Marion E. was Kentucky’s OTHER Colonel Taylor

              
When two unrelated Kentucky colonels, both named Taylor, were engaged in the distilling trade, conflict might have been inevitable.  That was the case when Marion Elliott Taylor named his whiskey, “Old Kentucky Taylor,” thereby approximating the name under which Edmund Haynes Taylor, a major figure in Kentucky distilling, successfully been had marketing his bourbon. Col. Marion lost that fight but, in the end, losing might not have mattered much.

Col. Marion was born in Louisiana, of native Louisianan parents.  His birth date variously was given on U.S. census forms as 1850 and 1852, and on his gravestone as 1855.  An 1893 passport application described this Taylor as standing five feet, eleven inches tall, with brown hair and blue eyes.  From his photo at right he looks like a genial enough chap.  Sometime after the Civil War, Col. Marion found his way to Kentucky.  Col. Edmund sneered that his rival had “immigrated” to the state “and began to simulate our product” twenty-five years after he (Col. Edmund) had been making good Kentucky bourbon.

Col. Marion first surfaced in the liquor trade in 1886 as a partner with John J. Wright in a Louisville wholesale house called Wright & Taylor, located initially at 220 Second Street.  The company quickly became well established with whiskey brands that included “Pride of Louisville,” “Cane Spring,” and “Old Logan.”  Likely needing more space because of their rapidly expanding business, the owners in 1891 moved to 137 Third Street.  

Like many wholesalers who were featuring their own whiskey brands, Wright and Taylor seemingly often found themselves stymied in obtaining adequate supplies of raw product.  As a result in 1892 they purchased the Old Charter Distillery (RD#266, 5th Revenue District of Kentucky).  This whiskey-making plant had been established in 1874 by A.B. Chapeze on the Bardstown-Springfield Branch of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. [See my post on the Chapezes, June 2015].

The partners bought a facility from the Chapezes that although largely of frame construction was a going operation, capable of mashing some 260 bushels of grain daily.  In addition to the distillery itself, it had three frame warehouses with shingle roofs, one of which was vacant and another used to store spent mash for cattle feed.  Only one bonded warehouse was on premises, of iron-clad construction and located 100 feet east of the still. 

 

Col. Marion and his partner quickly set about upgrading the property, tearing down old structures and constructing new ones, shown above.  At some point prior to 1895, Col. Marion purchased John Wright’s interest in the distillery, but continued operating under the Wright & Taylor name.  In time the plant daily mashing capacity was increased to 600 bushels.  This allowed Col. Marion to produce “Old Charter,” a brand name purchased from the Chapezes, and to add other proprietary labels, including “Dunmore,” “Elliott Reserve,” “Kentwood,” “Redwood,” and “Taylor’s Golden Rye.”  He bottled these brands in amber glass containers, both quarts and smaller flasks, embossed with the company name and “Louisville.”

Meanwhile, 55 miles down the road in Frankfort, Col. Edmund was training a gimlet eye on what this other Taylor was selling.  When Col. Marion began marketing a brand he called “Fine Old Kentucky Taylor,” Col. Edmund exploded, claiming that it infringed on his similarly named “Old Taylor.”  In 1903 he took his Louisville rival into Jefferson County Circuit Court seeking $100,000 in damages (more than $2.5 million today) and an injunction on further marketing of Old Kentucky Taylor.  He claimed that Col. Marion’s whiskey, a blended and to his mind “inferior” product, was creating confusion among consumers with his quality straight bourbon.

Col. Edmund may have made a mistake by suing in a Louisville court.  Local judges almost everywhere were reluctant to find against a resident businessman on trademark issues and Col. Marion, despite his Louisiana origins, had become highly regarded in Louisville commercial circles.  The decision gleefully was quoted in an ad, shown above, that Col. Marion placed in the Wines & Spirits Journal, a leading trade publication.  He quoted from the court decision: “The defendant, Marion E. Taylor (Wright & Taylor) in branding his bottles, cases, packages and barrels with the trade mark “Taylor,” or “Old Taylor,” or “Kentucky Taylor,” or “Fine Old Kentucky Taylor,” had a perfect right to brand them.”  The judge went on to deride Col. Edmund’s claim of priority of adoption, dismissed the case and charged him court costs.

