgo County plummeted.  The populace there regretted naming their town for him and officially changed it to “Edinburg” to honor John Young, a prominent local businessman who had been born in Edinburgh, Scotland. Today Edinburg has a population approaching 90,000.

The Ohio native appears to have operated his saloon until about 1917 when it disappeared from San Antonio directories.  It might have been the result of the tightening noose of prohibition in Texas or an effect of declining health.  Breen died on April 15, 1918 at the age of 51, apparently the result of stroke.  He was interred in the Mission Burial Park of San Antonio. Unusually, neither his wife or any Breen relative is recorded buried with him. 

The road from sleepy Ada, Ohio, to gun-toting San Antonio was a long one for Dan Breen.  He had escaped a humdrum life working in his tiny home town to running his own saloon in a wide open  — and too often violent —booming Texas city.   For an adventurous youth of America’s mid-19th Century, the choice had been clear.

Paul Jones Yearned for “The Old South”

                                

It should come as no surprise that Paul Jones (Jr.) one of America’s most famous whiskey men,  should be buried in a large mausoleum, pictured above, fashioned after a Southern pre-Civil War mansion in Louisville’s historic Cave Hill Cemetery.  A former Confederate soldier, Jones and the liquor business he founded constantly looked backward with deep nostalgia for “The Old South” of memory.

Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1840, into a affluent family, Jones, depicted here in middle age, knew the easy and bucolic life of Southern living as he was growing up, when plantation owners and their families were buffered from back-breaking toil and many tasks of everyday life by the existence of slavery.  Below is an illustration taken from an advertising booklet issued by the liquor firm he founded.  The caption reads “—When Paul Jones was young.”  It shows an elderly black man, certainly a slave, making his way up a road past slave shacks.  The picture creates a tranquil, nostalgic, antebellum mood.

The image is unrealistic. Tranquility would be a thing of the past for Paul Jones at age 21 with the outbreak of the Civil War.  His older brother, Warner, had helped form a Confederate company of infantry from Western Tennessee and was elected a captain in what became the 33rd Tennessee Regiment.  Paul Jones joined a Virginia regiment and received the rank of lieutenant. When General Sherman threatened Atlanta,  both Jones brothers’ units were ordered by General Lee to defend the Georgia city.  In the ensuing battle Warner was killed.

After the Southern surrender,  Paul Jones, according to one account,  “returned home to find his home in ruins and the family destitute.  His family’s wealth which before the war had been considerable had been invested in Confederate bonds and was gone.”  Paul Jr., joined by his father, subsequently relocated to Atlanta.  There the histories differ.  Some say the Joneses began producing whiskey and cigars; others that Paul Jr. went to work as a salesman for Rufus Rose, a Georgia distiller.  (See my post on Rose, September 30, 2011.)

This divergence is part of an ongoing and unresolved controversy about how the famous “Four Roses” brand got its name.  Seagram’s, the current owner of the label, has perpetuated myths by spinning a tale of Deep South romance:   “It began when Paul Jones, Jr., the founder of Four Roses Bourbon, became smitten by the beauty of a Southern belle. It is said that he sent a proposal to her, and she replied that if her answer were ‘Yes,’ she would wear a corsage of roses on her gown to the upcoming grand ball.  Paul Jones waited for her answer excitedly on that night of the grand ball…when she arrived in her beautiful gown, she wore a corsage of four red roses. He later named his Bourbon ‘Four Roses’ as a symbol of his devout passion for the lovely belle….”

This is pure romantic nonsense.  Paul Jones remained a bachelor for all of his days.  What can be documented is that Jones was successful in the liquor trade in Georgia and that when its state legislature passed a law banning alcohol sales, he relocated about 1884 to Louisville, Kentucky.  He quickly was able to obtain a prime location on Louisville’s “Whiskey Row” on Main Street where he began “rectifying” whiskey and selling at wholesale.  With the “Whiskey Trust” controlling the price of whiskey stocks, Jones soon looked for a distillery of his own.  The opportunity came when the J. G. Mattingly distillery ran into financial difficulties. This facility had been built by the Mattingly family in Louisville in 1874, located between High and Rudd Avenues and 39th and 40th Streets, and run successfully by them until 1889.  In September of that year they ceased operation and the distillery went up for auction.  Jones bought it for $125,000 — equivalent to about $3 million today.

For his money, according to insurance records, Jones obtained a mill and fermenting house, a boiler house, a distillery spirits building and a cattle barn.  The property also held five warehouses, all of them brick with slate or metal roofs.  With an assured supply of whiskey the Paul Jones Company was on its way to becoming one of America’s largest distilling organizations.  It used the brand names, “Paul Jones,” ”Four Roses,” "Jones Four Star,” "Old Cabinet,” "Old Cabinet Rye,” "Small Grain,” "West End,” and “Swastika,”  In those pre-Nazi days the swastika was an Native American good luck sign.   

