Whiskey Men and Bootlegging

Foreword:  When  alcohol prohibition was imposed in states and in the Nation distillers and whiskey dealers often were prepared.   Some shipped their liquor abroad.  Others sold it at steep discounts to private customers.  Some, however, found themselves still owning large supplies and nowhere to go with them. A handful of those whiskey men (and at least one woman) were spurred to take illegal action, known generally as “bootlegging.”  As will be seen, such efforts seldom were successful.  

 J. T. Doores of Bowling Green, Kentucky, shown above,as a youth was so captivated by a prohibitionist preacher that he took a formal pledge to foreswear alcohol.  Within seven years Doores not only had recanted, he was running a whiskey wholesale business that brought him considerable wealth and political clout in Kentucky.

In 1916 Doores’ Warren County like other localities in Kentucky went “dry.” In a crack down on what local law enforcement called “bootlegging,” police attention was drawn to the former liquor dealer in December 1917.  Doores was arrested and hauled into court for having carried from Louisville to Bowling Green several gallon jugs and some pint flasks of whiskey, concealing them in four suitcases.  The authorities charged that the whiskey in his possession was to be sold.  His arrest made headlines throughout the American Midwest. The Cincinnati Enquirer opined:  “Doores probably is the most prominent man who yet has been arrested in Kentucky on a charge of peddling liquor into a dry burg.”  

I have been unable to find the disposition of the charges against Doores.  In those days individuals with considerably less political clout, even if found guilty, often were left off with a slap on the wrist and a small fine.  We can assume that was the worst that might have befallen Doores.

When his father died in 1904 and left him in control of the family distillery in Tell City, Indiana, William Krogman was well prepared to succeed in the whiskey trade.   As “dry” forces closed in on the production and sale of alcohol, however, Krogman’s markets slowly dried up along with profits.  Finally, the advent of National Prohibition caused the distillery to shut down completely.  

Krogman found the situation difficult to accept.  Sealed by federal order, his warehouses were full of aging whiskey.   The temptation proved to be too strong for William.  With four others, including two former Tell City town marshals and an ex-sheriff of Perry County, Krogman hatched a plot to rob the his distillery warehouse.  They carried it out in August 1921.  In short order Krogman and his cohorts were identified by federal authorities and arrested.   

Summoned into Federal Court in Indianapolis, Krogman and his four accomplices were charged with conspiracy.  As the presumed ringleader, Krogman’s bail was set at $3,000 (equivalent to $65,000 today.)  The others paid lesser amounts.  I am unable to find the outcome of the arrests, but in many cases such offenses were treated leniently even by the U.S. courts and the perpetrators let off with fines.  The rationale could reasonably have been that Krogman was only trying to purloin liquor that actually was his.  William continued to own the Krogman properties during the “dry” years but died in 1832 and never saw the Repeal of the 18th Amendment.

Having inherited operation of a successful Anderson County, Kentucky, distillery Mary Dowling was not about to let National Prohibition interfere with her liquor trade.  Her illegal business worked until 1924 when revenue agents set a trap for her.  She was operating both out of her home and from an office next to two distillery warehouses, supposedly sealed, in which large quantities of liquor were stored.  Federal agents arrived with two “turncoat” bootleggers in their automobiles, men who had done business with Mary in the past. The agents watched as the bootleggers entered the house and bought out two sacks of whiskey, each containing a dozen bottles.  They waited until the sacks were placed in one of the autos, then searched and seized them, as their stool -pigeons reputedly ‘fessed up.  The “sting” had worked. The agents then entered the Dowling home with search warrants.  

In the basement they found and seized 478 sacks, each holding 12 quarts of whiskey, exactly like the ones deposited in the bootlegger’s car.  They confiscated the liquor and arrested members of the Dowling family, including three of Mary’s sons. As a court record later narrated, she contended that the whiskey had been there before Prohibition and was “to be for the use of family and guests, whom she entertained on a large scale.”  

