Kids Selling Whiskey II

A prior post (August 13, 2023) dwelt upon the use of children’s images to merchandise liquor, a pre-Prohibition practice that would certainly never be countenanced in contemporary America.  The examples of kids selling whisky continue to come to attention on ephemera such as trade cards, postcards, calendars and advertisements.   Shown here are another ten such items, along with commentary about their origins.

Louis Sommer was a Chicago druggist who featured an “in your face” depiction of a child hawking liquor.  Of all the ads shown here, Sommer’s is the only one showing a youngster holding a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a half-full glass in the other, suggesting that the tyke might have had a nip or two.  Sommer, who also used the brand name “Jim Dandy Whiskey,”  is listed in business selling drugs and whiskey from 1904 until 1918 when likely closed down by prohibitionary pressures.  

The second child shown here, obviously is gifted in being able compose in English. She is advertising two brands from Applegate & Sons, a firm founded by a Kentucky colonel named C. L. Applegate.  The Colonel first forges onto the scene in 1876 when he and a brother, Edward, purchased land in the small town of Yelvington in Daviess County.  There about 1878 they constructed a distillery.  Information from insurance underwriter records compiled in 1892 suggest that the Applegate property included a two frame warehouses, both with metal or slate roofs. Warehouse "A" was 115 ft north of the still house, warehouse "B" was 107 ft south. The distillery itself was constructed similarly. The property also included cattle and a barn.

The golden haired terminally cute child shown next appears on a oval metal serving tray advertising The Jacob Pfeffer Co., Cincinnati OH. Brands on the tray include Zeno, Tippecanoe and Lenox.  Pfeffer who was in business from 1876 to 1918.  He advertised as a “rectifier and wholesale liquor dealer and dealer of imported and domestic brandies and wines.  Admitting that he was a “rectifier,”  that is, a blender and compounder of whiskies, set him apart from other  dealers who disliked admitting that they truly were not distillers.

The hooded child that follows is shown in a trade card by the seashore where despite the cold, she has been digging in the sand.  This item  is from Andrew M. Smith who was was born in Denmark, came to the U.S. as a merchant sailor, served in three different outfits in the Civil War, and moved West.  He opened the first California Wine Depot in Salt Lake City, Utah, then moved to Philadelphia where his enterprise failed.  He then set up in Minneapolis in 1886 and found success. Smith died in 1915 but his son, Arthur Mason Smith took over the business.  Smith’s company used the brand names, “Amsco,” “Fine Old U.S. Cabinet Rye,” “Flour City Rye,” “Golden Buck,”  “Harvester,” and “Pennant.”

A greeting card showing a small boy urinating in the snow to spell “Good Luck”  may have had a secondary message.  The Bonnie brothers, whiskey dealers of Louisville, Kentucky, initially were four.  After the eldest retired, Ernest Bonnie, the youngest and still in his 30s, wanted out.   The remaining two Bonnies bought him out for $70, 000, more than a million in today’s dollars.  For that compensation Ernest sold all interest in the business and in the brand names. Unlike his brother, however, Ernest had no intention of retiring from the whiskey trade. Taking two Bonnie Bros. employees with him, he shortly thereafter went into competition with his siblings using the name, E.S. Bonnie  Company and continued use of the Bonnie name.  I surmise this card was Ernest’s subtle way of “sticking it” to his brothers.

The next image of a tyke is that of a lad who apparently has had a successful effort at spear fishing or, alternatively, has stolen a barrel of dead fish.  It appeared on a trade card issued byL. R. Cain who advertised himself as a wholesale and retail dealer in wines, liquors and cigars in Decatur, Illinois.  His featured brand was Old Gum Springs Hand-Made Whisky.  Cain’s card indicates that he also was proprietor of a saloon.  He advertised “a good, substantial lunch every day.”

The three child images to follow feature two children, in each case a boy and girl, but in distinctly different modes.  The first, a 1906 calendar advertising Export Pony Whiskey, uses a design by Ellen Clapsaddle, a noted illustrator of children.  She is credited with more than 3,000 greeting cards and her images of children continue to be popular.  (See my post on her, March 2, 2012). Here she has given us two youngsters having a tete-a-tete across a stone fence.  This calendar was issued by the U.S. Bar, located in Los Angeles.