Jones advertised from coast to coast including a giant lighted sign in New York’s Madison Square.  The Paul Jones brand quickly found a national audience, packaged in glass bottles from quarts down to mini size.  He often merchandised with “Old South” themes, including  images he put on saloon signs and bar trays.  Conjuring up a number of stereotypes about African-Americans, one showed a black mammy with a slice of watermelon and a black man with a bottle of Paul Jones whiskey.  In the center is a boy torn between the two treats.  It is entitled “The Temptation of St. Anthony,”  a reference to a Medieval saint who was tempted by demons in the desert.  Another rural image used in merchandising Paul Jones whiskey was of a grinning farmer pouring himself a glass. Used on saloon signs, it also graced shot glasses and back-of-the-bar bottles.

Throughout this period Jones was expanding his operations, taking over an adjacent building in which paper labels for bottles were stocked and stored. Curiously,  Sanborn insurance maps show no areas set aside for offices in either structure.  It has been suggested that Jones, living a presumably Spartan bachelor life, conducted all his business in the hotel room in which he resided for years.  It was at the Galt House, just down the street from the Paul Jones Company.

As his business thrived, Jones made investments in Louisville, becoming a director and vice president of the American National Bank and president of the Louisville Fair and Driving Association.  Throughout the early 1900s Jones suffered from a kidney ailment known as “Bright’s Disease” and died of its complications in 1905.  He left money in his will for the building of the Southern mansion mausoleum shown at the top of this post.

After Paul’s death, Warner Jones’ son with other family members carried on the company.  During National Prohibition in 1922 they bought the Frankfort Distillery, one of the few outfits that had been granted the right to sell “medicinal” whiskey during the dry period.  That purchase kept their brands alive and when Repeal came the family added a third Louisville based distillery to supply them with spirits.  The Joneses continuing fixation with the Old South was evident in a brochure they issued in 1934 that talks lovingly about “…The plunk of the banjo and the melancholy throatiness of some Afric chant drifting from a whitewashed log-cabin across damasked tobacco-patch….”  Accompanying illustrations carried the same theme of black slaves happy to be serving white men.

In 1943, the family sold its liquor interests to Seagrams, a Canadian company that maintained the nostalgic (and sometimes racist) images that had characterized Paul Jones advertising for generations.  An 1940's ad shows a happy black waiter and his fractured English.  The Paul Jones brand eventually disappeared from liquor store shelves, although Four Roses has survived.  Meanwhile, the original Paul Jones lies alone in his massive mausoleum, possibly dreaming still of his Old South.

Addendum:  In 2020 I was contacted by Atty. Saunders "Sandy" Jones about an oil portrait of Paul Jones that had come down through the Jones family to his 96-year-old father.  He graciously has sent me a photo of the picture which I am delighted to added to this post -- and thank him very much for the opportunity.  It appears to me that it may be the basis for the pen sketch of Paul Jones that opens this vignette.  Readers can decide for themselves.

  

Rufus Put the Rose in "Four Roses"

When the definitive history of American distilling is written,  Rufus Mathewson Rose -- whose company gave rise to the familiar “Four Roses” brand whiskey -- will deserve considerable attention. Not the least of his accomplishments were his early use of aggressive advertising and the range of stoneware jugs in which he marketed his products.

Rufus Rose, shown here in maturity, was born in 1836, a Connecticut Yankee with a Puritan pedigree. While studying medicine in New York, he traveled in 1853 to Hawkinsville, Georgia, to help out temporarily in his uncle’s drugstore. He liked the place and the work. In 1858 he moved to Dixie for good and in 1860 opened his own drugstore in Hawkinsville. That same year he married a local girl, Susan Wilcox of Wilcox County.

Sympathetic to the Southern cause in the Civil War, Rose closed his business early in the conflict and despite his medical background enlisted as a foot soldier. In late 1861 he was reassigned by the Confederacy to be a pharmacist and sent to work in Virginia. There his health failed and he was honorably discharged in 1862.

He then relocated to Macon, Ga., where he opened a laboratory to produce medicines for the Southern cause. Rose’s health eventually was restored, the enterprise proved successful, and he was honored by being named a captain in the Georgia reserves by the Governor. In 1864 his first wife, Susan, died. The next year he married again, to Katherine Fleming of Pulaski County, Ga. They eventually had two children, Randolph and Laura.