The Dowlings were prosecuted for a conspiracy to possess, transport, and sell intoxicating liquors in violation of the National Prohibition Act. There ensued three years of court cases both in Kentucky and Federal courts as Mary through her attorneys contended that the search warrant was flawed, criminal charges should be dropped, and the seized liquor returned.  An initial trial was adjourned when she became sick.  The indictment was renewed by the government in 1925 and this time the Mary and her sons were convicted.   Then fate intervened.  Upon an appeal of the conviction to the U.S. Sixth Court of Appeals, it was found that the stenographer who had taken the record of the earlier trial had died and no one could read his notes. That was enough for the Circuit Court and they threw out the convictions.  

Meanwhile Mary Dowling had hatched a new -- and more successful -- business plan.  About 1926 she hired Joseph Beam, one of Kentucky’s premier distillers but now out of work, to dismantle her distillery, transport the pieces to Juarez, Mexico, reassemble it there, and resume making whiskey.  Mexico had no prohibition so liquor production was completely legal.  Her whiskey was sold to American  tourists who were allowed to bring it over the border.  In addition, a significant amount found its way onto the U.S. market, allegedly for “medicinal use.”  No one seemed to know how it got here.  But Mary did.

Note:  Longer articles on each of these three individuals may be found on this blog:   J. T. Doores, January 26, 2015;  William Krogman, December 6, 2014, and Mary Dowling, January 22, 2014.

This Yankee Put Peoria on the Distilling Map

       

The stern and rugged visage at right is that of Almiran Smith Cole, a New England Yankee who in 1835 uprooted his family from their Massachusetts home, loaded a wagon with sale goods and set out for to a settlement on the Illinois River called Peoria.  Arriving two months later, Cole subsequently founded the town’s first whiskey distillery, giving rise to an industry there that eventually return hundreds of millions in taxes to the U.S. Government and made the Yankee entrepreneur a very wealthy man.

When Cole left New England he was breaking with a family heritage of centuries.  He was descended from Hugh Cole who emigrated from England to Plymouth, Massachusetts, about 1654.  Four generations later, Almiran was born in 1805 in Cheshire, Berkshire County, Massachusetts.  Of his education and early life details are scant but it would appear that as a youth Cole was engaged in the mercantile trades.  

When he was 28 years old in January 1833, he married 21-year-old Chloe Brown, descended from a longtime New England family, in Pownell, Vermont. Their marriage produced nine children only two of whom lived into middle age. Two years after they wed, Cole decided that his fortune lay westward.  Packing supplies and a cargo of trade goods, in September 1835 he and Chloe set out from Lanesboro, Massachusetts, driving horses and a wagon across the Appalachian mountains and into the Midwest.  The trip took the family sixty days.

Shown above as it looked upon their arrival, Peoria was the oldest white settlement in Illinois and only recently had incorporated as a village.  Cole saw opportunity in its accessibility by road and water and decided to settle there.  Off-loading his trade goods, he opened a store on Main Street, the main commercial avenue.  Although a canny entrepreneur, Almiran seems to have been restless in his business efforts.  Two years after establishing his general store, he sold out to one of his clerks and moved in an entirely new direction.

Cole became a steamboat captain. He bought a steamer, named the “Frontier,” and ran it as a passenger packet between LaSalle, Illinois, and St. Louis.  One of the first boats of its kind to ply the Illinois River, it has been cited as “intimately associated with the history of Peoria.”  Shown here is a photo of steamer traffic on the Illinois.  This foray onto the water brought Cole a lifelong sobriquet of “Captain.”  Within several years, however, the Yankee tired of this occupation, sold the steamer, and returned to the mercantile business, erecting a new building for his store.

By 1844, he had once again gotten restless, sold the store, and erected the first distillery in the history of Peoria, one capable of mashing fifty bushels of grain a day.  It was an inspired move.  By this time Peoria was experiencing considerable growth and would incorporate as a city in 1845.  Saloons were proliferating. Supplies of corn and other grains were abundant and easily accessed.  With Cole leading the way, distilling proliferated.  In 1850, 5,685 barrels of whiskey were recorded from Peoria.  By 1859 distilling was the major manufacturing interests there, with hundreds of thousands of dollars invested.  Six distilleries and two alcohol works were in operation.

