The Forgotten Whiskey Man of Minneapolis — J. C. Oswald

Note:  As in the past, when I come across material about a whiskey man that is as good or better than anything of my authoring, I will reprint it in this blog.   Ron Feldhaus in his 1987 publication, “Bottles, Breweriana and Advertising Jugs” included a lengthy biography of J.C. Oswald.  Feldhaus in turn had gathered information from an 1890 book, “Biographical History of the Northwest” by Alonzo Phelps and an 1893 book, “History of the City of Minneapolis, Minnesota,”  by Isaac Atwater, both of which contained extensive biographies of Oswald. With a few additions signaled by brackets, Ron’s article is reprinted below by his permission.

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There have been some distinguished men in the history of the Minnesota liquor industry.  Some became known even outside the state, such as A. M. Smith and George Benz.  Others were influential in the growth of Minneapolis, such as Isaac Weil and Jonas F. Brown.  [This blog has posts on each of these whiskey men.]   However there is one man who is virtually unknown to the Minneapolis bottle collector because he seems to have left no embossed or paper labeled bottles or “go-withs” to mark his passing.  Yet this man was in the liquor business for over fifty years.  He was a pioneer of Minneapolis.  He was a State Senator.  He raised race horses of world renown.  And his native wines were known far beyond Minnesota’s borders.  This man [shown above] was John Conrad Oswald.

J. C. Oswald was born in the village of Oberaach, Canton Thurgau, Switzerland [shown above] on May 20, 1824.  At age 16 he was apprenticed to a cotton manufacturer, Godfrey Scheitlin,.  In two years his industry and aptness were rewarded by his appointment as overseer,  which he diligently pursued for the next five years.

In 1847 he joined the tide of emigration which flowed toward the shores of America.  While in New York he was appointed the agent of large tract of land in Virginia.   He met Ursula Scheitlin, an old girlfriend and also the sister of his former employer.  They soon married and she accompanied him to the scene of his labor for the next ten years.  It was a wild region [Cabell County, now West Virginia, shown here]  and offered none of the comfort and convenience of life.

He opened a country store, cleared and cultivated a farm and met with fair success.  Five children were born while the Oswalds were in the South.  Only one survived.

In 1857, he sold out and came to Minneapolis, where Godfrey Scheitlin, his former employer and now brother-in-law, had preceded him.  He opened a general store with his brother Henry Oswald and after a year bought out his brother’s interest.  He moved his stock goods to the old land office buildings in lower town.  In the spring of 1859 took a new partner, Mathias Nothakel.  The firm continued in business until 1862, when both members sold out.

He then bought a 160 acre farm named “Oak Grove,” which was on the site of the present Bryn Mawr area of Minneapolis.  Experimenting with an unusual crop for Minnesota, he raised tobacco and made a success of it for two years, but the tobacco was destroyed by frost in August 1863 and he never repeated the attempt. Oswald had a fondness for horses, which he bred and raised.  His mares brought him nine colts, every one a trotter and some breaking world records.

His knowledge of wine making in the valleys of his native land directed his attention to the adaptation of the fruits of this country for wine.  In 1858, he and Godfrey Scheitlin experimented in the the manufacture of native fruit wine.  The experiments proved a great success.  In 1862 Oswald constructed a wine cellar on his farm, and engaged in the manufacture of wine on an extensive scale.  “J. C. Oswald’s Native Wines” became celebrated and brought orders from distant places.

About 1866 he added to the wine business that of distilled liquors and established the first wholesale wine and liquor business in Minneapolis.  [Normandy Rye, Monogram Whiskey and Nelson Rye among his brands.]  The first location was an old stand at the corner of First Street and Hennepin Avenue.  In 1867 he moved to No. 3 Pence Opera House.

In 1874 he erected a four-story brick store at No. 17 Washington Avenue North, where he stayed until his death  [the building at the far right of the photo]. In 1881 he associated with Mr. Theophil Basting, who long had been manager of the business and also his son-in-law.  The firm’s name was J.C. Oswald and Co. That same year he had a huge elegant home built at 1332 Hennepin Avenue [below].

Oswald always took an active interest in public affairs.  He was on the Board of Commissioners who directed the building of the present County Courthouse in Minneapolis.  He was instrumental in the development of the first electric street car system.  For many years he was a member of the Park Board.  During these years the foundation of the magnificent park system of the city was laid, and its plans largely perfected.

