The Wandering Dane Found a Home in Minneapolis

He called himself Andrew Madsen Smith.  In his autobiography he identified himself as “Soldier and Sailor, Moulder and Merchant, Tramp and Trader, Soap-boiler and Scribe, Peddler and Philosopher,  Overseer and Understrapper,  Jack-of-all-Trades and Master of Fortune.”  He was all of those and additionally a successful whiskey man, but he chose to write under the name "Hans Lykkejaeger, The Wandering Dane.”

Smith story began when he was born in Juteland, Denmark, in 1841 to a poor family and began life named Anders Madsen Schmidt.  According to his autobiography, while still young he was put to work in a foundry but soon ran away to the sea.  His career took him to many adventures as a ship’s cook,  a London street tramp, and then back to sea and, through jumping ship, to the clutches of Indians in the jungles of Brazil.  Eventually he shipped with an American vessel.   When the Civil War broke out he took a bounty payment and joined the Union Navy.  When that enlistment ran out he joined the Union Army, later had another stint in the Navy and then again was in the Army,  fighting Indians in California.  Smith’s life in America took him all over the country, often on foot, and included jobs farming, peddling, and working on the railroad.


It was in that last occupation at Ogden, Utah, that Andrew/Hans, a large man who eventually weighed 250 pounds, met the love of his life.   In his book she is “Gretta.”  In life she was   Bottila Elgberg, a Danish immigrant nine years his junior, a woman who initially spurned Smith but married him in April 1872.  In his autobiography,  Smith/Lykkejaeger says of her:   “I was looking for my luck and found her.  Finding her, I found my luck.”  His account ends with the newlyweds moving to Salt Lake City that same year where he at last found his calling as a whiskey man.  Under the name A. M. Smith with $10 cash he opened a liquor store he called the California Wine Depot.  A bottle from that period is shown here.

The autobiography ends in Utah.  Here the story was picked up by Ron Feldhaus in his book on Minnesota bottles.  With ample advertising, good whiskey and wines, as well as canny investments,  Smith became a financial success in Salt Lake City.  An amber flask shown here exist from this enterprise.  Ever restless, he pulled up stakes in 1876 and with his family headed east to Philadelphia where he set up another liquor store.   After an initial business failure (something to which he was accustomed) Smith started over in the City of Brotherly Love, succeeded the second time and in 1886 was able to set up a small branch in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Perhaps drawn by the large Scandinavian immigration population in that state, when the business in Minnesota thrived,  Smith sold his Philadelphia store and moved his family west to Minneapolis. It would be home to “The Wandering Dane” for the rest of his life as the California Wine Depot became a fixture at 249 Hennapin Avenue.  That appears to be Smith’s bulky frame at the center of his highly illustrated wine label and trade mark.  For a number of years he also ran a eatery next to his store he called the California Restaurant.

The Dane featured a number of brands,  including “A.M. Smith’s Special Bourbon Whiskey,”  "Fine Old U. S. Cabinet Rye,” "Flour City Rye,” "Golden Buck,” "Harvester" and “Pennant.”  One brand was a “Amsco,”  an anagram of Smith’s assumed name. He also was noted for his “Crescent Brand” beverages.  He advertised these vigorously, including ads purportedly showing the large casks of wine and whiskey at the interior of his establishment.  He also featured trade cards with winsome children as the focus.

In a city where whiskey men regularly supplied saloons and other favored customers with gifts,  Smith was famous for his giveaway items. Among them were highly decorated shot glasses, artistic and finely etched.  He also provided tip trays.  Unlike other liquor dealers who lithographed their name and product around the edges, which sometimes made them hard to read,  Smith put his name and message right into the design.  He may have fancied himself the roaring lion shown on one tray.  Both trays were made by Chas. W. Shonk of Chicago. In addition, Smith was noted for distributing calendars, almanacs,  dominoes, corkscrews, and brushes as merchandising artifacts.

