P. Vidvard & Son Wrote Their Names in Cobalt and Stone

Peter Vidvard, an immigrant from France, and members of his family proved to be extraordinary entrepreneurs,  using the money from selling liquor to fund a number of notable enterprises in Oneida County in central New York State.  In the process Peter and son imprinted their names in stoneware and in stone.

The story begins in Nancy, France, where Peter Vidvard was born in 1821.  While details of his early life are sketchy,  it is known that he emigrated to the United States about 1843, settling in Utica, shown here as it looked at mid-century.  Then about 22 years old, Vidvard appears to have entered the retail grocery trade at a time when selling liquor was a principal profit center. Four years later, having saved a little capital, he started his own business, selling liquor and cigars, located at 29 and 31 John Street in Utica.  Later he issued a certificate worth 15 cents in trade noting that address.

About the same time he married a woman several years older than he was.  Her name was Catherine (nee Oster).  Like Peter she had been born in France and had come to America as a child with her family.  Her father was John Oster  a well known grocer who owned a landmark hotel in Deerfield Creek, a village adjacent to Utica.   Records indicate she apparently had an earlier marriage and had been widowed with two children before her marriage to Vidvard.  The couple would go on to have six children of their own,  four girls and two boys.


Peter Vidvard’s business success was rapid, with sales notable throughout Central New York.  As a sign of his prominence, in 1859 he was elected treasurer of the New York State Liquor Dealers Association.  He also brought family members into the business.  Both sons,  John, and, Jules (sometimes rendered Julius), were groomed from an early age to the whiskey trade, working as clerks in their father’s store.  He also employed his nephew,  Francis X. Oster,  as a  salesman traveling throughout much of New York State.  When his stepdaughter,  Josephine,  married an Irish immigrant named John Sheehan,  the son-in-law was brought into the firm.  In 1868 Peter took the step of making him a partner and changed the company name to Vidvard and Sheehan.  A bottle with that name is shown above.


Meanwhile, John Vidvard was demonstrating considerable talent as a businessman.  At the age of 21, with backing from his father’s “large command of capital,”  he started his own company in 1873 to manufacture and sell cotton pants, overalls,  and shirts. He also dealt in other dry goods sold at retail.   Two years later John took over an Oneida County brewery that had been destroyed by fire and rebuilt.  He changed the name to Vidvard Brewery but sold it just a few years later.

The year 1879 marked a major change in the Vidvard firm.  John Sheehan had departed the partnership in 1878 to start his own wholesale and retail drug company in Utica.  Almost immediately Peter made son Jules a full partner and changed the firm name to P. Vidvard & Son.   He marked this occasion by commissioning a special whiskey jug that displayed the new name and the date.

He ordered this stoneware containers from the famous White’s Utica pottery.  This ceramics factory had been founded  in 1839 by Noah White, formerly a barge pilot on the Erie Canal.   White saw that Utica was an ideal spot for a pottery.  The canal could be used to transport clay from New Jersey and return finished products to markets in New York City, Boston and Philadelphia.  His stoneware, as the crock shown here, often used hand-drawn cobalt designs.  Vidvard saw the benefit of having his fancy containers made right in town.  Note the similar decoration on the 1879 whiskey jug.   Other containers shown here, although unmarked, also show White’s Utica characteristic features.

Although the Vidvards continued to prosper, their success was not without its pitfalls.  In  1881 a local woman named Margaret Rawlins filed for civil damages against Peter Vidvard.   In court she testified that her husband, upon whom she and her children depended for support, went drinking at the bar of a Utica hotel called the “The Yorkville House.”  She claimed that he got drunk on liquor sold him there, fell from the loft of a barn on the premises, broke his arm and sustained other injuries that prevented him from working for more than six months.

Although Vidvard owned the hotel, he had leased it to a “Mrs. B” who operated it.  Ms. Rawlins obviously saw Peter, rather than the hotel management, as having the deep pockets to pay compensation.  The jury was sympathetic to her story and awarded her $150.  Vidvard appealed the verdict to the New York Supreme Court which ruled on the case in 1884.  The high court overturned the earlier verdict finding that there was no evidence that Vidvard had been responsible or negligent in any way for the accident.  It stated: “If the sale of three glasses of whiskey to the same person within a few minutes would authorize an award of exemplary damages against a tenant, it would not be in a case against a landlord without further proof.”  And there was none.