Oswald was a distinguished looking man.  He had piercing eyes, white hair surrounding a balding top and a white General Custer style mustache and goatee.  In 1887 he was elected to the State Senate and he held the office for four years.  At this time he sold his farm, 119 acres of it going for nearly one-half million dollars. 

At the time of his death on June 13, 1905, J.C. Oswald was Vice-President and Director of the Germania Bank and Director of the F&M Bank. Shortly after Oswald’s death, Basting closed the  J.C. Oswald and Co. doors for the last time.

Note:  Oswald is buried in Section 2, Lot 136, Grave 4, of Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis.  His headstone is shown here.  The "fancy" jug for Normandy Rye, shown above is a 2018 arrival to this post.  It graciously was sent to me by Verlyn Durene, a Minnesotan who eagerly has sought Oswald materials and artifacts.

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Martin Shaughnessy of St. Louis: Fire Within and Fires Without

Martin Shaughnessy was about fire.  Fired within by strong ambition to succeed, principally by selling whiskey, this Irish immigrant lad quickly gained recognition in the business circles of St. Louis.  But the fires that ravaged major landmarks in the city seem likewise to have been on his mind — and eventually spurred him to action.

Martin was born in County Galway on the west of Ireland in 1855, the son of Michael S. and Mary Mooney Shaughnessy.  When he was about eleven years old the family came to the United States and settled in St. Louis where they already had relatives living.  The boy was educated in local schools.

The Shaughnessys had resided in the Missouri city only a few months before a major conflagration had all of St. Louis buzzing.  Shown above in ruins, the Lindell Hotel, touted in the local press as “the largest building of its kind on the Continent, if not in the world,” was destroyed in March 1867.  After a mysterious blaze broke out on the fifth floor, firemen were unable to reach the flames with their hoses and fire quickly spread to upper floors, in the end reducing the vaunted hotel to rubble.  Martin, now 11, almost certainly witnessed it as city residents by the thousands flocked to the flaming site. 

Upon completing his education, Shaughnessy went to work for an uncle who was in the hotel business, managing the American House Hotel.  After learning the hospitality business, the young man moved to John C. Foley Company, wholesale whiskey commercial merchants.  He spent three years there learning the liquor trade. Then, fired by ambition, he struck out on his own in 1877.  He was assisted in this effort by his ability to take over for an uncle, John Mooney,  who owned a St. Louis wholesale and retail liquor dealership, listed in local directories at 100 East Twelfth Street. 

Martin almost immediately changed the name of Mooney’s firm to his own — “M. Shaughnessy & Co.” — another sign of the ambition burning inside him. He found almost immediate success in the whiskey trade.  His first address listed in directories was 121 Locust Street, followed by a a rapid series of consecutive moves to locations on North Main, North Sixth, and for many years an address on St. Charles.   His need for larger and larger spaces likely was driven by his activities as a “rectifier,”  that is, he was blending and compounding raw whiskeys received from distillers to achieve desired taste and smoothness, bottling them and applying his own labels.  

His proprietary brands, included “Coal Port,”  “Grandee,” “Leroy,” “San Bois,” “Diamond Brand,” “Shaughnessy Rye Malt,” and “Shaughnessy’s Special.”  His flagship was “Club House Whiskey,” which he trademarked in 1888  and again in 1905, after Congress stiffened the infringement laws.  By 1906, despite the expense involved, he had trademarked most of his brands.  Those whiskies were issued at retail in both clear and amber bottles, sized from minis to flasks to quarts.

Much of Shaughnessy’s success can be attributed to his frequent and imaginative advertising.  Shown left is an 1891 ad for his Diamond Brand.  He describes it as “distilled from selected rye and barley malt, after the formula of a noted Pennsylvania distillery.”   Like many whiskey men of his time, he ascribed medicinal qualities to the blend claiming:  “It will be found especially valuable in conjunction with milk in the treatment of all pulmonary troubles.”  At right is a 1900 ad in the National Druggist magazine for his Club House Brand, touted there as a stimulant.  Pure whiskey is sometimes hard to get, the ad states, but yet “how essential it is for medicinal purposes.”