Smith's largesse may have stemmed from his own collecting interests.  He was a world known collector of rare coins, beginning during his period in Philadelphia when he worked as a coin dealer as well as a liquor merchant.  He subsequently wrote three  books on coins, beginning in 1881.  His “Encyclopedia of Gold and Silver Coins of the World” (1886) is still prized by numismatists and is itself sold for large sums.  Looking at pages of the tome is convincing both of Smith’s knowledge of coins and his ability to present information in a highly organized fashion.  Referring to bottle collecting,  Feldhaus says that of all Minnesota whiskey men “perhaps A.M. Smith would have best understood our hobby.”

In time Smith’s wine and liquor business became one of the largest in the region.  As localities in Minnesota and neighbor Wisconsin were voting “dry” through local option, he also did a thriving mail order business.   Discussing his success, Smith said, “And we are continuing to do better and better and better. I have increased in size, property and family.” 

It apparently was during a prosperous era that that Smith decided, using a “nom de plume,”, to write the story of his early life and likely to self-finance its publication. Originally entitled “Up and Down in the World: Or Paddle Your Own Canoe” and later “Luck of the Wandering Dane,” the book was first published in 1885 and ran 130 pages, with illustrations on virtually every page by an unnamed artist (Smith himself?).  The book cost 25 cents and on its cover states:  “For sale by all news dealers.”  A reviewer in the Atlantic Monthly said sourly of Smith’s autobiography:  “Occasionally the tale is told with snap and cleverness, but on the whole its humor is rather of the swaggering sort and hardly worth smiling over.”

The 1910 U.S. Census found Andrew and Bottila living in Minneapolis in a house with a niece and two servants.  He was 69 and gave his occupation as “liquor merchant.”  After years of running his wine and liquor business in Minneapolis, Andrew Smith died in July 1914, ostensibly as the aftermath of wounds he had suffered during his Civil War service.  His son, Mason Smith, carried on the business until it was shuttered by the coming of Prohibition in 1919.  By this time the family interests had diversified to an automobile dealership and a sand and gravel business.

Note:  “Luck of a Wandering Dane” has been republished by Hewlitt Packard as part of  a series of reprints from the collection of the University of Michigan Library.  It is worth reading about the early years of this “larger-than-life” whiskey man, but the current cost of the book is somewhat more than the 25 cents asked for the original.  Smith’s autobiography also has been available at no cost in an on-line version.

Philip Freiler’s Shot Glasses Were Fathered in Time

 Note: As indicated in earlier posts on this blog, when I come across an article on a pre-Pro whiskey man that exhibits thorough research and is as good or better than one of my  own authorship, I will, with permission, add it to my blog.  This is the case with Philip Freiler , a whiskey man of Elgin, Illinois.  Freiler’s story has been well told by Dick Bales in his “Common Stuff” column on the Pre-Pro.Com website.  With Dick’s permission,  after some minor editing, his article and illustrations are reproduced here:

Philip Freiler was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on April 3, 1860. His parents, Joseph and Mary Freiler, moved their family to Chicago in 1867, where Joseph started a wholesale liquor business.  In 1878 the Freiler family moved to Elgin, Illinois, where Joseph started a similar business. In 1883, due to failing health, Joseph sold his liquor enterprise to Philip.

Here are two pictures of the Freiler establishment on River Street in Elgin. Freiler is pictured in the one faded newspaper photograph. He is the fourth person from the right, standing, with no coat or hat. An arrow points to him.  Philip Freiler and his wife Elizabeth had four daughters. The family lived on Douglas Avenue in Elgin. At left below is a picture of their home, taken in about 1895.

Remarkably, there seems to be a connection between Freiler’s whiskey and an Elgin watch company!   The National Watch Company was incorporated in 1864. The company was reorganized in 1865 and a factory was built in Elgin in 1866. In 1874 the company changed its name to the Elgin National Watch Company.