Old Maryland Dutch Whiskies issued a series of trade cards, often depicting children.  The company itself is something of a mystery, claiming to be located on Maryland’s Eastern Shore but failing to show up in any directories.  It is possible that the brand name came from a Baltimore rectifier who chose to remain anonymous.  Some of the assertions made on the card are novel.  They include: “When not taken immoderately, there will be an entire absence of Nervous Prostration.”   And “Emphatically ‘The Whiskey of our Daddies.’”

What are we to think of a card that shows two kids dress as adult, of whom the boy is throwing coins into a hat with no crown being held by a frog in a suit.  The trade card includes a poem that fails to help with an interpretation:  “Children cry, Papa’s dry, And wants some Sour Mash Rye.”   The flip side of the card advertised Schwartz & Malmbach’s “famous” whiskey as sold by J.E. Hughes, the proprietor of the Central Hotel in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania.  Hughes obviously ran a saloon along with the hotel and also asserted “Good Livery attached.”  Your horse was well cared for while you were drinking.

The last image is an 1897 ad from Green River Whiskey and shows the five children of a proud distilling father,  John McCulloch.  McCulloch, a former U.S. revenue agent, shucked his federal career when the opportunity arose for him to buy an Owensboro, Kentucky, distillery.  He built the whiskey into a well-recognized national brand.  Among his strategies was vigorous advertising.  These children are not from an artist’s imagination but portraits of real people. At left, the boy hugging the baby is his McCulloch’s eldest son, Wendall.  The baby is his brother, Charles.  Below them are two other brothers, on left is John Wellington, Jr. and on right, Hugh.  Standing at right is his daughter and the oldest child, Martine.  Several of his sons as adults followed him into the whiskey trade.

There they are, ten more examples of selling whiskey by using the images of children.  As unthinkable as it is in our age, the practice was common in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and apparently a successful merchandising strategy since it was so frequently used.

Notes:   More complete treatment of several of the “whiskey men” cited here may be found elsewhere on this website:   Applegate & Sons, July 21, 2012;  Jacob J. Pfeffer, December 15, 2015; A.M. Smith, May 19, 2013; E. S. Bonnie, April 29, 2014;  John McCulloch, April 1, 2014.

Michael Cronan: “A Lad from the Old Sod”

 Foreword:  For years Steve Abbott has been an excellent historian of antique bottles whose many informative articles have graced the pages of collector magazines.  Although I have featured a number of guest authors on this website, I have never had a contribution from Steve.  Recently I was researching a story about Michael Cronan, a liquor dealer of Sacramento, California, when I encountered an article on Cronan that Steve published in the December 2018 issue of “Bottles & Extras” magazine.  His story offered an opportunity to recognize the many contributions Steve has made to whiskey history.   He graciously has allowed me to abridge and adapt his text for presentation here.

Michael Cronan

Michael Cronan, Sacramento whiskey and soda dealer, was too ill in the early fall of 1908 to attend the funeral of one of his best friends in San Francisco, so he sent his son Joseph in his stead.  San Francisco cemeteries are mostly at the edge of town in Colma, San Mateo County.  The horse drawn funeral proceeded through a drizzle along the dirt road, stopping at taverns, not necessarily saloons, every so often to water the horses and warm the mourners.

At the last stop, Malloy’s, the bereaved went inside for a final toast to the deceased friend.  Then, one of the sentimental Irishmen thought how unkind it was for the living to be having a drink inside a warm tavern while the deceased lay in a hearse out in the rain.  So the boys brought their friend in from the cold.  Not only did they bring him in, but they took him out of his coffin, stood him by the fireplace, and toasted him for the last time, hopefully with a glass of Irish dew.

This story was passed down by Joseph Cronin whose son “Bud,” passed it on to this writer.  It is a great story from an Irish family whose American origiins began with Mike’s birth in Caven County, Ireland, December 12, 1846.  Family history says that he probably came from a farm family and immigrated in the late 1860’s.  Mike worked in mills of some sort in the East, then worked his way to California, where he was employed on a railroad route headed to the Bay Area.  Somehow, and it seems to be true of other early immigrants, he came up with a substantial amount of cash., which the family says was about $10,000.  With this money in 1872 Mike bought his way into the Brooklyn Hotel at 85 Front Street (address pre-1880) Sacramento.

