The Baker Boys and Swastika Whiskey

   

Sometime in the latter third of the 1800s, three sons of a veteran steamboat captain on the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers, determined to make distilling their career.  George Baker, William Jackson Baker and Richard Alexander (R.A.) Baker went on to found Baker Bros. Distillery in Franklin County, Kentucky, not far from Frankfort.  Then they chose a name for their whiskey that later would become a hated symbol of oppression and death:  the swastika.

The swastika -- until the Nazis appropriated it -- for ages had been considered a harbinger of good luck. An ancient symbol, the swastika dates back 3,000 years to India. It also is an Native American icon, with origins in prehistory.  Given its positive image, it is no wonder that in the early 20th Century organizations found it an appropriate symbol. Coca Cola used it as the shape for a watch fob and the Boy Scouts of America displayed it on the spine of their 1903 “Handy Book.” It also was the symbol for a Ladies Home Journal-sponsored girls' club.

Who among the brothers selected the swastika to represent the Baker flagship brand is unclear.   It may have been George, the first son, born in Marietta, Ohio, in 1850.  William, born in Carroll County, Missouri, arrived eight years later and Richard, the youngest, not until 1865.  Although Chester Zoeller in his book on Kentucky whiskey speculates that the Baker Brothers & Co. Distillery may have been founded as early as 1869, that date makes no sense as the boys would have been too young.  Moreover, when he retired from steamboats to farming in Missouri, their father was wealthy and able to send his sons to college, delaying their entry into commerce.

My guess is that, if built in 1869, the facility was under other ownership and only later purchased by the Bakers, possibly as late as the 1880s.  The distillery was located four miles east of Frankfort on the Georgetown Pike, one mile west of the junction of North and South Elkhorn Creek on the Frankfort and Cincinnati Railroad Line.  Although details are sketchy, the original Baker Bros. distillery likely was run by George and William.  Richard did not arrive in Frankfort until 1887 when he went to work for John D. Hinde, a wealthy Kentuckian and horse breeder, who owned and operated a 600 acre model farm near Frankfort.

Hinde and his son Thomas apparently helped the Baker boys with cash to rebuild and expand their distillery and as compensation Thomas Hinde was named president of the company.  Subsequently the Hindes moved permanently to Chicago, apparently leaving the Bakers to run the operation.  Richard became vice president and George the secretary-treasurer.  William’s role at this time is unclear.  For a time he may have been running a small distillery in Pulaski County, Kentucky.  

The Bakers also were having personal lives.  George married Mary Chase Donahue in 1889.  They had one child.  In 1911 at Frankfort Richard married Irma Labrot, daughter of Leopold and Louise Welch Labrot.   Her father was the owner of the Labrot-Graham distillery.  Richard and Irma’s union appears to have produced no children.  No record exists of William marrying.

The name of the distillery changed several times, from Baker Brothers to Swastika Distillery to Kentucky Sour Mash & Rye Distillery (1903-1905) to the name by which it became best known, the Frankfort Distillery Company.  By that time the distillery was capable of mashing 700 bushels a day and had four bonded warehouses, as shown on the 1910 Sanborn insurance map here.  By 1912 the daily mashing capacity had been increased to 1,250 bushels.

The company’s flagship brand continued to be Swastika Whiskey, available in half-pints, pints and quarts.  Over the years the distillery issued a variety of other brand names, among them:  “Baker,” "Baker Bourbon,” "Baker Rye,” “Coronet,” "Elkhorn Mills,” "Gallant Knight,” "Kerry Patch,” "Old Chief,” "Old Woodpecker,” Shandon Bells,” and “Victoria.”  Of these in 1906 the company trademarked only Baker, Elkhorn Mills, Kerry Patch and Shandon Bells. Interestingly, Swastika Whiskey was not among them.

In 1913, George Baker died, age 63.  He was buried in the Frankfort Cemetery.  After his death, William took his place as secretary-treasurer of the distillery, continuing in that post until he died in 1918.  With the death of his father-in-law in 1915, Richard with wife Irma also controlled the Labrot-Graham Distillery, twelve miles from Frankfort in Woodford County.  This facility was a successor to the venerable Old Oscar Pepper Distillery, founded in 1817. [See my posts on these distilleries, January 21 and 24, 2017].

