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.

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.