Happy as Peter must have been about the judgment, he was facing other difficulties.  His nephew,  Francis X. Oster,  in 1884 had quit his uncle’s employment and struck out independently.  Initially with partners, Oster started his own wholesale and retail liquor business in Utica, competing with P. Vidvard & Son.  More important,  Peter’s own health had been declining for the past several years.   In June 1885, he died, age 65 years, 9 months and 12 days old.  A member of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Utica, we can assume he was buried in the church cemetery at Webster and Eagle Streets, surrounded by grieving family and friends. Although written before his death, the following tribute in a tome called “A Historical, Statistical & Descriptive Review” of Oneida County might serve for Peter’s obituary: “We may fairly say that no one in this community is more highly respected and esteemed for his general upright dealing and amiable and generous disposition.”

The business of P. Vidvard & Son was carried on by Jules for a number of years after his father’s death.   White’s Utica Pottery, challenged by competition for markets, went out of business in 1910.  Thus all the containers shown here are at least 103 years old and possibly a decade or two older.

Lacking a picture of Peter Vidvard tombstone,  we do have his name carved in marble as one of the donors in 1870 to purchase a new bell for St. Mary’s Church.  It can be found at the lower right hand corner of the list of names on the tablet shown here.  Unlike the other people memorialized for their gift, Peter chose to advertise. The name inscribed is P. Vidvard & Son.

Jacob Bergerman Sold Whiskey in the Heart of Mormon Land

 To quote one observer:  “It is a sight you would never encounter today: liquor bottles proudly displayed to the public in a big shop window, only a couple of blocks from Temple Square, right out there on a bustling thoroughfare for the whole world -- Mormon and gentile alike -- to admire.”  He was talking about the picture shown above of the Salt Lake City store where Jacob (“Jake”)  Bergerman sold whiskey at the home base of the tee-totaling Mormons.  He called his firm the Utah Liquor Company.

Jake was a native New Yorker, born in 1856. He was the son of Marcus Bergerman who uprooted this family in the spring of 1868, when Jake was only 13, and moved to Colorado, settling in Pueblo.   Jacob finished his education and at age 19 in 1874 began an apprenticeship in the printer’s trade, which he practiced for three years. Apparently growing restless,  he left that job to roam the southwestern parts of Colorado,  clerking in the town of Ouray for 16 months.  Early in 1879, he had amassed enough money to begin his own general store in the mining boom town of Kokomo.  After only a short time there,  he took his merchandise to another boom town called Carbonateville.  There he entered a partnership with Frank Ralph, its postmaster.

Together with Ralph,  Bergerman moved again in 1880 to Robinson, Colorado, and ran a general store there until the late 1890s.  Sometime during this period,  Jake was joined in marriage to Esther.  They would have two children,  Sadie and Rose.   It should be noted  that the once boom towns of Kokomo, Carbonateville and Robinson today are all Colorado “ghost towns.”  Bergerman may have sensed that downward trajectory in Robinson and about 1898 moved to Salt Lake City where he opened a liquor store, initially located at 167 South Main Street. Although the company letterhead claims a founding date of 1874,  while Jacob was still an apprentice printer in Colorado, the Utah Liquor Company first shows up in Salt Lake City directories in 1898.

From the outset,  Bergerman does not appear shy about selling whiskey in the heartland of the Mormons.   Early on, for example, he issued a metal token good for 12&1/2 cents in trade at the Utah Liquor Co. that had an image of the Mormon Tabernacle on the reverse.  Bergerman also showed considerable imagination in the containers he chose for his liquor.  Among them are patterned molded gray canteens with cobalt decoration that depict on one side a scene of men drinking and on the other has the address of his firm.  Known in 1/4 and 1/2 gallon size, they were made by the White’s Pottery in far off Utica, New York.  During this early period he also commissioned a shoulder jug stenciled with stylized fleur-de-lis.  This jug was issued in 1/2 and one gallon sizes.