Operating two major Kentucky distilleries brought Richard Baker considerable recognition in the whiskey trade.  He is shown here in the only photograph I could find, one taken from a passport application. When National Prohibition was enacted in 1920, Baker’s distillery was one of only six in the United States authorized to sell spirits through pharmacies for medicinal purposes. 

In 1922 Frankfort Distilleries Inc. was sold to  Paul Jones & Co. The new owners kept the name in order to retain the liquor permit.  [See my post on Paul Jones,  Sept 4, 2014.]  As shown here on a 1923 letterhead the offices were transferred to East Main Street (“Whiskey Row”) in Louisville. Richard Baker died in October 1940 at the age of 75 and was interred in the Frankfort Cemetery adjacent to his two brothers.  His grave is shown here.

Although the Frankfort distillery survived National Prohibition, Swastika brand whiskey did not.  By the time of Repeal, Hitler had begun his rise in Germany with the symbol emblazoned on everything from posters to postage stamps.  After the war when the Holocaust was fully understood, the swastika as a good luck symbol had disappeared forever— and with it, except for bottle collectors, any vestige of Swastika Whiskey.

Notes:  Details of the Bakers’ activities in the Kentucky whiskey trade are fragmentary and difficult to track.  While I have tried to cobble together an accurate narrative, the “holes” are evident.  It is my hope some watchful descendant will see this post and help me fill in details about this whiskey producing family.  In addition to Zoeller’s book, “Bourbon in Kentucky,” a key reference was a biography of Richard Baker in the “History of Kentucky,” by Kerr, Connelly and Coulter, dated 1922.

Rubel and Lilienfeld Went from Dry Goods to Wet

                          

Rubel-Lilienfeld Company was a well-known Chicago liquor wholesaler, with a customer base over many states.  Two of the principals, Theodore Lilienfeld and Simon Rubel, had come to this occupation not only as immigrants, but also after a period of working in dry goods, clothing and acccessories.  The process of their transition makes this story.

We begin with Lilienfeld.  He was born in Germany in 1842 of German Jewish parentage.  At the age of 18, perhaps to avoid service in the Prussian Army where almost 50% of inductees died during basic training,  he came to the U.S. and settled in Michigan.  He apparently was able to avoid military service in the U.S. Civil War, a conflict that began shortly after his arrival.  After 10 years of working in the U.S., apparently in mercantile trades, he married.  His wife, Anna, was also a German immigrant and eight years his junior.

The 1880 census found them living in Saginaw, Michigan, a city on the Saginaw River that was a thriving lumber town in the 1800s and became an important industrial center during much of the 1900s.   The couple by that time had three children, Harry born in 1872,  Meta in 1877, and Ella in 1879.  Theodore’s occupation was listed as “dry goods merchant,” in the census, apparently running his own clothing store.

Meanwhile, Simon Rubel also was establishing himself in the United States.  He too had been born in Germany in 1852, his birthplace recorded as Steinbach Am Donnerberg.   He came to America with an older brother, Isaac, in July, 1869.  They came on the ship “Deutschland,” a vessel constructed as an emigrant passenger vessel.  Just six years later after Rubel’s voyage the ship was wrecked off the coast of England with significant loss of life. Upon arriving in Chicago,  Rubel’s first job was listed in the 1870 census as working in a dry goods store.  The following year a Chicago directory listed him employed by “Rubel Bros., a cigar and tobacco firm run by his relatives, Max and Ferdinand Rubel.  During this period Simon found a wife in Emily Jonas, a native of Detroit who was 12 years his junior.  

Not long after his marriage, during the mid-1800s Simon, seeking greener pastures in the West, took Emily to Utah where two of their daughters were born. He appears to have located in Ogden where he opened a branch of a Chicago liquor dealership called Rubel & Penglase.  By 1889, he and his growing family were back in Chicago.  Subsequently two more children were born, including a son, Stanley.  Another son died at birth.