Within three years, he went into business with Hugh Casey, the son-in-law of Owen Casey, the proprietor of Eagle Soda works, and together Hugh and Mike morphed that business into Casey-Cronan at 50 Front Street (218 Front Street post 1880).  They were not only business partners, but best friends, Hugh being Mike’s best man at his wedding to Julia O’Brien in 1875.  At some point Hugh decided to go back to Ireland for a few years and Mike began his liquor dealership in 1887 at 230 K Street, a building earlier occupied by whiskey distributors Hall, Luhrs and Mazzini Bros., then Cronan, Cronan-Wissemann, and later George Wissemann.  The earliest ephemera for this budding  company is a forwarding card which would be sent to retailers when Mike would be in their vicinity for sales.  

By 1887 Mike had gone into business under his own name, M. Cronan.  Circa 1898 Mike decided to take an up-and-coming German businessman, George Wissemann, as a partner.  The merger of Irish and German immigrants did not last past 1900 when Wissemann stayed at the 230 K Street location and Mike, incorporated as Cronan & Company, moved to 323 K Street.  Upon splitting with Wissemann the company incorporated with Mike owning 365 shares, his wife Julia with 5 shares, his sister Anna Blanche with 5 shares and two investors, Thomas Kennedy and Thomas O’Neil with 12.5 shares each.  According to information passed through the family, Mike knew that national prohibition was coming and had already become law in some states. 

 

Sharing his risk and welcoming the investments of two other Irishmen (Kennedy and O’Brien) seemed prudent.  Plus Mike wanted day-to-day help running the business.  Apparently Mike did not keep an agreement with Kennedy who was paid a salary, but whose dividends in the company were not paid off in cash but used to pay off his investment in the company.  When Mike died and the estate was settled, Kennedy sued the estate for what he considered to be his share and won.

Michael Cronan’s part of the whiskey business came to an end on November 10, 1908, when, as the Sacramento Bee so delicately put it, Mike “dropped dead.” He was buried in St. Joseph’s Cemetery.  The company was worth between $50,000-$75,000, had a good credit rating, and paid good wages according to the Dunn credit rating reports.  The company continued until 1911 when Mike’s widow closed shop, moved to San Francisco, and tended to her business interests in Sacramento and elsewhere.

Michael Cronin’s life spanned his youth on an Irish farm, then in America as a mill and railroad worker, hotel owner, liquor dealer, property owner, and Sacramento businessman.  He was a true “Lad of the Old Sod,” who applied an immigrant’s ambition, risk, hard work, and left part of his legacy to those of us who collect bottle related objects and who try to preserve some of the history related to them.

Notes:  My thanks to Steve Abbott for allowing me to bring his narrative about Michael Cronin back to attention. Steve provides an informative story about a successful immigrant “whiskey man” that fits well with the purpose of this website. Most of the images shown here are from the original article.  Two other liquor dealers mention in Steve’s text have been featured in past posts on this website:  Hall, Luhrs, May 1, 2015, and George Wissemann, July 18, 2016.

John Baum, “Cyclone Carry,” & Leavenworth Liquor

John Daum

John Daum, immigrant, Civil War veteran, father of seven, and prosperous businessman of Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1881 faced a stark dilemma. Swayed by prohibitionist zealots like the hatchet-swinging Carrie “Carry” Nation, Kansas voters by 92,302 to 84,304 had prohibited all manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.  As a liquor dealer, Daum, shown here, was facing the devastating loss of his livelihood. What he did next took him into uncharted territory — and the Supreme Court of Kansas.

Daum’s story began in April 1840 with his birth in Hesse-Darmstadt.  His father was a blacksmith who taught him the trade.  In 1858 at age 19 the youth opted to emigrate to the United States and chose Saint Louis, a city with a large German population, as his destination.  There he found work as a hand in the engine rooms of steamboats that plied the rivers of mid-America.  In 1860, his ship docked for the winter on the Mississippi at Leavenworth, giving Daum considerable time to explore the city.