Gloating on the part of Col. Marion was short lived.  Subsequently Col. Edmund took his case to the Kentucky Court of Appeals in a case known as “E.H. Taylor, Jr. & Sons Co. v. Marion E. Taylor.”  This time Col. Edmund got some satisfaction.  Although the court denied damages and allowed Col. Marion to continue to use the Old Kentucky Taylor brand name, it granted an injunction that required that he advertise it as a blended product, thereby presumably reducing likelihood of confusion with Old Taylor.  The court also found that Col. Marion “intentionally” had tried to mislead  the public through his advertising practices.  As shown below, some Col. Marion ads subsequently hewed the court line: Old Kentucky Taylor was described as a blend.

None of this completely mollified Col. Edmund.  He continued to pursue action against Wright & Taylor.  In 1907 he got a ruling from a more understanding Jefferson County court granting a “perpetual injunction” against any advertising of Old Kentucky Taylor that failed to mention that the whiskey was blended or “rectified.” In 1909 Col. Edmund achieved a supportive ruling from the Commissioner of Patents in Washington, D.C., that Col. Marion’s product “from its inception has been deceptively labeled.”  Six months later The U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. agreed, adding:  “And it is unfortunate that one honestly complying with the law [i.e.,Col. Edmund] is compelled to suffer at the hands of ‘commercial sharks.”  Piling on, the U.S. Attorney General in a report to President Theodore Roosevelt alluded to “fraud” on the part of Wright & Taylor.

None of this support, however, assuaged the ire of Col. Edmund against Col. Marion.  In 1913, responding to an Old Kentucky Taylor ad in Mida’s Criterion, a liquor industry journal, he paid to publish a full page open letter in a competing journal to flay what he called “a fraudulent reading notice.”  Col. Edmund contended: “The courts of Kentucky, the District Court of Appeals at Washington and two departments of the Federal Government have pilloried these compounders for this very type of fraud upon our pure Kentucky-distilled Old Taylor.”  He added that he was initiating new proceedings against Wright & Taylor for “contempt of court.”

Although Col. Marion could not have been happy about repeatedly defending himself before the bar of justice with its costs in money and time, his rival’s vendetta seems never seriously to have impeded his progress in the whiskey trade and elsewhere.  During this period he continued to expand the Old Charter Distillery, increasing its mashing capacity to 1,000 bushels daily and its warehouse storage space to 36,000 barrels.  

In another sign of success, by 1894 he had moved his headquarters to Louisville’s “Whiskey Row” on West Main Street where top Kentucky whiskey men kept their offices.  Like his successful colleagues, Col. Marion also was generous in giving advertising items to favored customers, including back-of-the-bar bottles, shot glasses, and serving and tip trays.  Examples are shown throughout this post.

Nor did the wrath of Col. Edmund have any apparent effect on Col. Marion’s standing in his own community.  When citizens decided to build a statue to honor a beloved former Confederate general who was active in Louisville civic affairs, Col. Marion was chosen to head the committee raising the funds and supervising the project.   Along with other Kentucky worthies, he was a delegate to a statewide group formed to plan and build the Kentucky pavilion at the 1903 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.  Moreover, the author of the pamphlet History of Kentucky Distilling fantasized that “our gracious friend” Col. Marion would be appointed U.S. ambassador to England by President Theodore Roosevelt and there able to promote Kentucky whiskey.

The coming of National Prohibition laid blows indiscriminately  on both colonels, as both men were forced to shut down their distilleries and wholesale liquor enterprises.  In the 1920 census, Col. Marion gave his occupation as “merchant - real estate,”  evidence that he had been buying local properties with his ample wealth.  He died a year later, just a few days short of his sixty-sixth birthday, given the dates on his tombstone, and was buried in Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery where many notable whiskey men are interred.  