As the accompanying illustration indicates, the symbol of the Elgin National Watch Company was a winged Father Time facing to the right, holding a scythe in one hand and a clock in the other.  It appears that when Philip Freiler introduced “Father Time Whiskey” to the drinking public, he merely flipped the Elgin National Watch Company picture over and used a version of this Father Time as his logo! These two “Father Time Whiskey” shot glasses also show a winged man holding a scythe and a clock, but here the figure is facing to the left.  The connection seems to be indisputable.

Father Time has been around for hundreds of years, but the wings seem to be an almost unique feature, and both the National Watch Company logo and the Father Time Whiskey glasses feature a winged Father Time.
  
Philip Freiler was not merely a local whiskey wholesaler. He sold his product throughout the Midwest, and he did not sell just Father Time Whiskey. Shown here is a “Century Club Whiskey” glass.    Philip Freiler glasses run the gamut from the beautiful Father Time Whiskey glasses to very plain looking all-text glasses.

 In 1938 the Century Distilling Company got into a trademark dispute with the Schneider Brewing Company. This federal case, indexed as 26 Fed. Supp. 936, offers some wonderful information about Philip Freiler in the opening paragraphs:  "One Philip Freiler of Elgin, Illinois, first used the name ‘Century Club’ as a name of whiskey in May, 1883, and established it as a well-known brand with a wide distribution in the Middle West. When the City of Elgin went dry under a local option law in 1914 he sold his entire business to Henry A. Klein, doing business as the Liquor Dealers Supply Company. Before that time, however, and on April 20, 1905, Freiler had registered the trade-mark ‘Century Club’ for whiskey and registration was issued to him by the Patent Office March 19, 1907."

Klein paid an ample consideration and continued the business under the Freiler name and manufactured and distributed gin and whiskey as “Century’ until prohibition."  This case was appealed in 1939, and the lead paragraph of this case confirms that  “Philip Freiler was engaged in the wholesale liquor business at Elgin, Ill., from 1883 to 1914.”  Freiler died on April 11, 1916, in Elgin, and he is buried in Waldheim Cemetery, Forest Park, Illinois. This cemetery features the famous Chicago Haymarket monument.

Philip Freiler has been gone for almost a century, but luckily for us, his glasses live on. None of the glasses pictured here seem to be all that common. It seems likely that one could spend years trying to amass a complete collection of all the Freiler glasses. There are also Freiler advertising items, such as these playing cards.

Addendum:  In addition to the whiskey labels noted here,  Freiler used a number of other brand names, including "Belle of Navarre,” "Bluff City,” “Congress Club,” "Dr. Schenk's,” "Freiler's 1869 Elmwood,”  "Freiler's 1880 Congress Club,”  "Freiler's 1883 Fine Old Little Joe,”  "Freiler's Old Bluff,” "Freiler's Old Little Elgin,” "Freiler's Silver Tide,” "Kentucky Queen,” "Old Elgin,” and "Ready Money."

The Louis Who "Zapped" Louisville

 In a town saturated with distillers and wholesale and retail whiskey dealers, Louis Zapp, a German immigrant, sensed that he had to make his business stand out among the crowd.  As a result he featured his own name in large letters on his jugs, bottles, advertising and giveaways.  In short,  he “Zapped” Louisville and found success in his strategy.

Zapp, shown here as he appeared on a whiskey label, was born in Germany in 1850.  his unusual name is a derivative of “Zepf,” a common name in Northern Germany.  When Louis was four years old his parents emigrated to the United States, settling in Louisville, Kentucky.   We can presume he received his early education in the public schools of his day, but like many sons of immigrant families, he went to work while still in his teens.   He appears to have served, likely as a clerk, for a Louisville merchant.

By 1883 he had saved sufficient money to join with a partner, J. H. Baker, to establish his own whiskey dealership and grocery known as Zapp, Baker & Co.  Although the Baker name continued to be affixed to the firm’s flagship brand of whiskey, within a short time the partner was gone and the name was changed to Louis Zapp & Co., the name it would carry until its closing.  The initial location was at 203 West Main and subsequent addresses were three in the 300 block of West Market Street.

