Edward Martin: The Enigma from Enniscorthy

When Edward Martin left his birthplace in Enniscorthy, Ireland, and traveled to the New World, he was just one of the thousands of impoverished Irish youths who left home looking for a better future.  The next few years of his life are puzzling and downright mysterious.  Having joined the California gold rush of 1849, Martin emerged from the mines inexplicably a stupendously wealthy man, becoming one of the largest landowners in the West.  Amid these riches, in an unusual move, he founded a controversial San Francisco liquor house.

Martin was baptized on March 5, 1818, in Enniscorthy, the second largest town in Wexford, a coastal county in southeastern Ireland.  He was the eldest of twelve children of Thomas Martin, apparently a butcher, and Anne Johnson, from a well-known family of Irish weapons makers.  Although Catholic children were denied public education, Edward likely received some schooling as a youth before entering employment locally.

Evidence is scant on what happened next.  One account has Martin leaving for Santiago, Chile, before he was 21.  Another source indicates he may have been 26.  It is known that he spent five years in Chile engaged in commercial activities.  After getting word of the 1848 gold strike Martin is said to have boarded a sailing vessel and headed to California.  After a voyage of six months he arrived in San Francisco in September 1849 and headed straight for the gold fields.   

The news of gold brought some 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad.  Most sought the precious metal in vain and went away poorer than they came.  Martin was a startling exception.  He apparently struck it rich — very rich — and soon exited the mines.  That is the heart of the enigma.  None of Martin’s biographers document what he found or where he found it.  It remains a blank page and a mystery.

Biographers also differ wildly about what happened next. One claims Martin took a long ocean trip back to Ireland.  If so, it was possibly to share his wealth with family.  Then he is said to have returned to San Francisco to establish a real estate company.  A second biographer has Martin going directly from mining to a  career in real estate, prospering, and retiring before long to take an extended ocean voyage to Europe and the Far East.  A third source has Martin visiting the cities of the Eastern U.S. before deciding to make San Francisco his permanent home.

Biographers agree that Martin invested heavily in large tracts of land in California and Oregon.   One says he he owned about 200,000 acres in California and over 600,000 acres in Oregon.  An historian of the West disputes the latter figure, figuring Martin owned no more than 450,000 acres in Oregon.  An 1870 account called Edward “our greatest Irish landowner” of the far West.  

When many San Francisco banks failed, Martin joined a group of successful San Francisco Irishmen in establishing the The Hibernia Savings and Loan Society (later the Hibernia Bank),  serving as the secretary-treasurer from 1859 until his death.  The bank building is shown here. By this time Edward had adopted his mother’s maiden name, Johnson, as his middle name.

More important, for the purposes of this blog, Martin ventured into the whiskey trade.  In 1859, he partnered with three San Francisco locals in establishing a liquor house they called E. Martin & Company.  Initially the partners located it at 604-606 Front Street but soon outgrew those premises and moved by 1868 to 408 Front.  Although Martin was prominently identified the concern, another partner, Daniel V. B. Henarie, appears to have handled day to day management.

Sometime in the 1860s, Edward married.  Irishmen were noted for marrying late and he would have been well into his forties at the time of his nuptials.  His bride was a widow, Eleanor Downey Harvey.   Said to be “beautiful and lively,” Eleanor was an immigrant from County Roscommon and the sister of John Downey,  the seventh governor of California and the first Irishman to hold that office, serving from 1860 to 1862.  

With one living child from her first marriage, Eleanor would bear Edward three sons:  Peter, Walter and Andrew.  A biographer said of her life as Martin’s wife:  “She now lived in a palatial mansion on Broadway in San Francisco’s exclusive Pacific Heights, where she entertained and soon became a trend setter among the burgeoning ranks of San Francisco society.”

Meanwhile her husband was roiling the waters of the San Francisco liquor business.  In 1870, E. Martin & Co. enlisted John F. Cutter in an effort to steal the popular Cutter brand, founded by his father, J. H. Cutter, away from a Kentucky distiller named Charles P. Moorman and Moorman’s West Coast distributor, Anson Hotaling, a powerful and litigious whiskey man.  Martin even issued a bottle claiming to be “sole agent” for J. H. Cutter whiskey, shown below left.  A court fights ensued, described in detail in my post on Moorman of November 2, 2017.   When Martin lost, he issued a bottle for J. F. Cutter, shown below right.

Other Martin brands were notably less controversial.  They included “Argonaut,” “E. Martin & Co.,”  "Miller's Extra Old Bourbon,” "Miller's Extra Whisky,” "Miller's Old Bourbon,” and "Old Dorsey.”  The company trademarked Miller’s Extra Old Bourbon in 1875 and again in 1894;  Miller’s Extra Whiskey in 1901, and Argonaut in 1906. 

 Miller’s Extra brand likely was the firm’s top shelf bourbon available to a wealthy clientele.  This bourbon was bottled in three sizes:  a quart and two different sizes of flasks, as shown below.  Blown in a mold with applied lip, these are considered early bottles, dated from 1872 to the late 1870s.  Because the embossing pattern on both the quart and the flasks is the same, not usual on Western whiskeys,  it appears to some that E. Martin & Company were attempting brand recognition.  These bottles are very rare with only a few known and now avidly sought by collectors.