With Almiran Cole as the pioneer, Peoria would become the whiskey capital of the world.  No place on earth, according to the historians, produced as much bourbon and rye as that flowing from Peoria distilleries.  In 1885, for example, more than 18 million gallons of whiskey were produced in the city. So great was the revenue from the whiskey tax paid to Washington that Peoria’s share was larger than any other city in America.  Shown above is a steamboat with a sign proclaiming that Peoria had paid $3.5 million in taxes.

Meanwhile, Cole had become dissatisfied with his first distillery after two plus years and sold it as a prelude to building a much larger plant at the location shown here  A large spring on the property provided water for the distillery and the river behind allowed shipping the finished products.  With his own hands Cole is said to have done much of the excavation for the foundation and preparation of the timbers for the four story framework.  The cost was $38,000 ($836,000 equivalent today).  In Drown's "History of Peoria," issued in 1851, Cole’s distillery was referenced as one of the largest buildings in the Mississippi Valley. It was capable of mashing 1,600 bushels daily.  

In 1862, Cole again tired of making whiskey and sold his distillery to three silent partners, none of them apparently with experience in the industry.  At that point he moved to his farm in East Peoria where he had built a stately home for Chloe and his children.  He supervised the farm work and looked after his extensive real estate interests, financed by profits from his distilling ventures.  His estate is said to have encompassed large tracks of land between East Peoria and Pekin,Illinois. The 1860 federal census ask people about their net worth.  Cole claimed a total of $310,000 in assets, roughly equivalent today to $7 million.

Throughout his career in Peoria Cole had engaged in financing public benefits.  In 1848, with a charter from the Illinois Legislature, he built the first bridge across the Illinois River.   After the first bridge was carried away by ice floes before it could be opened, he built a second, called “Cole’s Bridge.”   Shown here, it opened in October 1849 as hundreds of gleeful Peoria residents promenaded across.  Cole also built a toll road at the eastern exit of the span to settlements on the other side, including one village named for him — Coleville.  

A toll booth sat near the Peoria shore taking five cents for a pedestrian, 20 cents for a single horse and 25 cents for a two-horse rig.  Business was good but problems continued.  The year after the bridge opened the local newspaper reported that:  “The steamer Planter hit the bridge…weakening the structure….A large drove of cattle were driven onto the span….The leaders stopped on the draw and caused it to tilt, dumping the entire herd into the river except for one….”  Cole continued to control the bridge but in 1886 at age 81 sold the span and the toll road to the City of Peoria for a reported $30,000.  It became a free bridge.

At age 86, Almiran died in December 1891.  He was buried in Peoria's Springdale Cemetery in the circular Cole family plot shown above.  There he joined Chloe who had died nine years earlier and some of their children who pre-deceased him.  He has not been forgotten in Peoria.  Among local landmarks is Almiran Street, Cole Hollow, and Cole Hollow Road, shown left. 

Moreover, the city employs an Almiran Cole “impersonator,” shown here, to regale tourists about this founding father and his deeds.  The audience is told that from Cole’s first whisky-making facility in 1844 until National Prohibition in 1920, Peoria was home to no fewer than 74 distilleries.  The New England Yankee had shown the way.

Note:  Several references were key in composing this vignette.  They are:  Historic Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Peoria County, 1902,  transcribed by Danni Hopkins;  The History of Peoria County, Illinois, 1880;  Centennial History of East Peoria, Daniel A. LaKemper, editor, 1984

Chicago’s Bennett Pieters and His Bitter(s) Fall

Born in Belgium, the youthful Bennett Pieters appears to have exploded onto the Chicago social scene about 1860, newly rich from sales of a medicinal he had invented called “Red Jacket Bitters,” sold as a remedy for stomach ailments.  According to the Chicago Tribune, “Pieters…was a popular man among the set: he kept good saddle and carriage horses; had rooms at the Sherman house; had excellent suppers, where the guests …were regaled with champagne.”  And then the bottom dropped out. 