Unlike many other Louisville spirits dealers who were putting their products into glass bottles,  Zapp preferred to use ceramic jugs.  Shown here is a large “scratch” jug with the firm name incised into the Albany slip glaze.   Zapp featured his name and a claim for “pure” products.  A similar label also graced a shoulder jug.  Later Zapp moved to a different format for his containers.  His labels featured his name in large script under the glaze.  He used an array of jugs, including cone tops decorated with Albany slip and Bristol glaze as well as beehive shapes.

This “Zapping” of Louisville was carried out in his advertising as well.  Shown here is an advertisement for “Louis Zapp’s Quite Ripe Kentucky Whiskey.”  It also advertised “J. H. Baker Bourbon 11 Year Old and the company’s line of “Old Royal” Brand California Wines.

The ad also implied that Zapp had a distillery and bonded warehouse in Jefferson County, Kentucky.   The record indicates that while he did not own a distillery, he had a financial interest in one or two.

One was the Rugby Distillery (RD #360, 5th District of Kentucky).  This facility, which later bore other names, was located at the corner or Missouri Avenue and 36th Street in Louisville.  Insurance records indicate that it was frame with a metal or slate roof.  The property included four heated warehouses, all brick with metal or slate roofs.  A barn was located on the property to make use of the spent mash for cattle feed, a common adjunct to distilleries at that time.  Zapp may also have had a financial interest or whiskey purchase agreement with the Old Kentucky Distillery of Louisville. (See my post of Feb. 2013.)   Zapp also applied his distinctive name logo to his giveaway items,  many of them shot glasses advertising his Old J. H. Baker brand.

Louis Zapp also had a personal life.  In 1875, he had married a Kentucky-born woman named Margarett Lehr of Louisville.  They would have five children,  born between 1876 and 1884.  The 1900 census found the Zapp family living at 1413 New Broadway in Louisville.   All their children were still in their household,  including Ruby, 24; Arthur, 22; Louis Jr., 20; Louise, 18, and Phillip, 16.   Their father’s occupation was listed as “grocer-liquor dealer.”  Zapp also was taking a leadership role in the Kentucky whiskey industry.

An example was his advocacy to the U.S. Congress in 1897.  The record shows he entreated the House Ways and Means Committee, the body that affixed tariffs,  not to raise the duty on corks, many of which were imported from Spain.  Zapp contended that American manufacturers of corks had formed a monopoly trust,  still lawful and common in those days.  As a result they were able to control the price of corks and whiskey distributors were, as he said,  “compelled to pay whatever prices they are pleased to ask.”   The only competition was from foreign sources, he added, and that increasing the tariff would only enrich the American combine at the expense of dealers and bottlers without increasing revenues to the government.  My hunch is that the whiskey industry, which had strong ties in the federal government, might have been able to stop the tariff increase as Zapp requested.

Eventually Louis brought his son, Arthur, into his liquor business. Arthur began as a clerk and worked himself up into a management position.  In 1903 Zapp filed articles of incorporation for his wholesale liquor and grocery business, valuing it at $30,000.  Among the incorporators were Arthur;  another was a relative named H. J. Zapp, and C. H. Short.  As the Zapp name became well known in Louisville,  apparently the need for emphasizing the name receded and later jugs, such as one shown here, toned down the logo.  By 1909 the company management changed once again as Short was made a full partner and the business became Zapp, Short & Company.   The firm continued to sell whiskey until the coming of national Prohibition.   Afterward it emphasized its grocery lines.

Zapp, even with advancing age,  continued to be active in managing the business through the 1920s.  The 1930 census found him residing at 2725 Birchwood Road in Louisville.  His wife, Margarett,  had died the year before and he was living with daughter Ruby, unmarried, and daughter Margaret and her husband.  That same year Louis died, just short of 80 years of age.  He was buried in Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery beside Margarett.   Through his success he had insured that Zapp would be a name remembered in Louisville and whiskey lore for a long, long time.