Shaughnessy also adopted merchandising techniques common with wholesale whiskey dealers.   He issued a series of shot glasses that advertised his brands, particularly Club House Whiskey.  Those items would be given to favored customers, particularly saloon owners and bartenders who were buying and featuring his brands.  Also echoing a trend in his trade, in 1905 Martin changed the name of his firm to the M. Shaughnessy Distilling Company.  Although laws prevented rectifiers from designating themselves “distillers,”  the “distilling company” label was legal for them.

Meanwhile, Martin found time to marry.  At age 36 in 1891, he wed Agnes Tivy, born in 1867 in St. Louis, the daughter of John Tivy, an Irish immigrant, and Margaret Ahern, a native of St. Louis.  Agnes has been described by one source as “a young woman of means.”  By this time Martin himself also was growing wealthy.  A 1924 newspaper article said Shaughnessy’s career “soon brought him among the first St. Louisans in wealth and prestige.” 

 

Martin and Agnes are not recorded as having children and apparently spent much of their married life living in hotels.  One of them likely was the Lindell Hotel that had been rebuilt following the 1867 fire. Once again it was the largest hostelry in St. Louis, and accounted “the best appointed and conducted hotel” for travelers in town.  In April 1886, the Lindell caught fire a second time;  this blaze originated in the basement, spread to the lobby and smoke engulfed the entire building.  The press described the hotel as “so badly damaged by fire, smoke and water that tonight its interior presents a sad appearance.”  This time, however, it was not destroyed.

Hotel fires seem to have been endemic in St. Louis.  In 1883 the four story Occidental Hotel was ruined an a fire that took the life of a firefighter.  A residential hotel fire took the lives of eleven occupants.  Later, the Hotel Belvidere burned at the southeast corner of 14th Street and Washington Avenue.   Shaughnessy must have been well aware of the dangers but decided to invest in a hostelry that already had burned twice.  As one writer described it:  “Not content with his considerable assets, he decided in 1898 to acquire and manage the Lindell Hotel….”  With the purchase of the Lindell, Martin and Agnes made it their home.

Meanwhile, Shaughnessy’s whiskey business required a larger warehouse facility for storing his whiskey for aging.  In 1903 he acquired for $70,000 (equivalent to $1.75 million today), a parcel at the northwest corner of Washington Avenue and 22nd Street.  There in 1906 he commissioned a structure that still stands today as the Martin Shaughnessy Building, a six-story red brick Classical Revival warehouse now on the National Register of Historic Places.  Shown right, the building’s claim to fame is that it was the very first fireproof warehouse in St. Louis and one of the city’s first completely fireproof buildings.  One writer has speculated:  “Probably having witnessed…the 1867 fire at the old Lindell Hotel, the 1885 fire at the new Lindell Hotel or any number of other local conflagrations, Shaughnessy would have had ample inspiration to speculate capital on an innovative fireproof storage warehouse.”

Recognizing the inflammatory nature of his stored whiskey, Shaughnessy insisted that the building be constructed entirely with fireproof materials, including brick and terra cotta on the exterior and concrete flooring and ceiling on the interior.  Load-bearing interior iron columns were sheathed in hollow-tile terra cotta, then coated with a layer of concrete to provide extra protection from fire.  Heavy fire doors at each floor sealed access to storage spaces.

During this period, Shaughnessy also was deciding the fate of the Lindell Hotel.  Never the same after the second blaze, the hostelry was torn down to make way for new commercial construction.  Martin and Agnes now moved to the Washington Hotel, but only temporarily.   Wealthy St. Louisans were  foreshadowing the gated communities of our own time.  They were creating self-governing enclaves known as “private places” whose streets and common gardens were owned by the residents, gated, and patrolled.  One of those was Washington Terrace, a private place near in the Central West End of St. Louis.  There in 1908,  Shaughnessy built a three-bay, two story mansion in the Tudor Revival style at No. One.  A carved foliated cartouche over large front doors proudly bore that address.  Shown here at the right of the spectacular gatehouse, the still extant Shaughnessy mansion is on the Historical Register.