Then, by some alchemy, Theodore Lilienfeld and Simon Rubel, both formerly engaged in dry goods, discovered that “wet goods” held more promise and collaborated in business. With Isaac joining in as a partner, they formed Rubel-Lilienfeld Company.  My hunch is that the three men were related but have found no evidence of that.  Nonetheless in 1896, the first entry appeared in Chicago directories of their business, listing them as wholesale liquor dealers.   Rubel-Lilienfeld was located in the Market Street district of the Windy City, shown here.  Their address was 96 Market, changing to 14 North Market as the result of street renumbering in 1911.  The company trade card read:  “Jobbers and Importers of Wines and Liquors and Blenders of High Grade Whiskies and Brandies.”

By announcing themselves as “blenders,” the partners openly were admitting that they were producing their own “rectified” brands, that is, mixing and compounding raw whiskeys and bottling them as proprietary brands.  Their two principal labels were “Hatchwood” and “Randolph Club.”  The company registered both brands in 1905, the point in time when the laws had been strengthened by Congress and gave confidence that trademarks would be enforced.

Shown above are a label and a flask of Hatchwood Bourbon, indicating its origin at “Forks of Elkhorn, Kentucky.”  This was a place where the North and South Forks of Elkhorn Creek meet before flowing into the Kentucky River, not far from the eastern edge of Frankfort.  There George Baker ran a distillery and provided the Chicago firm with whiskey they could blend and compound.  Shown here, Baker’s plant was Distillery No. 33 of the 7th District.  Baker was recorded as having made bonded warehouse transactions at the site from 1903 until 1920.  His was the major source of whiskey for Rubel-Lilienfeld and often credited on their labels.

Chicago was a hotbed of wholesale liquor dealers.  The competition among them was keen for markets not only in Illinois but in states to the west.  It appears from records that Simon Rubel, with his experience in the frontier West, frequently was gone on sales trips, often as far as the State of Washington.  For sales in and around Chicago, it was necessary to have items to gift saloonkeepers and bartenders stocking the partners’ liquor.   Shown here are two versions of Hatchwood back of the bar bottles.  They were meant to catch the eye of the customer who might decide to try their whiskeys.  Another favorite giveaway was shot glasses.  Two versions of the Randolph Club glass from Rubel-Lilienfeld are shown here.

Among the more unusual items to be provided to customers, including possibly retail customers, was a calendar plate, shown below, advertising Randolph Club Whiskey.  Although not unknown in the trade, such plates were relatively expensive.  This one features a color lithographic picture of a four leaf clover with the months scattered on its lobes.  Unfortunately I have not been able to read the year.

As time progressed, Rubel-Lilienthal’s business prospered as their brands developed a national customer base.  The 1910 U.S. Census found Simon Rubel living in Ward Six of Chicago.  With him was his wife, Amalia, their two older daughters, Amy and Elsa, and young Stanley.   Simon gave his occupation as “merchant (wine)”  although he was still an officer of the Rubel-Lilienthal Co.  The same census revealed a less happy story for the Lilienfeld family, although Theodore had made the Chicago “Blue Book,” living at 4344 St. Lawrence Avenue.  Two of his and Anna’s children, Harry and Ella, had died at early ages.  The couple was living with another daughter, Meta, and her husband, Sidney Pollack, and their two children.  Pollack had been taken into the business as a vice president and director.

 

Prohibition was closing in on the liquor industry.  In 1916 the Baker Distillery closed even though its warehouses remained open for several years for extractions of aged whiskey.  By 1919, the entire Rubel-Lilienfeld Co. was closed down, its interstate sales curtailed earlier by the passage by Congress of the Webb-Kenyon Act that forbid interstate transit of liquor to dry areas.  Simon Rubel never saw the end of National Prohibition, dying in September 1924 in Chicago.  I have been unable to find the date and place of Lilienfeld’s demise.

What can be said of Simon Rubel and Theodore Lilienfeld?  Immigrants to the United States they both began their careers selling shirts and pants, blouses and skirts, but determined before long that there was much more prosperity in selling whiskey.  Thus wet goods replaced dry for both men — but Prohibition put an end to all prospects for that more profitable trade.