Founded in 1854 as the first community incorporated in the Kansas Territory,  Leavenworth, shown above, and its adjunct military installation, Fort Leavenworth, became animportant stop for thousands of pioneer wagons heading west to the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails.  The city bustled with activity providing supplies to the travelers.  Baum liked the place and vowed to come back.

With the onset of the Civil War, however, Baum returned to St. Louis where he joined  Union Army as a member of the First Missouri Light Artillery.   Each company served as an individual battery, often separated from the other batteries in the regiment, making it difficult to know exactly in which battles Baum was engaged.  He is said to have fought at  the Battle of Shiloh, shown here, and at sites in Kentucky and Tennessee.  Because the First Missouri was located behind the front lines, casualties were light — only one enlisted man and no officers killed at Shiloh.  Baum apparently emerged from the war unscathed. Honorably discharged in 1864 he headed to Leavenworth.

Baum’s first recorded employment there was with Carney & Fenlon, grocers who were specialists in stocking pioneer wagons, including supplying them with whiskey.  Thomas Carney was a former governor of Kansas and several times elected mayor of Leavenworth.  With partner Edward Fenlon, he had built one of the largest wholesale grocery houses in the Midlands, operating a four story building and cellar crammed with goods in downtown Leavenworth and a large warehouse adjacent to both the Mississippi River and the railroad.  Company sales extended to Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Montana and New Mexico.  The partners saw something special in Union veteran Baum and raised him to stock manager.

Baum seemingly was drawn to the whiskey trade, however, and by 1866 had moved to employment as a clerk with A. McDonald & Company, a Leavenworth liquor store.  From that position,  about 1872 he moved to a partnership with a local named John Hannon to open a wholesale liquor house located at 113 North Fifth Street.  The partners called it Hannon & Baum. 

During this post-war period Baum was living the bachelor life, residing at Leavenworth’s Pennsylvania House hotel.  That was to change drastically about 1867 when he suddenly decamped to New York City to wed a woman named Mary German.  My guess is that their marriage occurred shortly after Mary arrived by ship in the U.S. from Germany.  Both about 27 years old, the couple may well have been childhood sweethearts.  

Returning to Leavenworth, Baum and Mary would have two children, William born in 1868 and Otto, 1871.  In fragile health Mary died in 1875, only 35 years old, leaving John to care for youngsters seven and four years old.  The following year, likely seeking a mother for his children, Baum married a second time.  She was 26, a local Leavenworth woman named Sophia Marie Endebrock, shown here.  Over the next nine years the couple would add four more sons and a daughter to the Baum household. 

Meanwhile, like a dark cloud on the horizon, Carrie Amelia Nation, aka “Cyclone Carry,” who became internationally famous as an American prohibitionist, moved to Kansas.  Although the state constitution prohibited alcohol sales, in many Kansas towns the law was ignored.  Saloons and liquor stores operated openly.  “Mrs. Nation launched a one-woman campaign against alcoholic spirits carrying a hatchet and a Bible. She prayed for fallen souls and left hatchet marks on bars.”

After demolishing a hotel bar in Wichita and destroying its liquor, Carrie roved Kansas smashing saloons and frequently being arrested.  Her visit to Leavenworth in 1901 was reasonably benign.  Leaving her hatchet behind, Carrie was given a police escort that kept close watch as she visited several sites, staying at the National Hotel.   As related by a city guidebook:  “…After being shown to her room.  , the saloon on the first floor was opened and did a brisk business, largely because of the many people who had turned out to see Cyclone Carry, as she was called by the newspapers.”  A postcard, showing the hotel, commemorated her visit to Leavenworth.

Although Carrie Nation’s trip to Leavenworth was uneventful, her prohibitionist activities were spurring state and local officials to enforce laws banning alcohol.  Baum faced an immediate deadline for shutting down his liquor business.  He did not hesitate to act.  The answer lay in a bridge over the Mississippi River to a location in Missouri called “Stillings.”  Not really a town, Stillings was a largely unpopulated geographical expression with a post office.  With several other Leavenworth liquor dealers, Baum moved his operation and supplies a few miles east to Stillings.

While continuing to live in Leavenworth and advertise in its newspapers, Baum was able to conduct his liquor business unimpeded in reliably “wet” Missouri.  Kansas residents had only to pick up the phone, dial 410, place an order, and within hours bottles or jugs of liquor would be delivered across state lines to their door.  U.S. courts generally had established that the Interstate Commerce Act (ICA) required unimpeded state-to-state trade, in effect undermining local and even state “dry” laws. Shown above and below are Baum jugs in several sizes marked with a Stillings logo.

