More Pre-Prohibition Whiskey Women

Foreword:  On June 19, 2017, I posted an article featuring five women who had found success in the liquor trade before the imposition of National Prohibition in 1920.  Subsequently I have found four other stories of women in that era who had important roles in the management and success of organizations dedicated to alcoholic beverages.   All of them came from modest family backgrounds and had limited opportunities for formal schooling but possessed a native intelligence that allowed them to succeed in business.

“Beer and whiskey were involved,” reported San Francisco Daily Alta newspaper about the shooting death of Daniel Hanley, founder of a saloon and local store that specialized in sales of alcohol.  Left with three small children to raise, Mary Sullivan Hanley, shown right, proved to have “the right stuff.”   

In October 1877, during a raucous party at a neighbor’s house, a dispute broke out between Hanley and another Irishman.  Both sides had firearms and shots were exchanged.  Hanley was shot through the right thigh.  The assailant and an accomplice were arrested on a charge of assault to murder.  After lingering for six months Dan, only 37 years old, died of blood poisoning and the charge became manslaughter.

Seemingly without skipping a beat Mary Hanley took over management of the family grocery, liquor sales and the saloon.  A widow who never remarried, her success in business for some two decades allowed her to feed, clothe and educate the three Hanley children.  

When her eldest son John reached seventeen, he was tasked with working in his mother’s enterprises, thereby learning the liquor trade, later opening his own liquor house and issuing a Hanley brand of whiskey.   A younger son, James, was able to go to law school, became a prominent San Francisco lawyer and eventually was appointed the city’s assistant district attorney. 

“George Dickel” is a familiar name to anyone who has ever bought a bottle of whiskey.  As shown above, his brand appears on the labels of a variety of Tennessee whiskeys that are displayed on store shelves from coast to coast. Few people realize that Dickel’s reputation belongs in equal measure to his wife, Augusta Dickel.

Born in Tennessee, Augusta was twenty-two years younger than George when they wed.  They would have no children.  But unlike many September-May marriages,  Dickel had made a wise choice.  Augusta was a canny business woman and skilled at finance.   As the reputation of Dickel’s Cascade whiskey spread well beyond Tennessee,  the company experience explosive growth. 

Then in 1888, the entire picture changed.  Dickel was severely injured in a fall from a horse and invalided. He was forced to withdraw from the management of the liquor house he had founded.  Augusta took over and never missed a beat,  working closely with her brother-in-law, V.E. Shwab.  After suffering for six years with his injuries in 1894, Dickel died at age 76. 

In his will, and likely orally as well, George instructed Augusta to sell the business upon his death at the “first favorable opportunity.”  Her own woman, she paid no heed to that admonition and maintained her interest in the liquor enterprise.  While Shwab took care of the day to day operations, including the Cascade Distillery,  Augusta had the money and time to travel around the U.S. and abroad.  With a flare for advertising she used those opportunities to boost Dickel whiskey to audiences wherever she went. 

In his book on women in whiskey, author Fred Minnick paid her this tribute:  “Although Augusta was only an owner on paper, she could have sold her shares to a competing whiskey company, or interfered with operations.  She may not have changed the whiskey world, but Augusta certainly made an impact by not listening to her husband.”  

In 1958  the liquor giant Schenley rebuilt a distillery at Tullahoma, Tennessee, very near the site of the original Cascade Distillery.  At the entrance is a large bust of George Dickel.  A statue should also be erected there of Augusta, in a major way responsible for her husband’s fame.

Flora Doble Neale, the proverbial “farmer’s daughter,”  a girl with limited education, ultimately became Boston’s “First Lady” of liquor sales.   Born on a farm in Oxford, Maine, in 1846, while still in her teens Flora was wooed and won by Otis S. Neale, a Civil War veteran.  On June 14, 1866,  they were married and took up housekeeping in Boston.  Early in 

the 1880s Neale became the sole proprietor of a major liquor house.  

Meanwhile, Flora was playing the role of dutiful wife and mother.  The couple had a single child, Albert.  In the 1880 census her occupation was given as “housekeeping.”   There is no indication that she was playing any part in her husband’s rapidly expanding commercial activities.  Dubbing himself “Doc” Neale, Otis was selling a “fine old private stock” whiskey under his own name, as well as a line of liquors called “Outing Club” that included whiskeys and cocktails.

Suddenly in 1898 Otis Neale died, only about 52 years old.  Seemingly in an instant Flora Neale was thrust forward into running the Otis S. Neale Company.   As the 1901 billhead that opens this post indicates, she assumed the titles of both president and treasurer of the company, the only woman in Boston with that distinction.  Although aided by a manager, evidence is that Flora was an active participant in the business from 1898 forward.  