Pieters arrival in Chicago is uncertain as is the date of his inventing the bitters remedy.  The earliest cited date is 1858 when he began a vigorous marketing  campaign for his nostrum from an address at 139 South Water Street.  Pieters was advertising not only in Chicago newspapers but in publications throughout America and said to have plastered his notices on fences and any blank walls he could find. Note the sign bottom left on the illustration of Chicago’s Rush Street Bridge.

Pieters’ ads emphasized that “there is unequaled virtue in the Red Jacket Stomach Bitters."   They are, he claimed, “A combination of rare herbs, prepared in the choicest old bourbon whiskey.”  Not only did his bitters aid digestion, they cured severe headaches and were a preventative against fever and ague (malaria).  By wrapping his remedy in an Indian motif, Pieters was tapping into the rampant myth of the times that Native Americans possessed special knowledge of medicines.

One author has conjectured:  “People had supposed that his bitters owed their rare virtues to samples unknown to the white man, gathered at midnight in primeval forests by grim Indian chiefs, or dusky Indian girls….The secrets having been specially communicated to Pieters under circumstances of so private a nature that they never became public.”  He trademarked the Red Jacket name in 1864.

Pieter’s bitters rapidly caught on with the public.  As an example, in 1969 as part of a Kansas archeological training program, a bottle was excavated at Fort Zarah along the Santa Fe Trail in Barton County.  This suggests that pioneers heading West were counting on Pieter’s nostrum to fend off illness.  The bottle he used was a distinctive rectangular shape that came in various shades of amber, as shown above and below.  When new they came with a label depicting Red Jacket, a chief of the Seneca tribe.

As sales mounted Pieters grew wealthy.  He also found time for a personal life, marrying in Chicago a woman named Amelia who likely was in her late teens when they wed.  She had been born in New York of immigrant Canadian parents.  Bennett ensconced Amelia in a home that the Chicago Journal described as “…Among the the most elegant and refined in the city, adorned in the most chaste and beautiful manner, and gracefully presided over by his wife, an estimable, accomplished lady.”   The couple would have one child, a son they called Frederick.  

Although he had been in town only a short time, Pieters soon gained a notable reputation in Chicago business circles.  The Journal extolled him as “…A man of fine abilities, and beside being shrewd and successful in business, he was possessed of superior scholarly attainments.”

With a partner, Pieters also was growing the business.  Leaving its Water Street address, the company by 1864 had moved to 21 River Street.  Two years later Bennett Pieters & Co. moved to 31 and 33 Michigan Avenue, listed as distillers and wholesale liquor dealers.  An 1866 tourist guide to Chicago commented that the firm’s business had expanded beyond their former quarters and “now occupies a store of palatial proportions—solid stone and brick, five stories high.”

But trouble hovered on the horizon.  During the Civil War the Federal Government slapped a special excise tax on alcoholic beverages.  Considered medicines, bitters though alcoholic were taxed at a somewhat lower rate.  Selling both whiskey and bitters, Pieters was subject to the taxes and acknowledge it by printing up special revenue stamps to wrap on his products, letting the consumer know the reason for the added cost.  As did other whiskey men, Pieters put his own likeness on the stamp. (The stamp shown below recently was advertised by an auction house for $4,500.)

Having a revenue stamp was one things, actually handing the money collected over to the government was another.  In October 1867 the Feds swooped in, arrested Pieters and his partner, and their place of business was seized by the authorities.  They claimed that Bennett Pieters & Co. had been deficient in keeping records and thereby defrauded the U.S. of a large amount due for tax.  Pieters and his partner quickly put up $10,000 (equivalent to $220,000 today), had their establishment returned to them and continued in business.

Within a year, Pieters again was in legal trouble, this time for suborning a Western Union Telegraph operator into giving his liquor house free early A.M. wire service in order to be in touch with a company outlet in Omaha, Nebraska.  When Western Union discovered that its facilities were being used after its regular closing hour of midnight, it hired the famed detective Alan Pinkerton to investigate.  Pinkerton, shown here, quickly fingered Pieters and his partner as the culprits.