Shaughnessy maintained his whiskey business even as prohibitionary forces were shutting down his markets.   According to directories, his firm made a last office move in 1916 to 118 North Third Street and then was forced to shut down about 1919 as National Prohibition loomed.  Club House and other Shaughnessy brands disappeared.   The 1920 census found Agnes and Martin, now age 62, living alone in their mansion with three servants. Although Shaughnessy gave his occupation as “none” to the census taker, he actively was looking after his considerable real estate holdings in St. Louis. 

Martin died six years later in September 1926.  A Roman Catholic, he received a Requiem Mass and was buried in Section 18, Lot 294, of Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis.  Agnes would join him there 19 years later.  Their joint gravestone is shown here.  Although the stone carries no epitaph, Reedy’s Mirror, a St. Louis periodical, earlier had described Shaughnessy thus:  “…A leading citizen and an extensive owner of real estate, a patron of the arts, a supporter of many charitable movements, and a man who performs religiously the duties of citizenship.”   Martin Shaughnessy, I would add, also had dealt successfully with fires inside and out.

Note:  Much of the information provided here was derived from the National Park Service “statement of significance” required to place the Martin Shaughnessy Building on the National Register of Historic Places.  The form was prepared by Matthew Bivens, researcher, and Carolyn Toft, executive director, for the Landmarks Association of St. Louis.

The Thomas Hall Story Almost Ended Before It Began

In his 1905 book, “A History of the New California:  Its Resources and Its People,” author Leigh Hadley Irvine devoted two and one half pages to Thomas B. Hall, a highly successful Sacramento grocer and whiskey dealer, whose accomplishments included forming a state military unit and serving as its commander, helping frame the Sacramento city charter, and playing a key role in settling large tracts of California land with colonist farmers.   Hall’s accomplished life, however, came close to ending before it began. 

The same year that Hall was born, 1853, his father, an immigrant from Ireland of English descent, was drawn westward by the idea of California riches.  He pulled up stakes in Illinois and bringing his family, including baby Thomas, headed to Sacramento.  There he went to work for the Folsom and Placerville Railroad.  When the owners neglected to pay him, Richard Hall decided to return East, taking a steamer via the Panama route.   The ship was the ill-fated Yankee Blade, which wrecked at Point Conception off the coast of Santa Barbara in 1854, costing an estimated 30 to 40 lives.

The Hall family, carrying baby Thomas, struggled to reach the coast five miles away but survived.  There they were picked up by another steamer that took them to Los Angeles.  After remaining there a week, they took another ship to San Francisco.  Deciding that the fates had decreed that the Halls should stay in California, the father bought a farm near Sacramento and for the rest of his life tilled the soil.

After spending his early days on the farm and receiving his education in the public schools of Sacramento and some training at a San Francisco business college, Thomas Hall, now sixteen, decided it was more profitable to sell food than to raise it.  He began as a porter at a Sacramento wholesale grocery firm.   As his biographer Irvine tells it:  “Seven years from that time he succeeded his employers in the business.”  With a partner named Luhrs, Hall established a grocery firm that would operate for decades.

As shown here on a trade card, the firm specialized in ham and rye — not rye bread, but rye whiskey.  Although Hall and his partner sold whiskey in their grocery, in 1882 they bought out a existing  liquor dealership and made whiskey a major element in their business.   They used the brand names, “Derby Brand,”  Double Stamp,” Old Log Cabin,” “Pride of the West.”  Their flagship was “Snow Flake Whiskey, advertised as Kentucky Bourbon with the claim:  “Unrivaled for purity, mellowness and bouquet.”  

Bottle collectors know Hall, Luhrs & Co. as a prolific distributor of whiskey, with at least five embossed round quart bottles, several mini-cylinders and at least one pumpkinseed flask.  As many wholesale liquor dealers did, Hall, Luhrs also issued advertising shot glasses as giveaway items to saloons and other establishments carrying their brands of liquor

Meanwhile Thomas Hall was having a personal life.  In March 1876 he was married in Sacramento to Selina A. Govan, a native of Pennsylvania and the daughter of James and Elizabeth Govan, from a family descended from a line of Scotch/English stonemasons, marble-cutters and builders.   Thomas and Selina would have two children, a boy,  Ward, and a girl, Ethel.  The 1880 census found the family living in Sacramento with their two small children and two boys, likely relatives of Selina, whom Hall was sending to school.  His occupation was given as “wholesale liquor.”  Son Ward would join the firm upon maturity, initially working as a cashier.  Daughter Ethel would benefit from her father’s prosperity by being sent to Stanford University.  