The “Blue Book” of Boston, a directory of the rich and powerful took due notice of the widow, Mrs. Otis T. Neale.  She was listed, along with several neighbors, living in one of the area’s luxury apartment houses. Shown here, Richmond Court likely was the first in the Northeast made to resemble an English Tudor manor house.  On the National Register of Historic Places today, it was then a highly fashionable place to live.  Flora, the former farm girl, made herself at home.

With limited educational opportunities, Glenna Stengel Joyce came to maturity as a seamstress, making clothes for wealthy clients in Columbus, Ohio.  After an early failed marriage, her fortunes changed when she met William Henry “Will” Joyce, an Ohio-born entrepreneur seventeen years older than she.  Joyce owned the Milbrook Distilling Company; prosperous liquor dealerships in Columbus and Covington, Kentucky; co-owned a Columbus brewery, and created the Wyandotte Pop Company to make and sell soft

drinks.

Despite Glenna’s lack of formal education, Joyce had made a good decision.  She proved to have a penchant for business.  Her husband consulted her regularly on their liquor and soft drink interests.  When the coming of statewide prohibition in 1916 forced him to shut down his liquor stores and Columbus brewery, Joyce expanded his soft drink holdings and brought Glenna into company management.   When Will Joyce died at the age of 60 in November 1933, Glenna became a major stockholder and First Vice President of Joyce Products, a position she would hold for several decades.

Today the former seamstress is know as one of Ohio’s historic philanthropists.  Before Glenna died in 1960, she established a scholarship program that over the past 57 years through the Joyce Trust have distributed tens of millions of dollars toward the college education of more than 800 students at Ohio State and Notre Dame Universities.  As further testimony to Glenna Joyce’s business acumen, fund assets currently are in excess of $28 million and the number of recipients have been increasing every year.

Note:  Longer vignettes on each of these women can be found elsewhere on this blog:  Mary Sullivan Hanley, May 5, 2018;  Augusta Dickel, July 2, 2014;  Flora Doble Neale, March 12, 2018; and Glenna Stengel Joyce, September 22, 2018.

The Hanleys: Murder and Mayhem in ‘Frisco

“Beer and whiskey were involved,” reported San Francisco’s Daily Alta newspaper about the shooting death of Daniel Hanley, founder of a liquor merchandising tradition carried on by his wife and son.  Nor, as will be seen, would Dan be the last family member to make the newspapers in an altercation in which a Hanley got the worst of it. 

The Hanley family story began in Mitchellstown, County Cork, Ireland, where Dan Hanley was born in 1837.   Unlike most communities in Ireland, Mitchellstown, shown above, was a planned town, located on the site of a medieval village that was torn down by a British lord to build a place of his own design, shown here.  It is likely that in Mitchellstown Hanley met Mary Sullivan, a woman eight years younger, whom he eventually would marry.

It is not clear when the couple emigrated to the United States.  Hanley first surfaced in San Francisco directories in 1863 working as a bartender at the Rotunda Saloon and living at 5 O’Farrell Street.  Before long, the Irish immigrant was listed owning a grocery store and liquor business, including a saloon.

In 1877, the Hanleys were living at 33 Eddy Street, likely above their establishment.  They had three children,  John about 5, James 3, and Molly, under one year.  Also living with them was John Hanley, Dan’s older brother.   According to an account in the San Francisco Bulletin, the Hanleys had fenced in some property to the objection of a neighboring land owner named Dennis Ryan.  The result was ongoing trouble between the two families.

In October 1877, during a raucous party at Ryan’s house, a dispute broke out between the two Irishman.  Both sides had firearms and shots were exchanged.  John Hanley was hit in the hand and Dan was shot through the right thigh.  Ryan and an accomplice were arrested on a charge of assault to murder.  After lingering for six months Dan, only 37 years old, died of blood poisoning and the charge against Ryan became manslaughter.  Asked about what fueled the fight, witnesses told the press:  “Beer and whiskey were involved.”

Left with three small children to raise, Mary Sullivan Hanley, shown right, proved to have “the right stuff.”  Without skipping a beat she took over management of the family grocery, liquor sales and the saloon.  At the outset brother-in-law John was available to help.  By the time her son John was seventeen, he was tasked with working in his mother’s enterprises, thereby learning the liquor trade.  A younger son, James, was able to go to law school, ultimately becoming a prominent San Francisco attorney and eventually its assistant district attorney.  