Soon the forces of “dry” attempted to end the flow of alcohol from Stillings.  State authorities took Baum and four other liquor dealers to court, claiming violations of law.  After a lower Kansas court found for the defendants, the state’s attorney general and the Leavenworth county attorney appealed to the Supreme Court of Kansas.  The case was heard during July 1911.  The prosecution argued that the Stillings origin of liquor was a “subterfuge”  and that “certain wagons…with horses or mules hitched thereto and drivers thereon” were bringing liquor illicitly into Leavenworth.   This was not interstate commerce, the state contended, but “…Purely and simply…devices, shifts and subterfuges to avoid and violate the said prohibitory laws of said state of Kansas.”  

The Kansas Supreme Court disagreed.  The “whiskey express” over the Mississippi River was protected by the ICA.  The liquor traffic from Stillings continued. Two years later, however,  the Webb-Kenyon Act adopted by Congress exempted liquor from its provisions.  During the next four years, as the legislation was challenged in the courts, Baum could continue serving his customers.  Upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in January 1917,  Webb-Kenyon, still on the books today, effectively ended the Stillings safe haven for Baum and the others.

Baum’s gambit apparently had minimal effect on his standing in Leavenworth where he was hailed as an early resident who “figured prominently in the expansion and growth of the city.”   Among his achievements was as a founding member and officer of the local GAR, an organization of Union Civil War veterans; an organizer and trustee of the Leavenworth Turnverein, a German athletic club, and a principle donor to building Turner Hall, below.  Baum also was reported to have “amassed considerable wealth and property.”

Baum took a particular interest in Leavenworth’s Greenwood Cemetery where he was buried following his death in 1935.  In his later years he kept the wooden gate to the cemetery locked as he reportedly “lovingly” cared for the burying grounds where rested his first wife, Mary, and other kinfolk.  Said to have feared that when he died “the property would spiral into ruin,” Baum proved to be prescient. Greenwood, among the first cemeteries in Kansas, was allowed to languish until 2022 when it was named to the roster of National Historical Places. Currently steps are being taken to restore the burying ground as a Leavenworth landmark.

A final word about Carrie Nation who returned to Leavenworth for a second time only in 1911.  Her saloon smashing days were over.  She was brought to a hospital in the city by a nephew and, very ill, died there five months later.  Ironically, Carrie, the prohibition zealot, subsequently was buried in reliably “wet” Missouri, while Baum, the liquor dealer, is buried in Kansas where “dry” restrictions today continue to be among the most stringent in America.

Note:  A number of resources were used in telling John Baum’s story.  The two most significant were his biographies in the March 1886 Leavenworth Times newspaper and a National Park Service document on Greenwood Cemetery.  

The Successes & Sorrows of Boston's John E. Cassidy

 As an Irish immigrant boy of ten, John E. Cassidy found in America a promised land, rising from “butcher’s boy” to become a Massachusetts millionaire through his prosperous Boston liquor house.  Cassidy’s journey to success and wealth, however, was plagued with tribulations and personal sorrows beyond any which he, or anyone else, might have anticipated.

Born in Fermanagh, Ireland, in May 1836, John was the son of Mary McGovern and Peter Cassidy.  When he was about eight years old,  Ireland suffered a period of starvation, disease and emigration that became known as the Great Famine. The potato crop, upon which a third of Ireland's population was dependent for food, was infected by a disease destroying the crop.  Irish by the thousands left their homeland for the United States, many choosing to live in Massachusetts.

The Cassidys fetched up in Lowell, shown below about 1850.  It was a city thriving as a major industrial center during the mid-19th century, attracting immigrant workers, including many Irish to its mills and factories.  Peter Cassidy went to work as a laborer but died two years after arriving in America.   Mary Cassidy, identified in the 1850 federal census — perhaps whimsically — only as “Mama,” was head of a household that included her six children and five boarders.