Hall, Luhrs first location was at the corner of Third and K Streets in Sacramento, but by 1883 the increased business volume had required that larger quarters be obtained.  As a result the following year the company moved into a more spacious building on Second Street, specifically erected for the partners and obtained under a longterm lease.  The Sacramento Daily Union described the facilities in glowing terms under the headline “A Splendid New Structure for the Firm of Hall, Luhrs & Co.”   The building was drawn to plans of Hall’s own devising, rising three stories.  The main floor front was constructed wholly of iron and glass and the upper stories were also made of iron and glass.  The Daily Union reporter marveled over the sample room for its “…artistic design, composed wholly of wooden framework and glass.  It rises to the height of the eighteen-foot ceiling and over it is a large opening with the upper skylight above, throwing a strong but softened light through the glass roof.”

On either side of the office and sample room were railway tracks traversing the entire length of the building.  Goods could be delivered at the front door, placed on cars, and transported to any part of the main floor or sent below or above by a three-story hydraulic elevator.  After having served other purposes over the years including as a hotel,  the Hall, Luhrs & Co. building now is part of the Sacramento Historical District and has been restored to its original glory, as shown below.  

Established in its new quarters and the acknowledged largest wholesale grocery and liquor business in the city,  Thomas Hall turned his attention to other interests.  He was one of the organizers of the Mount Shasta Mineral Springs Company of Siskiyou County and a founder of the Orangevale Colonization Project, a venture that settled large tracts of California agricultural land with farm families.   He also maintained his own farm near Sacramento.   Active in the Republican Party,  Hall frequently was tapped for public service,  serving as a framer of the city charter and on Sacramento committees dealing with public works and business development.  When an auditing board for the state Commissioner of Public Works was created, the Republican governor chose Hall as a member.  Hall also promoted local sports.  In 1889 Hall, Luhrs sponsored Snowflake Park in Sacramento, obviously named after the firm’s flagship whiskey brand.  The park was the city’s primary baseball venue for at least a decade.

Hall’s military career deserves special attention.  In 1885, age 32 and still building his business, he joined an artillery regiment as a private, part of the California militia, equivalent today to the National Guard.  Shortly after his enlistment, his leadership qualities were recognized and he quickly was advanced to corporal.  When a new unit, Company G, later was being organized, Hall was elected its captain, a post he held for ten years before retiring.  He carried the “captain” title with him throughout the rest of his life. 

With the coming of National Prohibition the Hall, Luhrs Company was forced to shut down its liquor sales.  Snowflake Whiskey as a brand disappeared, not to be revived after Repeal.  The grocery company is reported to have survived until 1928.   I have been unable to find the date of death for Thomas Hall or his resting place.

A fitting epitaph for this extraordinary whiskey man was written about him in 1905:   “From porter to proprietor would aptly characterize the business career of Mr. Hall, and every successive step of progress has been earned by his earnest and diligent efforts.”  The author did not dwell on how close this successful whiskey man had come to death in the Yankee Blade disaster — how the extraordinary life of Thomas Hall had almost ended before it began.

Note: The 1905 book, “A History of the New California:  Its Resources and Its People,” by Leigh Hadley Irvine provided a wealth of information about Thomas Hall as did newspaper articles and other sources.  

  

For the Holtzermanns of Piqua, Bitters Were Mighty Sweet

 

That a major national alcoholic drink originated in tiny Piqua, Ohio, was in itself unusual.  Unusual too were the circumstances surrounding the Holtzermanns who made Piqua their home and, along with whiskey, produced the stomach bitters that made the family a fortune.

The central figure among this clan was Christoph August Holtzermann known by friends and family as August.  He was born in 1840 a Piquod — as residents of Piqua are referred to — from a German family with strong ties into the Prussian military.  His father was Jacob Daniel (J.D.) Holtzermann who had emigrated from Germany in the early 1800s and settled in this southwest Ohio town.  His mother was Johanna L. Dettmer.