Although the E. Martin Company survived until 1919 and the advent of National Prohibition, Martin himself died in May 1880 at the age of 63.  The San Francisco Morning Call, in an editorial the day following his death said:  “As a businessman he enjoyed the confidence of the entire community.” A millionaire, Edward left Eleanor, a wealthy woman in her own right, with one of the largest estates in California.  She lived another 48 years, dying in July 1928 within six weeks of being 102 years old.  

To my mind, a California history might have had the appropriate last word on this whiskey man:   “Mr. Martin's appearance indicates the true Irish gentleman, for he has in his physiognomy that mixture of dignity and wit which characterizes the genuine Irishman.”  Enigmas and all, the boy from Enniscorthy had done well. 

Note:  A major source of information on Edward Martin was a 2011 article by Mark Codd that appeared in the organ of the Ui Cinsealaigh Historical Society.  Codd cites a number of the earlier histories that often give conflicting information about the wealthy Martin and contribute to the mystery surrounding him.

C. P. Moorman and the Cutter Connection

On February 27, 1875,  John F. Cutter stormed into the offices of liquor wholesaler Charles P. Moorman, his father’s former business partner,  and threatened him bodily with a sword cane unless Moorman stopped claiming a monopoly on the use of the Cutter name on Kentucky whiskey.  The events that had brought things to such a violent confrontation — one that would end in John Cutter’s death — is a story that spans America from coast to coast.

The Cutters originally were from Hollis, a town in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, the offspring of Phebe Jewett Tenney and Benoni Cutter, a farmer.  The couple had several sons among whom was John Hastings Cutter, born in 1807.  He was only age nine when his father died and he was left in the care of his widowed mother.  Speculation is that older brothers,  R. B. Cutter and Ben B. Cutter determined to make their fortunes further west and fetched up in Louisville, Kentucky, where they entered the liquor trade.  When John was old enough to make the journey, he joined them there.

Because whiskeys exist with the initials of each Cutter, the Wilsons in their book on Western bottles speculate the following:  “As each member of the Cutter family matured in the liquor business he evidently had the right to formulate a brand in his own name.”   They dated R.B.’s whiskey from the early 1850s and discontinued in the 1860s;  Ben’s from the early 1860s to the mid-1880s.  John H.’s proved the most successful with his brand, beginning in the late 1860s and running until National Prohibition.

The Cutters did not own a distillery and are reported to have obtained product from at least two Kentucky whiskey-makers.   One was a plant owned by Mary Dowling at Lawrenceburg (RD #59, 8th District ).  The other was the a distillery (RD #241, 5th District) owned by W. B. Samuels, located at Samuel Depot in Nelson County on the L&N Railroad. The Cutters were “rectifiers,” blending whiskeys according to formulae reputedly kept within the family.

In 1858, John H. Cutter made the fateful decision to merge his by-then established whiskey firm with that of Moorman.  Moorman was a native Kentuckian, born in Breckinridge County in 1829, the son of  David M. and Judith Venable Moorman.  Some 22 years younger than Cutter, Moorman had come to Louisville as a youth, clerking in a liquor house.  By 1855 he had obtained sufficient knowledge and financing, with a partner to open his own wholesale whiskey business.  Successful from the outset, in 1857 he bought out the partner and the following year joined forces with Cutter.

A junior partner after the merger,  Moorman soon was joined by a second junior partner, Milton J. Hardy, Cutter’s son-in-law.  Hardy became the firm’s East Coast representative, stationed in Boston and marketing the Cutter whiskey line.  Meanwhile, John H. having made his fortune in Louisville, returned to Hollis, the home of his childhood.  The 1860 census found him there with his wife, Susan, six children, three servants, and five field hands.  Although his occupation was listed as “bourbon whiskey manufacturer,”  Cutter actually was occupied as a gentleman farmer and New Hampshire legislator.  Not recorded in the household was son John F. Cutter, 23, by that time likely involved in the family whiskey business in Boston.

That same year, 1860, John H. Cutter died at the relatively young age of 53, the cause given as “disease of the liver.”  He was buried in South Cemetery near his home place in Hollis.  His passing triggered significant changes in his company, allowing Moorman to buy a controlling interest in the J. H. Cutter brand.  Now the focus shifted to the West Coast and San Francisco.  According to the Wilsons:  “To the Eastern folks that came around the Horn or made the trek to the West in the early pioneering days, the J. H. Cutter brand name was already well known and popular with westerners from the time the first barrel was shipped to California.”

In the early 1870s Moorman’s interest in whiskey appears to have waned.  This may have coincided with his marriage to Kentuckian Lucy Beckley, the daughter of John and Elizabeth Long Beckley, and the birth of their first child, a boy. Moorman turned to banking as the vice president of the Kentucky National Bank.  He also was running a commission house in non-whiskey merchandise.  Milton Hardy assumed managerial control of the liquor company, emphasizing markets in the West, especially California.  In 1874 he bought the controlling interest from Moorman, who came to regret his decision and three years later returned to the whiskey trade.  He cut a deal with Hardy in which Moorman became the sole owner of the J. H. Cutter brand name and the two men broke off their formal business relationship.  