James Wolcott Was Tip Top with Tip Trays

Pre-Prohibition whiskey men be recognized for a lot of reasons,  some bad, some good.  A plethora of court cases can get someone known, as can violators of the 1906 Food and Drug laws.  On the positive side we remember those early liquor dealers who gave the public not only a good drink but an artistic merchandising approach.  In that context,  James E. Wolcott of Rochester, New York, and the liquor company bearing his name deserve to be remembered as superior for their contribution to artistic tip trays.  Wolcott was “tip top” with that saloon giveaway.

Wolcott was born in Rochester on April 20, 1850.  We have the unusual benefit of having him captured by the U.S. Census of that year as a one month old baby.  His father, George, was a 33-year-old liquor dealer in the New York town; his mother Caroline, five years younger.   A two-year-old brother, Henry, rounded out the family in 1850.  James attended the public schools of Rochester and also, according to a biography, spent time at Professor Satterlee’s secondary school.

As a kind of natural progression,  he entered his father’s liquor business at the age of 22.  That establishment had been founded in 1827 by E. Pherus of Rochester.  Within a few years George Wolcott and his brother bought out Pherus out. When the brother retired, George brought James into the business as a partner but after a few years, the father too retired and the son was left to run the organization.  In the meantime James was having a personal life.  In 1874 in Rochester, he married Isla J. Chase who like himself had been born in New York.  They would have three children,  Carolyn, George and Charles.

James Wolcott proved to have a real genius for merchandising his liquor.  In an 1877 Rochester business directory he described his firm as “Distillers, rectifiers, and wholesale dealers in pure double copper distilled old rye, bourbon and wheat whiskies....”  The address given was “East End of Clarissa Street Bridge.”  That was the company’s location during its entire 90 years of existence.  In the 1880 census, Wolcott described his occupation as “distiller.” More likely he was a rectifier,  blending a number of his own brands from raw whiskey obtained elsewhere.  Among his labels were “Wolcott’s 1827 Rye,” “Brookdale,” “Delaware,” “Malted Wheat Whiskey,” and “Old Candlelight Rye.” 

The flagship brand was “Cornhill Rye,” first listed as the company “specialty” in 1895.  It was a name with strong recognition for many Rochester residents.  Corn Hill was one of Rochester’s most historic districts and Clarissa Street , named after the daughter of an early land owner, one of the district’s well known avenues.   As early as 1810 freed black slaves were living in Western New York and Rochester’s first African-American neighborhood was located there.  Corn Hill is currently on the National Historical Register.

Where Wolcott really came to distinguish himself was in his saloon giveaways.  Tip trays, usually about  six inches in diameter,  had come into fashion for all sorts of businesses as the process of color lithography on metal became perfected in the United States.  For bars and restaurants, however, trays were a “natural.”  Recognizing their promise, J. E. Wolcott & Company advertised Cornhill Rye with a wide variety of these items.  Shown here are an array of trays, three with the pictures of comely women and others depicting a bottle, a stag and a mare and her colt.  The tray with the illustration of an Indian chief is perhaps the most interesting.  It appears not to have been produced by a lithographic process and looks almost hand painted.  The firm also gave away to favored customer shot glasses advertising Cornhill Whiskey and a tall glass for its 1827 Highball Blended Whiskey.

If making and selling whiskey was his occupation, raising and racing horses was Wolcott’s passion,  indicated by the horses on a tip tray and repeated illustrations of equines in his liquor ads.  Regularly owning one or two thoroughbreds,  Wolcott was a member of the Gentlemen’s Driver Association in Northern New York and regularly raced his steeds on the Rochester Raceway, in which he had a financial interest.  His biographer says that this whiskey man became a well-known figure in racing circles and it was bruted about “that any horse belonging  to James E. Wolcott was sufficient guarantee of its worth and highbred qualities.”  Walcott also was active as a Mason and attained the 32nd degree in the Scottish Rite.