Jacob’s reasons for selecting this location to settle down are unclear.  Piqua originally was a small crossroads hamlet with a combination of log frame houses, ma-and-pa shops, taverns, and small-scale industries.  The completion of the Miami & Erie Canal in 1837 allowed the shipment of goods more easily in and out of town and gave an initial economic boost.   The coming of the Columbus, Piqua and Indiana Railroad in 1856 again led to some increased commercial activity and the downtown shown above.

Both the 1850 and 1860 U.S. Census show Christoph Holtzermann living at home with his parents.  By 1863, however, he had taken a wife.  She was Elise Schletter, born in Germany, and the daughter of Friedrich Ludwig Schletter and Tibetha Gertrude Holtzermann.  Elise was his second cousin and possibly brought to America to marry him.  By the 1870 census, Christoph had established his own full household of Piquods.  Living with the Holtzermanns were their four children, Johanna, George, Louis and Jacob.  Also residing with them were Elise’s mother and her sisters Tibetha and Caroline.  Two domestics served the family.  

Holtzermann could well afford to sustain this many people.  His net worth according to the census was equivalent to $250,000 today.   In the early 1860s he had opened a small store at the corner of Main and Water Streets, shown above, advertising himself as a liquor merchant and druggist.  He named the company “J.D. Holtzermann & Sons.” The business was successful but unspectacular until 1867 when Christoph patented his formula for bitters.  He said the beverage was composed of sugar, orange peel, orange apple, oms root, galanga root, gentian root, calamus root, wormwood, ginger, cardamon seed, cassia, mace, nutmeg, clover and coriander seed.  Perhaps the most important ingredient, however, was pure alcoholic spirits. He called it “Holtzermann’s Stomach Bitters.”

Holtermann, working under the name of his father, was awarded a patent for this concoction in May 1867.  In his application he had claimed that:  “The nature of my invention consists in so compounding certain ingredients…as to produce a healthful, pleasant stomach bitters for dyspepsia, weakness of the stomach and bowels, and general debility.”

An illustration exists of the J.D. Holtzermann & Sons emporium, emphasizing it as “sole manufacturer of Holzermann’s celebrated stomach bitters, importers & wholesale dealers in liquor.”  Within its two stories, the company was rectifying and compounding a variety of spirits.  Increasingly whiskey men like Christoph were moving to bitters as their flagship brands.  They were trying to avoid paying extra taxes from Civil War imposed levies in whiskey by terming their products “bitters” and thus medicine rather than liquor.

Christoph advertised: “Holtzermann's Stomach Bitters For Sale Here! August Holtzermann Wholesale Dealer in Foreign and Domestic Liquors. Located on the Corner Of Main & Water Streets. Piqua, Ohio the large liquor house on the corner of Main and Water Streets, where are also manufactured the celebrated Holtzermann's Patent Stomach Bitters, which are very extensively sold through Western Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.”

Holtzermann initiated vigorous merchandising, initially with a log cabin theme appropriate to the earlier rustic town Piqua had been.  The theme was carried over to the bitters bottles fashioned to look like two story log structures with embossing of the name on the roof panels.  As shown here, these bottles came in various shades of amber.  Today they are are hotly collected. 

Christoph unfortunately had little time to enjoy his soaring fortunes.  In June 1875 he fell ill and never recovered, dying on July 6 of that year, only 34 years of age.  He was buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, Piqua.   His untimely death must have sent his business affairs into some chaos.  His eldest son, Louis, was still only nine years old and the second son, Jacob Daniel, was only six.  My assumption is that other family members guided the fortunes of the Holtzermann bitters empire until the boys reached maturity.  We know that both were required to work in the whiskey trade at an early age.  At the same time they were able to attend school and Louis is credited with receiving some “higher education” in Piqua.  Both apparently showed business abilities while still in their teens. 

As the sons took over business operations the shape of the Holtzermann’s Patent Stomach Bitters changed.  The log cabin bottle, while distinctive, likely was relatively expensive to produce.  About 1885, a new container was issued, one more like the other bitter bottles of the day.  Shown here, it was square with four panels,  embossed “Holtzermanns/ Stomach/ Bitters” on one panel and then on the opposite panel “J. D. Holtzermann & Co./ Piqua O.”  Even that bottle is said to be rare.