Although he is gone, Col. Marion is far from forgotten in Louisville.  Built in 1906 the Marion E. Taylor Office Building at 312 South Fourth Street is a downtown landmark of eight stories.  Over the years it has held several financial institutions and offices for dozens of attorneys and other professionals.  Over in Frankfort I have been unable to find any memorial to Col. Edmund to compare to the man he pilloried as “discredited” and repeatedly accused of fraud.  Seemingly, in the final analysis, Col. Edmund’s attacks meant little in the life of Marion Elliott Taylor.

Note:  I have chronicled the career of Edmund Haynes Taylor Jr., including other legal battles he fought, in a post of January 2015.  Additionally, while researching Col. Marion, I came upon the “Sipp’n Corn blog, a website devoted to the Kentucky whiskey industry as viewed through the many lawsuits it engendered.   In December 2013 the author also recounted the legal battles of the two colonels and did it well.  Take a look.

Col. E. H. Taylor Jr.: The Face and Signature of Kentucky Bourbon

Although much has been written about Edmund Haynes Taylor, Jr. by generations of authors, I prefer to think of him as the face and signature of Kentucky bourbon, a place in whiskey history that was achieved by his engagement in crucial legal and political struggles.

Depicted here, Taylor was born in 1930 near Fulton, Kentucky.  A fourth generation Kentuckian, he was a descendant of two American presidents, James Madison and Zachary Taylor.  When his father died when he was five years old, he was sent to Louisiana to live with his great uncle Zachary, the future Mexican War hero and Chief Executive. Zachary gave the boy a good classical education.  In the early 1850s Taylor returned Lexington.  There he resided with his uncle, Edmond Haynes Taylor, a local banker, and “Jr.” was added to the young man’s name to distinguish him from his uncle. 

Working successfully in his uncle’s bank, he now had the steady income to marry.  His bride in December, 1851,  was Fanny Johnson of Lexington, shown here, described in her obituary as “a very handsome woman.”  They would have seven children among them three boys, all of whom would figure significantly in their father’s whiskey interests.  Thirty-one years old when the Civil War broke out, Taylor avoided service in either army and instead traded in cotton, working with both sides, reputedly tolerated because of strong political contacts North and South. (The “Colonel” was strictly an honorific.)

Not originally a distiller, it was Taylor’s banking sense that there was money to be made in selling whiskey.  Not just any whiskey as many Kentucky distillers featured, but a quality product.  Accordingly after the war he spent much of 1866 touring Europe being educated in the latest distilling techniques, including the importance of keeping the liquids in copper kettles. Upon his return to the United States in 1867 he opened his first distillery, “The Hermitage."

Two years later he bought an old distillery near Frankfort, Kentucky, and completely renovated it, installing all copper stills and innovative steam-heated warehouses that controlled the temperatures during whiskey aging. The distillery, shown above, also featured state-of-the art grain equipment, a more efficient sour mash technique, and modernized buildings.  He called this facility “Old-Fashioned Copper,” or “O.F.C.,” as depicted above on a saloon sign.  Although he operated successfully for more than a decade, a combination of factors brought Taylor close to bankruptcy in the late 1870s and forced him to sell control of his distillery to the St. Louis Liquor firm of Gregory and Stagg.  Although he stayed on as manager, Taylor clashed with the new owners who wished to increase profits by cutting the quality of the whiskey.   In 1884, he cut his ties with the distillery and George Stagg became the manager.

Before long Taylor was back in the whiskey business.  Moving a few miles away to a creek on the south side of Frankfort, he built a spectacular distillery modeled on a German Rhenish castle.  A shown here on a postcard, it featured thick limestone walls, crenellated battlements, medieval turrets, interior sunken gardens and luxury appointments.  He called his firm, E. H. Taylor & Sons and the distillery “Old Taylor.”  The sons, as shown in a letterhead, were J. Swigert and Kenner.  A third son,  Edmund W.,  would join the business later.