As the eldest son, John Cassidy likely went to work as early as possible but likely received some elementary education in the Massachusetts public school system,  then accounted America’s best.  His first recorded job was in a butcher shop, cleaning up and doing odd jobs.  That occupation reputedly was followed by working as a stone cutter and then opening a grocery store in Lowell at No. 6 Lowell Street.

By that time Cassidy was married.  In April 1859, in a Catholic ceremony, at the age of 23 he wed Mary Ann Haviland, 20.  The couple would go on to have a family of four children, two daughters and two sons.  The arrival of their first child, Mary Tracy, may have spurred Cassidy to leave Lowell and move 30 miles south to the Boston area where he was recorded as a “tradesman” and eventually opened a liquor business. The family resided in Watertown, a suburb ten miles from downtown Boston.

This period in Cassidy’s life encompassed the Civil War and there are some  references to his having served in the Northern Army during the conflict.  Helped by the researchers at the Watertown Historical Society (see below), I have been unable to confirm that service.  By the time a draft was initiated, Cassidy was 27 years old, married with one child, and gainfully employed.  No evidence so far has been found of his having enlisted or been drafted.  One possibility is that, like my own (yes) grandfather, he participated in a “home guard” during the conflict. 

Cassidy quite clearly had a excellent business mind and rapidly built the reputation of his liquor house, initally located at Boston’s No. 11 Central Wharf, on the waterfront, shown above.  The proprietor was advertising as an importer of “brandy, wine, and gin” and “receiver of “Kentucky bourbon & rye whiskey.”   Before long the need for more space occasioned a move to 50-52 Broad Street at the corner of Milk Street.  It would become Cassidy’s permanent location.

As a merchant, Cassidy featured a blizzard of liquor brands, including "Atwoods Pure Alcohol,” “Beech Grove,” "Boat Club,” "Charles River,” "Chestnut Hill,” "Cumberland Club,”, "G.O. Taylor,” “Grave’s," "Grave's Maryland Malt,” "Hub Punch,” "Judges Favorite,” "Kentucky Union,” "Old Heritage,” "Old Neptune,” "Pine Hill,” "Pure Old Neptune,” "Salt Mash Bourbon,” "Ye Old Pilgrim Rum,” and  “Old Kentucky Club House Whiskey.”  Those labels included liquors obtained from other Boston dealers, like Chester Graves (see post of February 15, 2023).  Cassidy’s flagship brands were “Machinaw Whiskey” and Machinaw Rye,” advertised on shot glasses given to wholesale and retail customers.

In addition, Cassidy was marketing other proprietary brands, trademarking “Old Neptune” and “Salt Marsh Bourbon” in 1875.  He must not have felt the official stamp was worth the money and effort, however, and waited until 1906 when the trademark laws were strengthen by Congress to register “Mackinaw Rye,” “Pine Hill Whiskey” and “Old Pilgrim Rye.”  These liquors likely would have been “rectified” at his Boston headquarters from barrels purchased from distillers and blended to achieved desired color, taste and smoothness. 

Cassidy proved to be an excellent businessman, growing in wealth and prestige in the Boston area.  Although it was not a showy mansion, he ensconced Mary Ann and his children in a comfortable three story house in Watertown.  Shown above, it still stands at 227 North Beacon Street.  The whiskey man’s primary investments were in land.  A portion of an 1898 map of Watertown designates a number of parcels he owned.  Among them was a pine-covered parcel along the Charles River where Cassidy established a saw mill and rapidly harvested the timber.  Commented the Watertown Enterprise:  “To those who see this property since the trees have been cut it is a great surprise as the entire landscape has been changed.”

Cassidy had an plan for the timbers.  They would be part of a steamboat he would build on property he owned adjacent to the river.  As townsfolk watched in awe, the outlines of the first — and only — steamship ever constructed in Watertown began to take shape along a tributary leading to the Charles River.  In In a bow to his resident city Cassidy named it the S.S. Watertown.  Shown below in an artist’s painting of the scene, the steamship was launched on July 30, 1890, as  the thousands of locals looked on to applaud the achievement.

The S.S. Watertown, was 134 feet long, about 21 feet at its greatest width, and built to haul as  much as 400 tons.  During its short lifespan, the ship principally was used for excursion trips from Boston to nearby ports during the summertime and hauled goods from Boston to Lynn, Massachusetts, the rest of the year.  Barely two years after its launching, in September 1892 as the ship was headed to Lynn loaded with groceries, furniture and other merchandise, a fire broke out — ushering in the first of Cassidy’s travails.