At some point during the early 1890s, the Hanleys apparently shut down their business and John, shown right,  went to work for a string of other San Francisco wine and liquor dealers.  He was recorded, for example, as secretary of the Golden Gate Champagne Co.  By 1896 he had settled in as the bookkeeper and secretary for the Joseph Melczer Co., located on Front Street.  Melczer was a Hungarian immigrant who had talent for wine and had built a prosperous San Francisco wine and liquor business.

While in this employment, John married.  His bride was Ella Cronin, born in California in 1877, the daughter of John and Ella Cronin.  Inexplicably, their wedding announcement in the San Francisco Call identified John as hailing from Nogales, Arizona, and said the couple would make their home in that state.  No evidence exists, however, that they ever left Frisco.  Their children, three sons and four daughters, all were born in California.

Hanley worked for Melczer & Company through 1904, and in 1905, the wealthy Melczer, with his wife Elizabeth, retired. Making an unrevealed financial arrangement with his former employer, Hanley took over the management of the wine and liquor house, soon changing its name to the Hanley Mercantile Company. The new owner wasted no time in issuing his own brands of whiskey. His flagship was “Hanley Rye,” shown here in two amber flasks, one with a label, the other as embossed in the glass.

Hanley’s timing might have been better. In 1906, the Great San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed Front Street, the avenue shown above in ruins.  In the conflagration, like many local whiskey men, John lost his entire stock of whiskey.   Undaunted, he opened again the very next year on Florida Street, advertising his liquor as “Good Goods."

Hanley Merchantile has been credited with a canny marketing move. In 1904 Oregon had enacted a “local option” law and a number of communities went dry. Meanwhile, San Franisco stayed predictably wet. Taking advantage of the Interstate Commerce Clause, Hanley advertised heavily in Oregon and did brisk business by mail order there, using the Southern Pacific Railroad to deliver the goods. 

Customers would send Hanley Merchantile five dollars and the company would send back four bottles of Hanley Rye or perhaps Ashborne Rye, a name I believe can be related back to the San Francisco fire. Everything sent to Oregon, naturally, came in a plain brown wrapper.

By 1909, John Hanley had settled into more permanent retail quarters on Eddy Street when a incident occurred that would unwillingly thrust him into the newspapers.  The San Francisco Call of May 8, 1909 headlined:  “Mrs. Elizabeth Melczer, Rich Society Woman, in a “Fistic” Role, Seeks Dividends from Mercantile Company and Pummels Its President; Pulls Hanley’s Hair and Puts Up a Good Fight.”

Leaving from her mansion home in Palo Alto, shown here, the now Widow Melczar had gone with her attorney to Hanley’ office to collect dividends she said were due her from the liquor business.  The discussion deteriorated into an argument between the dowager and Hanley.  In the fracas, Elizabeth pulled Hanley’s hair yanking some of it out and chased him around his desk.  Hanley tried to protect himself with a chair that subsequently was broken. The eyeglasses of Mrs. Melczar’s attorney were broken in the melee. Hanley was forced to take cover under a table until the attorney could hustle the outraged female from the room.  The newspaper story the next day had all San Francisco laughing.

For a day or so, Hanley could not be found, clearly lying low until the buzz receded.  The Call ended its lengthy news account by reporting:  “According to Hanley’s friends,  Mrs. Melczer had business transactions with him, and expectations were that these would be settled within a few days.”  One can image John’s Irish mother, Mary, wishing she could have gotten in a few licks on the Widow Melczar.

Whether it was this event or the increasing momentum of Prohibition, by 1918 the Hanley Mercantile Co. was out of business. Congress had closed the loophole that Hanley  exploited. In addition, Oregon had gone totally dry in 1914 cutting off an important source of his revenues.   John Hanley went on to other pursuits.  When he registered for the World War One draft, he was working in a steel mill.  In subsequent census records he was recorded employed as a cashier for the railroad.

Mary Sullivan Hanley, continued to live in San Francisco all her life, dying in October 1924 at the age of 79.  Devoted to her Catholic religion, she was a member of the third order of St. Dominic.  Given a solemn requiem high mass at St. Charles Church on S. Van Ness Avenue, she was interred at Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, the burial town for San Francisco.  A widow for 44 years, Mary lies next to her late husband, Daniel, in Section H, Row 4, Plot 45.  In 1942 John died and joined his parents in Holy Cross Cemetery.  The Hanley cross-shaped monument is shown here.

Note:  Much of the material in this post earlier appeared in an article in “Placer Trails,” a publication of the Genealogical Society of Auburn, California.  Dated April 2014, it was written by Jacqui Marcella, whose Irish ancestors were from Mitchellstown and possibly related to the Hanleys.