The arrangement proved problematic.  In the interim,  John F. Cutter, the son, had entered the picture.  He had developed a whiskey of his own formula and marketed it under the label, J. F. Cutter.  Confusion between the two brands was inevitable.  Moreover, the company in the past had used several agents for their West Coast operations, among them Ed Martin and Anson Hotaling.  After the split with Hardy, Moorman favored Hotaling, one of San Francisco’s strongest liquor houses, but John F. hooked up with Martin, physically moving into his offices in 1871 and for four ensuing years supervising merchandising and sales to insure the “J. F. Cutter” brand was well established.

Hotaling, as the sole West Coast agent for J.H. Cutter whiskeys, was enraged.  Highly competitive, in 1871 he earlier had convinced Moorman to sue the West Coast agent for Jesse Moore for trademark infringement simply because it was shipping its whiskey from Kentucky to California in barrels similar to those of J. H. Cutter.   A San Francisco judge found the charge ludicrous, dismissed the complaint and charged Moorman court costs.   Hotaling also continually pressured Moorman to sue Martin and John F. Cutter on trademark grounds.  

Both sides went public, telling their side of the story in long newspaper ads.  In 1872, John F. told readers:  “My whiskey is a distinct, independent article, sold under trade-mark totally different…and never has been and cannot be mistaken for theirs by any purchaser….If it has realized a more extensive sale than theirs, that fact may be owing to its quality and popularity rather than any attempt at imitation.”   Martin followed up with ads that declared that J. F. Cutter bourbon “…is superior in quality to any other brand of Cutter whiskey,”

Hotaling, on his part, accused Cutter of selling his family name to Martin for 30 years for a pittance, later insisting:  “…John F. Cutter never made any whiskey and knew nothing about it except to drink it.  He was a wild, roving, ne’er-do-well, a nuisance to his friends and of no benefit to himself…The only thing of actual value about him was the name his father gave.”

Increasingly under pressure from Hotaling and Moorman,  John F. sued claiming that his adversaries had never bought the trademark for J. H. Cutter whiskey and that it remained part of the estate bequeathed to Cutter’s children and thus was his property.  The defendants, however,  were able to prove in court their purchase from the father before his death.  A California judge ruled that even if the trademark had remained part of the Cutter estate, John F. had no status in court because the trustees were withholding his share “owing to the erratic habits of Cutter.”

This ruling seems to have unhinged young Cutter who soon after traveled from San Francisco to Louisville, apparently in an effort to establish new business alliances.  Finding doors shut to him despite his name, John F. stalked into Moorman’s offices on that February day with a sword cane and threatened him with it.  Subdued by onlookers he was fined $100 and given a sentence of 30 days in jail.  Apparently ill, Cutter died — “miserably” said one observer — in the workhouse as he served out his sentence.  Only 37 years old at his passing, John F. was buried next to his father in the Hollis cemetery, a joint monument shown here marking their graves.

John F.’s death did little to end the West Coast competition between the two Cutter brands.  In 1885 Moorman filed suit in a California U.S. court against the owners of the J.F. Cutter brand alleging that it infringed on his trademark.  The federal judge found that J. F. Cutter labeling was significantly different from J. H. Cutter whiskey.  To argue otherwise was, the judge said: “…To my mind, the utterance of an absurdity that the senses of the most ordinary observer would at once rebuke.” He found for the defendants.

Moorman, employing a fulltime manager as he aged, continued to be involved with his liquor house, known for a number of Cutter offerings including: "J. H. C.,” "J. H. Cutter,” "J. H. Cutter A,” "J. H. Cutter A No. 1 Old Bourbon,” "J. H. Cutter Bourbon,” "J. H. Cutter O. K. Old Bourbon,” "J. H. Cutter Old Reserve,” "J. H. Cutter Pure Old Rye, and ”J. H. Cutter Rye.”  The company also issued an "Old Moorman” brand, along with “Green Label, ”Uncle Jake,” and "V. F. O. Rye.”

Charles Moorman died in 1917 in Louisville at the age of 88,  He was interred in Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery where many other Kentucky whiskey men are buried.  Moorman lies beside his wife, Lucy, who had preceded him in death 26 years earlier.  His company survived for two more years until National Prohibition. Moorman is remembered in Louisville as a philanthropist having left funds for the Moorman Home for Women to care for the elderly indigent female population of Jefferson County, Kentucky.

As a conclusion to this story, the Wilsons make no comment on the feud over the whiskeys, observing:  “It is difficult to say which achieved the greater sales, but suffice to say both houses did a very good job of selling the brands.   The Cutter name reined as king in the western states straight through to Prohibition.”

Note:  Much of the information about Moorman and Cutter is taken from “Spirit Bottles of the Old West” by Bill and Betty Wilson (1968).  Those interested in learning more about Anson Hotaling may wish to see my profile of him on this blog, March 29, 2013.  Mary Dowling was featured January 22, 2014.