The Chicago Tribune had a field day, devoting multi-columns to the story and headlining “Startling Disclosures—A Possible Clue to Extensive Revenue Frauds—Whiskey on the Wires.”  Its story speculated that Pieters was running a secret, illicit distillery in Nebraska.  This apparently was never proved and only the telegraph operator was arrested.  Pieters and his partner paid his bail.  A jury subsequently acquitted the telegrapher and no action was taken against the liquor house.

Pieter’s downfall came when he attempted to defend his trademark against a Chicago rival who, likely sensing an opportunity for some easy profits, began manufacturing and selling a product called Red Cloud Bitters.  Claiming an infringement of his rights, Pieters brought suit in U.S. District Court.  As part of the deliberations, the judge had an expert chemist analyze Red Jacket Stomach Bitters.  The chemist found that the nostrum consisted of inferior whiskey flavored with ingredients that included tansey, a herb that can cause convulsions and liver and brain damage if taken in quantity, and jimson weed, a powerful hallucinogenic. The judge ruled that having misrepresented the contents of his bitters, Pieters was not eligible for trademark protection and Red Cloud Bitters could continue to be sold.

This appears to have been a final blow to the young Belgian entrepreneur. Profits from his nostrum nose-dived as newspapers across the country ran the story.  Profligate with his money when riding high, as one author put it: “…Hence when calamity came upon him he had nothing to fall back on.”  In addition, Pieters who always been a heavy drinker became an alcoholic.  As a result, he was forced in 1869 to merge his liquor business with another Chicago wine and whiskey wholesaler.  Within months he would be forced out of that company and forever lose control of Red Jacket Stomach Bitters.

As Pieters’ drinking increased, his family was required to sell most of its possessions and finally their home, leaving them virtually destitute.  Then in a stunning development,  Pieters, still a relatively young man, enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Fourth Cavalry, Company F, the insignia shown here.   After a physical exam in  Chicago, he was sent to for training in horsemanship and cavalry formation to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.  

Pieters had traded in the fancy suits of a successful Chicago businessman for the uniform of a lowly private, the garb illustrated here.  At Fort Leavenworth, he was given a sorrel horse, the color everyone rode in Company F, and sent West to the Indian Wars.  In an apparent effort to put his woes behind him, Pieters rode off with his comrades, thereby abandoning his family.

In August 1871 Pieters’ company was part of an expedition into Indian Territory against the Comanches and Kiowas who had refused to stay on their reservation and were plundering on the Texas frontier.   Although the U.S. foray proved fruitless, the following year the 4th Cavalry with 222 cavalrymen destroyed a major Indian village on the north fork of the Red River about six miles east of the site of present-day Lefors, Texas.  Meanwhile newspapers all across the country, among them The McArthur Enquirer, of Vinton County, Ohio, and the New-Northwest of Deer Lodge, Montana, citing the Chicago press, reported at length on Bennett Pieters' fall from grace.  

A question arises about whether Pieters reformed his habits while in the service.  A special order was issued by the Department of War on Thursday, October 23, 1973 included a paragraph on three cavalrymen who had been discharged.  Among them was Private Bennett Pieters, Company F, Fourth Cavalry.   Was this a routine discharge of a soldier whose enlistment was up, or something else?  The context of the Army document suggests that a court martial might have been involved.

Evidence exists that after his discharge, Pieters returned to Chicago.  There he found that his wife, Amalia, had obtained a legal separation in February 1873.  According to newspaper stories her petition to the court alleged that she had been reduced to utter poverty and misery through her husband’s love of intoxicating drink.  When Bennett failed to show up for a hearing to answer her complaints, the court granted her the separation.

Amalia and her son were recorded in Chicago in the 1880 census.  Amalia was “keeping house” and Frederick was “at school.”   Bennett is not with them and Amalia was listed as a widow.  Whether this indicates that Pieters may have died in the seven years after his discharge is not clear.  Regardless, there the trail of goes cold.  I have been unable to find any further mention of him or his burial place. Bennett Pieters had burst like a shooting star over Chicago and almost as suddenly completely disappeared from view.