His outside interests likely were the cause of Woltcott’s leaving his company’s management and ultimately its ownership.  About 1880 he had hired a Wisconsin-born clerk named  John F. Zimmer.  Zimmer had come to Rochester as a child, been educated there and got his start in business with J.E. Wolcott & Co.  He had risen through the ranks, been made a partner, and in 1900 entered into an ownership agreement with Walcott for the company.  Zimmer reorganized it, naming himself as president and Thomas J. Naylon as secretary.  He kept Wolcott’s name and location.  It has been suggested that some of his financing might have come from the New York & Kentucky Company, one element of the so-called “Whiskey Trust.”

After leaving the whiskey trade, Wolcott continued to be a major financial actor in Rochester.  He was a director of the Genesee Valley Trust Company and the Traders National Bank.  His biographer says of him:  “His opinions regarding financial and other business matters were considered sound and his ideas concerning management and experience were often received as conclusive.” 

Still a young 56 years old,  Wolcott was in Norfolk, Virginia, when he was stricken and died on November 24, 1906.  The cause of death was given as “apoplexy,”  a term not in general use today that once covered everything from strokes to heart attacks.   His funeral was held in St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, where he had been an active member, and he was buried in Rochester’s Mount Hope Cemetery while his grieving family stood by the graveside.  Shown here is Wolcott’s ivy covered headstone.

Wolcott posthumously earned a long biographical eulogy in the 1908 “History of Rochester and Monroe County” by William F. Peck.  Although Peck lavished on him many positive attributes, I believe the better tribute was presented shortly after his death as a resolution of the Vestry of St. Luke’s Church.  The resolution said of James Wolcott:  “Modest, kindly, firm and high-minded, the soul of honor and of courtesy in all his relationships and responsibilities, he illustrated in an eminent degree the qualities and the virtues of the Christian gentleman.”

The Wolcott Co. continued in business under Zimmer until 1917 when closed by the creeping paralysis caused by the coming of Prohibition throughout America.  As noted earlier,  the firm had survived 90 years at the same location, most of it under the Wolcott name.

Alexander "Sandy" Wood: Friend to the Famous

When Alexander, (“Sandy”) Wood died, his funeral was attended by former U.S. President Grover Cleveland, just one of the well known figures who were his buddies and fishing companions during his lifetime and who at his death came to pay tribute in Boston to the memory of this immigrant Scots whiskey man.

Wood, shown here in an undated photograph, was the son of Peter Wood and Janet (Jessie) Cleghorn, born in Kelso, Scotland,  in 1835.  At some point, with family members believed to include his mother and brother, he emigrated to New Brunswick, Canada, and settled in York County.   Alexander first appeared in public documents there in 1858 when he purchased some land in Manners Sutton Parish.

At the age of 32 in 1867 Wood moved to Boston.  Two years later he married Frances J. Sealy, the daughter of John and Elizabeth Sealy of Boston.  His wife,  nine years his junior, had emigrated with her parents from England.  The Woods would have four children.  During this period,  Alexander established a partnership with Marshall S. Pollard, a local businessman.  According to an 1872 Boston business directory,  under the name Wood, Pollard & Company, the two opened a cigar and grocery business at 204 Washington Street and a liquor distribution company at 100 & 102 Broadway. With the success of the latter,  the company moved to a larger building shown here at the corner of Friend and Causeway.

As did many grocers, Wood and Pollard featured their own brands, including coffees. On the liquor side, they were rectifiers,  that is, mixing up house blends of whisky from stocks furnished from Kentucky and other distilleries. For example, their firm is among those in an 1892 listing of companies being supplied by the Mayfield Distillery,  registered as #229 in the 5th District of Kentucky.  Wood, Pollard brand names included: "Cordova V. O. Rye,” "Elmwood,” "Kit Carson,” “A Rye,” "Nectar Gin,” "New Life Malt,” "Old Haynor,” "Oxford Rye,” "Snowdrop Gin,” "The Oxford, ", "Very Old Cabinet 1873, "W. P. & Co. Special Reserve Rye,” and "White Wheat Whiskey.” 