The elder Taylor had become the face and signature of this enterprise for a reason.  After Stagg and his partners had taken over the original Taylor distilleries they had kept his name because of his stellar reputation for bourbon.  When the Taylors opened their new facility, Stagg sued to stop them using their name on their whiskey.   Over the next months, a legal battle was waged that ended in the Kentucky Supreme Court with a victory for the Taylors.  They could continue to use their family name for their whiskey — but Stagg’s “Taylor” products were still on the market.  Thus the emphasis on the Colonel’s face and signature to proclaim the “genuine” bourbon.  Shown here is a 1903 ad in the Wine and Spirit Bulletin included both and an excerpt from the court decision.  All to make the point:  “There is but one Old Taylor distillery in Kentucky…There is but one Old Taylor whiskey distilled in KY.”

This message, complete with signature and face were repeated countless times on labels of Old Taylor bourbon.  They were under-glaze printed on tall ceramic jugs and featured on company giveaway items, including watch fobs and paperweights.  As a result, Taylor became one of the most recognized faces and signatures in America.

Having won the legal battle with Stagg, the combative Taylor took up a new cause.  One factor that had led to his earlier near bankruptcy was having to pay a hefty federal tax on whatever came out of the still immediately after distillation.   Convinced that a better system of taxation was necessary, he began to lobby for new legislation.   In this struggle, he was immensely aided by his political pedigree and friends.  In 1871, Taylor had been elected as mayor of Frankfort, a position he held for 16 years, reputedly a good and much esteemed leader.  Among his political allies was John G. Carlisle who the same year had been elected lieutenant governor of Kentucky.  When Carlisle eventually became Secretary of the Treasury, the two collaborated to push   

 through Congress the “Bottled-in Bond-Act of 1897,” a law that still stands.

Although the Bottled-in-Bond Act was aimed at creating a standard of quality in bourbon whiskey, the system also was connected to the tax laws, providing the key incentive for distilleries to participate.  They were allowed to delay payment of the excise tax on stored whiskey until the aging process was complete and the whiskey transferred for sale.  Supervision of the warehouses and transactions was given to Treasury agents assigned to control access to “bonded” warehouses at the distilleries.  E. H. Taylor & Sons were quick to advertise their adherence to the new law in ads and a bar sign, bearing that very familiar face, that declared:  “Bottled under U.S. Government Supervision….”

Taylor was not finished in his advocacy.  He added his voice and prestige to those who were pushing for a strong Pure Food and Drug Act.   Although most of the advocates for this legislation were reacting to the quack medicines of the time,  Taylor was motivated differently.  Like other quality whiskey producers he abhorred the “rectified” (blended and compounded) whiskey of his time, much of which was adulterated.  Those blends, he contended, should be labeled “imitation whiskey.”  When the Act was passed in 1906,  Taylor found an ally in Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, who was chief enforcer of the pure food laws.

This time, however, neither Taylor nor Wiley was able to force through their desired interpretation of blended whiskey.  Fought over for years, the issue finally reached the desk of then President William Howard Taft.  Taft in a Solomon-like decision determined that “whiskey was whiskey” and although blends should be distinguished from straight whiskey in labeling, they were not an imitation.  That ruling has prevailed to the present day.  

For all his political clout and savvy, however, Taylor could not hold back the tide of the Temperance Movement.  With the coming of National Prohibition, he and his sons were forced to shut down the Old Taylor Distillery.  At the time the father’s net worth was estimated at $2.5 million, 20 times that in today’s dollar.  Three years later, on January 19, 1923, Taylor died and was laid to rest at Frankfort Cemetery.  Beside him was his late wife, Fanny, who had died a quarter century earlier after a long illness.

The death of Col. Edmund H. Taylor Jr. occasioned headlines across the United States, many of them carrying a wire service obituary that read in part:  “Mr. Taylor’s name was known around the globe, for he had given it to “Old Taylor” whiskey, made in his distillery, pronounced by expert distillers the finest plant of its kind in the world.”   To this one might add that by the time of his death Taylor truly had become the face and signature of Kentucky bourbon.

Note:  The information for this vignette came from a variety of sources, among them an article by Clay Risen that appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review of October 28, 2013.