Note:  Preceding Pieters’ Red Jacket Bitters was "Red Jacket Whiskey" from the Red Jacket Distillery in Buffalo, New York, owned by two remarkable whiskey men, Thomas Clark and his successor James M. Merritt.  Their story can be found on a post dated August 17, 2018, on this website.  Thanks go to Ferd Meyer and his Peachridge Glass post of March 13, 2013, for bringing my attention to Bennett Pieters and for the use of images of bitters bottles included here.  Also appreciation to Joe Gourd for two illustrations from his extensive collection of bitters materials.

  

Charles Mangold Led Dallas Development

When Charles A. Mangold, shown left, died in 1934, the Dallas Morning News devoted part of its front page to his passing.  Among tributes, he was hailed as “one of the leaders in developing Dallas from a small village to a major city” subsequent to his arrival in town 47 years earlier.  Mangold’s contributions to Dallas included land development, promotion of the arts, an amusement park, two hotels, horse racing, quality livestock and assorted other enterprises.  The cash behind many of these endeavors was provided by Mangold’s highly successful Dallas liquor house.

Mangold came by his career as a “whiskey man” as a heritage.  His father, Adam Mangold, a refugee from Prussian oppression in Germany,  had settled in Cincinnati in 1845, opening a wholesale grocery and liquor business. Charles was born there in 1860.  Shortly after his birth, the patriotic Adam marched away, having enlisted in the Union Army at the outbreak the Civil War.  When it ended he returned to Cincinnati and resumed his grocery and liquor trade.

As he matured Charles went to work for his father and soon discovered he preferred the liquor end of the business.  That impelled a move to Lexington, Kentucky, where he was employed at a local distillery until 1887 when he moved to Dallas, population then only about 35,000.  He coaxed a boyhood friend, Joseph Swope, to join him and together they formed the firm of Swope & Mangold, dealers in fine wines, liquors and cigars. Shown here, their headquarters were in a three-story building on Main Street, marked by a large sign.

Almost from the beginning, the liquor house was successful.  Dallas was growing rapidly and a thirsty workforce wanted strong drink.  An account of the city in the 1890’s said that Dallas had, “a nice lemonade stand, an ice cream parlor, and three hundred saloons.”  Two of them, both apparently called the Dallas Club, were owned by Swope & Mangold.  To other saloons the partners sold their proprietary brands, including "S&W High Grade Whiskey," a blend that they likely were mixing up on their premises.  Moreover, Mangold was traveling the entire State of Texas seeking customers and gaining friends.

Among Swope & Mangold’s most inventive labels was the whiskey they called "Tarantula Juice."  It featured a heavy black label featuring skull and cross-bones and the large black image of a tarantula, large and often hairy arachnids belonging to the “Theraphosidae” family of spiders.  While the image was not the most enticing around, the name probably captured an audience from Dallas’ drinking population. 

Meanwhile, now being well established in the liquor trade, Charles was having a personal life.   At the age of 39, he married Anna Honeck, shown here.  She was from Herman, Missouri, the daughter of a Henry Honeck, a German immigrant and blacksmith. Anna had moved to Dallas in 1888 where she met Mangold.  She was ten years younger than her mate but was said to have good business sense and leadership skills, providing a true partner for her husband in his endeavors.  The couple would have four children, Lawrence W., Irma M., Olga A. and Charles Jr., known as Carl.  Married and with his business on solid ground, Mangold began exerting seemingly endless energy into making his presence felt in Dallas. Following are his areas of accomplishment:

Land development:  When Mangold died, one newspaper proclaimed him as the “Man Who Visioned Oak Cliff.”  Mangold was one of the first men to dream of “a city west of the river" when Dallas was only a straggling village and Oak Cliff was a wilderness of rocks and trees.  Along with other pioneers he helped lay out the first streets and constructing the first homes in Oak Cliff.  Mangold also led the effort to construct the Houston Street viaduct over the Trinity River to keep Dallas and Oak Cliff connected during floods. Today Oak Cliff is a neighborhood annexed by Dallas in 1901.  A founder of the Dallas park system, Mangold was appointed to the first city park board created in 1904.