As the fire spread, the captain wisely beached the ship to allow the passengers and crew to wade or swim to shore.  Unfortunately, one woman, afraid to jump, was thrown overboard by her husband to save her from the flames, dashed her head on the ship’s propellor and was killed.  The fire consumed the entire cargo and left the vessel a smoking hull.  Towed to Cassidy’s shipyard in April 1893 the S.S. Watertown was bought by a coal dealer planning to restore it.  The shipyard never built another.

The year 1893 also ushered in a series of legal problems for Cassidy as the Boston-centered Metropolitan Sewerage Commission, exercising “eminent domain,” seized a strip of Cassidy’s land twenty feet wide and totaling 50,000 square feet to construct an underground sewer.  Claiming damages for the value of the strip, as well as compensation for the effects of the seizure on his adjoining land, the liquor dealer was forced to launch expensive litigation that dragged on without resolution for almost a decade.

The resulting drain on his resources, estimated at millions of dollars,  eventually resulted in Cassidy being threatened with bankruptcy, a story important enough to make New York Times headlines.  His financial troubles sent a shock through Watertown and environs.  Strongly supporting the liquor dealer, the Watertown Enterprise told the story behind Cassidy’s plight.  While he had large debts and 115 creditors, only two were pressing him into bankruptcy.  The most notorious was the American Distributing Company, known an arm of the “Whiskey Trust,”  a liquor combine with a penchant for using dynamite and other underhanded means for forcing its competition to sell out to it.   The other claimant was a whiskey brokerage allied with the Trust, holding only a small fraction of the debt.  

With no other creditors willing to join their effort, the two ended their campaign to bring Cassidy down.  The Enterprise concluded its defense of Cassidy with this commendation:  “His many personal and business friends will rejoice that this trying time for him is over and that he is now in condition to reach again that ultimate success in business which his character and ability so deeply merit.”  

In an 1898 Watertown city directory amid the loom fixers, tanners and cabinet makers, Cassidy was listed simply as “gentleman.”  A 1904 ad shows Cassidy fully back in stride.  Still operating from his Broad Street-Milk Street headquarters, he was advertising “Old Pilgrim Rum,’  “Crown Gin” and “Fine Kentucky Whiskies.”  His son, William, was working with him and the company name had been adjusted to John E. Cassidy & Son.

Cassidy’s most enduring sorrows, however, seemed endless.  Within the space of 17 years, 1890-1907, he would experience the deaths of his wife and three of his four children.   Mary Tracy, the couple’s first child, born in 1860 a year after the couple was married, died in 1890, only 30 years old.   In March 1889, Cassidy’s eldest son, John Junior, died.  He was only 27.  In April of the same year, Cassidy’s wife, Mary Haviland, also passed away.  She was 67.  Nine years later, son and partner William J. followed in death.  He also was only 27.  Shown here, at the Watertown cemetery of the family’s Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church, Cassidy erected a memorial dedicated to his three children, shown here, — each taken away in the bloom of their young adulthood.

At the time of the 1910 census, Cassidy, now 73, was living with his daughter, Katherine, her husband Peter Palmer, their five children, and a servant girl.  He was recorded in the census as a liquor merchant, indicating continued management of his Broad Street business.  He died on December 8, 1911 at the age of 75.  His funeral was held at the Church of Our Lady in nearby Newton, Massachusetts, reported to have drawn a large attendance.  Cassidy’s obituary in the Watertown Enterprise hailed him “for more than 50 years as one of Boston’s most respected merchants.”

Notes:   This post was made possible by the assistance of two specialists of the Watertown, Massachusetts, Historical Society, Joyce Kelly and David Russo. Ms Kelly was responsible for researching the newspaper files on John Cassidy held by the Society and providing them to me quickly after my initial inquiry to their organization.  Mr. Russo is the author of a detailed article on Cassidy’s steam ship that was published in the April 2012 Historical Society newsletter, “The Town Crier.”  Available online, the article provides a detailed account of the ship’s history.  My gratitude to both for their help.  They demonstrate once again the value of local history organizations.