After the Civil War, Rose relocated to Atlanta where about 1867 he organized a whiskey producing enterprise he called “House of Rose.” His knowledge of the chemistry of distilling and business acumen were rewarded with rapid success. He built a large distillery on Stillhouse Road in nearby Vinings and established a retail store for selling whiskey in the downtown Atlanta.

According to one contemporary account, this transplanted Yankee became “very successful, winning a prominent place among Atlanta’s enterprising citizens.”  By 1870 as “R.M. Rose Co. Distillers,” Rufus was advertising his products heavily in the Atlanta and other Southern newspapers, touting such blended rye and corn liquor products as “Rose’s Atlanta Spirit Rye,” “Rose’s Mountain Dew, “ “Blue Ridge Whiskey,” “New Sweet Mash,” “Old Reserve Stock” and “Special Old Corn.”

Rose loved being a distiller and had little time for the anti-liquor folks who proclaimed whiskey “the demon’s drink.” He advertised his whiskeys as “...the purest, safest drink you could buy” and claimed that “when used in moderation, its effect on the human system is wholesome and beneficial....”

Rose was a prime customer of many Georgia potters of his time. Howell’s Mills, a pottery center close to Vinings, produced a wide variety of articles for the distillery, large jugs for providing whiskey wholesale to taverns and saloons and smaller containers for direct sales to the public. These stoneware jugs described a broad range of appearance, from beehive shapes and “scratch” jugs to shoulder jugs with overglaze labels. Some had the traditional brown top and beige body, others were covered entirely with brown Albany slip or white Bristol glaze. 

Sometime after 1900  Rose moved to fancier jugs with an underglaze transfer that says “Rose Distiller” and the drawing of a single large rose. Variations on this jug are those most frequently depicted in books and magazines but all Rose ceramics currently are collected, particularly on a regional basis.

Despite whiskey distilling being a major Southern industry, states below the Mason-Dixon line were prominent among those experimenting with prohibition laws. When Atlanta briefly went “dry” in 1885 Rose moved his offices from his beloved city for two years until it legalized liquor again. During this period Rose also opened an operation in Jacksonville, Florida.

His confidence in being able to continue operations seems expressed in his building a mansion in 1901 for $9,000 on Peachtree Street, then the neighborhood of Atlanta’s elite. Following the fashion of the time, the architecture of the home is Queen Anne-style but it was placed on a narrow lot that gave it a townhouse look. Nonetheless, the Rose mansion was included in the 1903 “Art Works of Atlanta.” The house still stands today and recently was up for sale.

After only a few years in his fancy new home, Rose must have been devastated when the State Legislature voted all of Georgia dry in 1907. He shut down the distillery in Vinings and the Atlanta retail outlet. Then R.M. Rose Distillers moved lock, stock and barrels to Chattanooga, Tennessee.  A shot glass from that period marks the move.

Rufus, however, was devoted to Atlanta and refused to go. Resigning as president, he turned over the business to son Randolph and devoted his time to his thriving Atlanta real estate interests. Rufus died at his home on Peachtree Street in 1910 at the age of 74.

His funeral, held at his home, was a major event. An Atlanta newspaper reported: “The funeral was one of the largest in point of attendance ever held in Atlanta for a private citizen, the entire first floor of the large resident and the front lawn proving altogether inadequate to accommodate the hosts of friends who gathered to pay the last sad tributes to one who has played an important part in the upbuilding of Atlanta, even though he at all times refused absolutely to permit his name to be used for any public office.” His grave was marked with a sign of his service in the Confederate Army.

A late achievement may also have been Rose’s most lasting. About 1906, according to accounts, he came up with the special blend that he called “Four Roses.” But it was only after Rose Distillery was transplanted to Chattanooga that the name became a synonym for American whiskey throughout the U.S. and eventually the world. By 1914 Four Roses was a national best-selling bourbon.

Almost from the beginning the origin of the Four Roses name has been in dispute. One ad claimed Rufus named the whiskey after his four daughters; but he had only one. Family members believe the four Roses were Rufus himself, son Randolph, brother Origen, and Origen’s son. Another story ties the name to Rose at one time having run four retail establishments. But other records fail to document that number of retail outlets.

Whatever the origins of its most famous brand, the Rose Distillery, relocated in Chattanooga, had little time left. In 1910 Tennessee enacted statewide liquor prohibition. Possibly in frustration, Randolph Rose sold the Four Roses brand name to a whiskey entrepreneur named Paul Jones. Jones moved to Frankfort in still “wet” Kentucky, founded his own distillery, and there built a strong national reputation for the Four Roses name. Eventually the Four Roses brand was purchased by the Seagram Company of Canada which continued to market the bourbon but mainly for export.

Meanwhile, Rufus Rose probably lies happy in the grave knowing that his family name became synonymous with good American whiskey and has been perpetuated around the world.