The Arts:  Mangold was involved in the Dallas Opera, the Oak Cliff Little Theatre, and a German singing organization known as a Sangerfest.  He is said to have made it possible for several well-known musical artists to visit the city.  They included, according to reports, “…The first famous singer to be heard in this city, Marie Decca, as well as the great orchestra conducted by Michael Brand….In 1904…another great artist was seen by the people of Dallas, Mme Sembrich, as a result of his efforts.”

Amusements:  The whiskey man was the founder and manager of Lake Cliff Park, a well known summer amusement park on the outskirts of Dallas.  Shown here, the park was clustered around a large lagoon offering bathing, boating, carnival rides, 10,000 lights, fireworks displays nightly and other attractions that made Lake Cliff for a time the most prestigious amusement area in the American Southwest.  The park also featured a casino owned by Mangold.

Horse Racing:  As the owner of a nationally famous pacing horse named “Pentland,”  Mangold was deeply embedded in the race scene in Texas. For several years he  was the vice-president and director in charge of the racing department of the Dallas State Fair.  In 1905 the president of the State Fair told newspapermen that “to Mr. Mangold is due the entire credit,” for the suc­cess of the race meeting that was the “cleanest and best conducted ever held in the South.”  Mangold also was one of the organizers of the Texas Thoroughbred Association in 1904 to encourage the breeding of quality horses.

Ranching and Farming:  Some of Mangold’s energies were directed at the “wide open spaces” around Dallas.  He became the owner of the well-known Sam Lazarus Ranch, covering parts of two Texas counties.  He also owned a stock farm at Hutchins, Dallas County, where he raised quality livestock, specializing a fine breed of Angora goats.

Hotels:   Many in Dallas remember Mangold for building hotels.  Opened in October 1917, the  Hotel Jefferson stood across from the newly opened Dallas Union Station.  State of the art for its time, the hotel featured one floor for “the exclusive use of women unattended, no men were quartered on that floor.” Perhaps there the fine hand of wife Anna can be detected.  

The photo shown above is of a 50-ish Charles Mangold cradling a bottle of whiskey at the ground floor bar of the Jefferson.  Nine years later Mangold would erect a second major hotel, the Cliff Towers Hotel, overlooking the Trinity River, shown below on a postcard view.

Miscellaneous Activities:  In addition to banking interests Mangold ran a laundry business called the American Laundry Company.  He was an organizer of the North Texas Press, the leading German publication of the region.  He also was responsible for bringing the first national convention to Dallas, that of the Elks fraternal organization, and for staging the delegates’ entertainment.  Throughout he was running his liquor establishment until shut by prohibition.

In his latter years, Charles suffered from diabetes, dying in August 1934 in his and Anna’s apartments in the Jefferson Hotel.  He had been seriously ill for about two months.  Mangold’s funeral services were held at the Dallas Elk’s Lodge and his burial at the Hillcrest Mausoleum at the Sparkman Hillcrest Memorial Park in Dallas.  One newspaper obituary opined:  The city of Dallas owes a great deal of its present greatness to the dreams, the work and the money of Mr. Mangold.” Another account acknowledged that his financial means had been generated by years of hard work and intelligent management in the liquor trade.

After her husband’s death Anna Mangold stepped into run his businesses.  She maintained holdings in numerous hotels, laundries, and banks, as well as extensive ranch and oil properties.  Anna died in Dallas on September 1, 1947, and joined Charles at his mausoleum resting place.  

Notes:  Several important references exist for this post.  Among them are the “Biographical Note” that Dallas/Texas History & Archives of the Dallas Public Library exhibits on its website related to the gift of documents by Mangold’s son, Carl, to its repository;  a Mangold biography in the volume “Greater Dallas & Vicinity” by Philip Lindsley & L.B. Hill, dated 1909; an article entitled “Courtesy Dallas Yesterday” by Sam H. Acheson, and Mangold’s obituary in the Dallas Morning News of August 27, 1834.