In 1887 when Louis was still just 23 and Jacob only 18, they apparently decided that Piqua was too small a place for their business ambitions and made a move to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where they opened a large department store on Cedar Avenue.  Among the goods featured there were the stomach bitters that had made them wealthy men at an early age.  The 1900 census found Louis, still a bachelor at 36, as the head of his own extended family.  Jacob, now 31 and unmarried, was living with him along with their mother, Elise, and a sister, Johanna, together with her husband and a baby girl.  One hired girl served the family.

A contemporary biography noted the quick success in Minneapolis of the “Holtzermann’ Chicago Store Company.”  “The firm has built up a large and flourishing business and have won respect and appreciation in the business world and in the community at large.”   Jacob Holtzermann would become a director of the South Side State Bank of Minneapolis, a director of the local Humane Society,  and a member of the Minneapolis Board of Corrections and Charities.  When a “blue-ribbon”  civic commission was created in Minneapolis in 1910 to advise on future city development, Jacob was one of 10 citizen leaders chosen.  The Holtzermann family was recorded as active with the local Evangelical Lutheran Church.

At some point, perhaps finding it difficult to keep businesses going in cities hundreds of miles apart, the Holtzermann brothers sold the rights to the Christoph’s formula and the bitters brand name to Ahrendt & Sons Company of Toledo, Ohio, a liquor dealership established about 1890.  Shown here is a Ahrendt-labeled “fifth” bottle of Holtzermann’s Patented Stomach Bitters.  Note the attempt to approximate the original log cabin bottle shape.  When Ahrendt went out of business in 1915 presumably the Holtzermann brand went with it.  Signaling Christoph’s success, the bitters he had invented had been on the American market for 75 years.

Note:  Two lengthy treatments of Holtzermann bitters with illustrations have preceded this one, one by Steve Sewell, the other by Ferdinand Meyer on his Peachridge site.  Both concentrated on the Holtzermann bottles.  While borrowing information and pictures from both, my purpose was to provide as much of the human side of this family as possible.  The post also has allowed me to remember Piqua, a town I visited from time to time as a newspaper reporter from nearby Springfield, Ohio.

The Cooneys of Nashville and the Doom of a Texas Town

While researching pre-Prohibition whiskey men, sometimes a “back story” emerges that is so compelling as to turn the account in that direction.  So it was with the Cooneys, wholesale grocers and liquor dealers of Nashville, Tennessee.  Interested in the family for the many and varied whiskey jugs they produced, I stumbled on a story of murder, an alleged curse, and the demise of a Texas boom town.

                      

The Cooney family were native-born Irish Tennesseans.  The father, John Cooney, was born in 1827 in Paris, Henry County.   Early in his career he had embraced the grocer’s trade and like many of his peers featured whiskey as a major product.  About 1855 John married a woman named Jennie Lougee, of French descent who originally was from New York.  They produced a family of four children.  The first three were boys — Charles, John L. and Stanley Torrence — and the youngest a girl, Jennie, named after her mother.   

The 1880 census found the Cooneys living in Nashville in an extended family. John was listed as the head of the household, occupation “grocer.”   His son John L. was there with his wife, Lula, and  a one-year old child.  Charles and Stanley were still single and living at home.  Both Stanley and John were working for their father in the grocery.  Charles was a pharmacist.  Rounding out the household was Maria Lougee, the 85-year-old mother of Jennie. A single maid served the family.

Attention turns now from Tennessee to Texas.  

In Travis County in December 1867,  Mary Isabelle Wheeler was born into a prominent Texas family as the daughter of Maggie H. and John Gill Wheeler.  Wheeler was a pioneer storekeeper in Manor, a town about 12 miles from Austin. His brother would serve five years as Lt. Governor of Texas and be a candidate for governor.   Early on Mary showed talent as an artist and unusual for girls in those days, her parents decided to give her the best possible education.  Accordingly as a teenager she was sent to the Columbia Female Institute in Columbia, Tennessee,  an Episcopalian “finishing school,” only a short buggy ride from Nashville.

It was there that she met Stanley Cooney and they fell in love.  In 1888 the couple married.  Mary was 21 and her husband 28.  After a year of living with Stanley in Nashville,  Mary became homesick for her family.   She persuaded her spouse to relocate to the Lone Star State and open a business there.  The town they selected was New Birmingham, a newly minted community in East Texas built around local iron ore operations. It was a boom town that quickly had grown to more than 3,000 residents boasting a business district of 15 blocks, with such amenities as a bottling works, an electric power plant, some 400 homes, and 32 mercantile houses.   Beginning about 1888 one of those businesses belonged to Stanley Cooney.  He and Mary settled down to make New Birmingham their home. 