Drawing on the Yankee legacy,  the partners named their flagship brand “Lexington,”  specifically Lexington A.A.A. Rye, as shown here on a ceramic closure and on a labeled amber quart.  They also sold their whiskey in pint flasks and in clear “lady’s leg” bottles with a strong embossed name laterally across the surface.  They also imported a schnapps-like product from Schiedam, Netherlands,  and slapped their personalize label on it.  Like other Boston liquor dealers,  Wood believed in providing advertising giveaways to saloons and other favored customers.   For the former there were shot glasses;  for the latter a ceramic purple “nip” in the shape of a cabin.

Amid this growing success,  Alexander met with tragedy.  Within a decade of his marriage to Frances who bore him three children, she died.  The 1880 U.S. Census found him, a widower,  living in Boston with his widowed mother, age 75, and three minor children,  Frank 10;  Ada , 7, and Jessie, 5.   Perhaps seeking a mother for his kids Wood married again two years later.  His second wife was Antoinette C. Urann.  This union would produce three more children, Fanny A., Antoinette S. J., and Alexander H.

Throughout this time Wood was returning regularly to New Brunswick during summers to fish.   In 1873 he and friends had purchased from a Canadian land company salmon fishing waters on the Southwest Miramichi River in Stanley Parish.   A man with an engaging and outgoing personality,  Sandy became acquainted with some of the leading figures of the Boston and beyond and would bring them fishing on his salmon-teeming river in Canada.  Among them were the the famous actor, Joseph Jefferson,  the governor of Massachusetts, William E. Russell, and most important, a President of the United States, Grover Cleveland.   Joining up in Boston the distinguished group of anglers would take a train through New England and into Canada.

Tragedy was to strike Sandy Wood a second time.  In 1891 his wife, Antoinette, after giving birth to her third child, died suddenly.  The Boston Globe of Nov. 8 provided these insights:   “ Mrs. Wood was a young woman of remarkable strength and grace of character, and her untimely death takes from her husband and children a most devoted wife and mother. She leaves three children, one a baby born shortly before her own death, and three stepchildren, to whom she had greatly endeared herself, and by whom she will always be remembered with affectionate tenderness.”   Her memorial service was held in the family home in the Savin Hill district.  Alexander, even though once more left with minor children,  did not marry again.

For the next few years Wood continued to manage the prosperous enterprises that he had founded decades before, to look after his children, and to continue his fishing parties to New Brunswick.  In June 1899 he himself died.  His memorial service, once again held  at the family’s Savin Hill home, drew a celebrity crowd.  Among them were former President Cleveland,  Joseph Jefferson, and four members of the Jefferson family.   They saw their friend’s body, according to the Boston Globe, “encased in a handsome casket, rested in one of the parlors, surrounded by numerous beautiful floral pieces.”   One pillow of pinks was from his partner, Marshall Pollard.  A simple service was said by the Rev. Christopher R. Eliot and then this Scots whiskey man was laid to rest in Boston’s Forest Hills Cemetery.

Wood’s last will and testament provided some insights into his wealth and character.  He left to his son, Frederick,  the house this heir was living in. He willed $5,000 cash to each of his children and then stipulated a that everything else among his possessions be divided equally.  These included “pictures, jewelry, silver, books, wearing apparel, household furniture, horses, carriages, and provisions.”  For the younger children, Wood appointed guardians and trustees.  Interestedly,  Wood said nothing about the disposition of the firm.  The absence suggests that the business was destined to be Pollard’s.

The fate of the company is shrouded in time.  When Marshall Pollard died thirteen years later in July at Marblehead, Massachusetts, age 70, he was credited by the New York Times as still managing Wood, Pollard & Co., “wholesale and retail grocers of Boston.”  After Pollard death the company reincorporated in 1913.   A 1916 Boston Chamber of Commerce listing indicated that members of the Pollard family were running the company.  At the time of Nation Prohibition in 1919, the firm was forced to terminate its liquor business.

Notes:  Some of the images and information here was derived from a website maintained by and for the descendants of Peter and Jessie Wood, a site that includes considerable material on Alexander Wood.  Census data and Boston Globe obituaries also were helpful in filling out the picture of this enterprising Scots immigrant and his family.