Bergerman seems quickly to have achieved recognition in the Utah business community as a canny operator.  During the early 1900s, he became the proprietor and manager of Calders Park, a well-known Salt Lake City recreational site and resort.  He ran a saloon on the premises where both boisterous parties and more respectable sorts, as the pair shown in this John Held New Yorker cartoon,  could have their leisure.   In 1904, he was awarded a lease to manage what the press called “an ideal pleasure resort” named “The Lagoon.” Hired by a regional railway company,  Bergerman was put on notice that his contract was dependent upon enforcing order among patrons and insuring that “all concessions in the shape of restaurants, bars, etc. must be conduct (sic) in first class manner.”

At some point in this period, probably 1903, Bergerman moved the Utah Liquor Company to larger quarters at 223 South Main,  the storefront seen in the photo.  At that location he also continued to bottle his liquor in interesting ceramic jugs,  even one with an error in the address of the Utah Liquor Company.  Of particular interest is a wide mouth crock that advertises Jake’s firm as “The Family Store.”  It bears the pottery mark of the Minnesota Pottery Co. of Red Wing.  In glass there were at last three clear highly embossed megaphone shaped cylinders denoting the Utah Liquor Company. Bergerman continued to advertise vigorously at the new location and took the “Lewis 66” brand of rye as his flagship label.  This was a whiskey from the Strauss-Pritz Company of Cincinnati, an outfit that was noted for its giveaways to dealers.   Bergerman is known to have featured three varieties of  carnival glass plates.

In addition to his business activities,  Jake was a member of a number of fraternal organizations in Salt Lake City.  They included the Elks,  and two orders of Freemasonry, the Free and Accepted Masons and the Royal Arch Masons.  He also was a member of Congregation B’nai Israel, which had been founded as a Reformed Congregation in 1891, according to a Jewish Heritage website.

Prohibition came slowly to Utah.  Prominent Mormons, despite the Church’s mandate against alcohol, feared that pushing the cause would erode their political base and revive the bitter clash between Mormons and non-Mormons in the state.  Continued attempts during the first two decades of the 20th Century to pass statewide “dry” legislation failed until 1917.  Ironically, it then was a colleague of Bergerman who pushed through the ban on liquor.  He was Governor Simon Bamberger, a non-Mormon, German-born Jew, and the man who in 1904 had awarded Jake the management  lease on the Lagoon resort.  About 1916, as his political career was being launched, Bamberger voluntarily stopped the sale of liquor at the Lagoon and offered to pay $1,000 to anyone who could prove he or she was a better prohibitionist.

On the first of August, 1917, the Governor signed a law making it a crime in Utah to manufacture, sell or consume alcohol.  The local press estimated that the law would affect four thousand persons in Salt Lake City alone who were dependent on the liquor business.  Among them obviously was Jake Bergerman.  As the deadline approached,  liquor stores such as his sold their stocks at bargain prices. The Salt Lake Tribune estimated that hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of liquor had been so acquired and stored in the cellars of Salt Lake residents.

Now 61 years of age,  Bergerman was faced with the need for a new occupation.  Apparently having accumulated some wealth he ventured into real estate.  Records indicate that in 1923 he purchased the Bernice Apartments, located at the corner of 800 East and 100 South.  This was a major residential building that had been constructed in 1912 by a well-known local architect and builder named W.C.A. Vissing.  It remained in the Bergerman family through at least 1934 and currently is on the National Register of Historical Places.

In ensuing years Bergerman’s health declined and on September 14, 1928, he died at his home at 480 East Broadway in Salt Lake City. The cause of death listed by the county coroner was stomach cancer but he also apparently had been troubled by heart problems.  Jake was buried under the Bergerman marker at the B’nai Israel Cemetery, located within Salt Lake City.  Near him today lie the graves of his wife, Esther, and daughter Sadie, who never married.  Much of his legacy resides in his innovative merchandising of his whiskey which has provided modern collectors with a treasure of desirable artifacts.

Note:  Although the information for this article was drawn from a number of sources, a key one was a 2003 article by Stan Sanders for Bottles and Extras, the journal of the Federation of Historical Bottle Collectors (FOHBC).  It provides details on Utah Liquor Co. collectibles.