With its two furnaces capable of recovering 50 tons of ore daily, New Birmingham seemed destined to become a major Texas city, a community with seemingly unlimited potential.  The Southern Hotel, shown above, was the center of town social life.  As one observer has written:  Its first register, beginning March 28, 1889, and closing Feb. 9, 1890, recorded guests from twenty-eight states, including Jay Gould of railroad fame and Grover Cleveland, recently come from the presidential chair.…Financiers, who had risked their millions in the attempted development of Cherokee County's iron ore were frequently registered.

No millionaire was more closely associated with “The Iron City,” as it was called, than General William Harrison Hamman, shown here.  A native of Virginia, Hamman was a lawyer and an entrepreneur.  After attending the University of Virginia in the early 1850s, he joined the Virginia militia, becoming a captain by 1856.  In 1858 he moved to Owensville, Roberts County, Texas to practice law.  When the Civil War broke out he enlisted as a private in the famed Hood’s Texas Brigade, rising to the rank of brigadier general by the end of the conflict.

After the war Hamman tried his hand at prospecting for oil, building railroads and developing transportation infrastructure. In 1871 he married Ella Virginia Laudermilk, whose sister was the wife of the iron works owner.  By 1890 Hamman was a dominant figure in the New Birmingham Iron and Land Company, vigorously promoting the town and its future.   

How the general and young Stanley Cooney chanced to be acquainted has gone unrecorded.   In July 1890, an event occurred reported by one newspaper as “Frightful Tragedy in New Birmingham, Tex.”  Despite being described as usually  “notably quiet and gentlemanly in his demeanor,” Cooney was neither when he encountered Hamman.   Blinded by anger, he used both barrels of his gun to shoot the former Confederate down in the street.   The Tennessean’s motive was said to be that Hamman had defamed the character of his wife.  Some whispered, however, that it was Ella Virginia who had traduced Mary.

Caught with the smoking gun still in his hand, young Stanley waived a preliminary hearing, was arrested and sent to jail.  When word of this killing reached Nashville,  John Cooney and another family member immediately left for Texas to help his boy.  A Nashville paper opined:  “The news of yesterday was a great shock to them and the universal opinion is that he must have been justifiable in what he did.”  Those sentiments did not translate to Texas.  Despite able legal assistance, young Cooney was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to prison.  Meanwhile Hamman was buried in the Owensville Cemetery in nearby Calvert, Texas.

After the general’s murder, New Birmingham suffered its own death blows in quick succession.  The panic of 1893 brought the building of railroads to a halt, iron prices dropped precipitously, the town’s major ore plant exploded without funds to rebuild it, and state laws prevented anyone outside from buying land there.  According to local legend, the fatal blow occurred in 1892 with the news that Cooney — likely with help from Mary’s politically potent Wheeler family — had been pardoned and released from jail.

The news appears to have unhinged the Widow Hamman.  “In a fit of outrage and grief,” as it is told, she ran through the streets screaming to the Heavens to “leave no stick or stone standing” in the town.  As New Birmingham slowly died, many saw her diatribe as an omen or perhaps a curse.  With no guests, the Southern Hotel was occupied for years only by a custodian.  It burned to the ground in 1926.   New Birmingham, the boom town had become a doomed town.  It eventually became a ghost town as vegetation swallowed up the site.  Today it is remembered only by a State of Texas roadside marker.

After his pardon, Stanley spared no time in getting back to Tennessee.  The 1910 census found him and Mary in Nashville with the rest of the Cooneys.  He was working at the family grocery just as if nothing had happened.  Mary was launched on her career as an Impressionist landscape artist.  Even today her paintings are sold by Southwestern art galleries for hundreds of dollars.  

As followers of this post know, I believe there is a tale to be told behind every pre-Prohibition bottle or jug.  Seldom, however, does the narrative turn out to be as dramatic as the one related here.   When the name on the jug is “Cooney,” clearly the back story can be well worth pursuing.