Whiskey Men and Multiple Marriages

Foreword:  In profiling some 660 pre-Prohibition “whiskey men” I have been impressed with the stability that most achieved in their married lives.  Divorce was uncommon.  Moreover, a second marriage usually meant a first spouse had died.  Sometimes, it appears, re-marriage was a way for a man to have a mother for his young children.  My research, however, has revealed three cases of whiskey men in multiple marriages, each of them unique in the conjugal details.

Whoever coined the phrase, “lucky at cards, unlucky at love,” might have had in mind Samuel J. “Sam” Thompson of West Brownsville, Pennsylvania.   Sam won a distillery in a game of chance one night and became famous for making a premier whiskey.  As he was rising  in wealth and prestige, however,  three of his four wives died within five years of his marrying them, one of them leaving him with three small boys.

At the age of 23, Sam married for the first time in 1843.  The bride was named Martha Cooper.  After five years of marriage but no children, she died in 1848, leaving a grieving husband behind.  The same year,  Lady Luck was with Thompson in a poker game, winning the deed to a distillery along the Monongahela River.   Although the distillery was the only way of collecting the debt, Sam knew nothing about making whiskey and competition was stiff.  An old friend gave him advice:  “Make better whiskey than the others.”   He did and during the next several decades, the name Sam Thompson Rye became synonymous with quality.

In 1857 Sam moved to a large house on the other side of the Monongahela River in the town of Bridgeport.  Two years later at the age of 39 he married a second time.  She was Esther Wilson of Washington County.  Over the next five years.  Esther bore him three sons.  Then in 1864, this second wife died, leaving Sam with three small children, one of them a baby.   A single father, he raised his boys without a female partner for the next six years.   Then in 1872, at age 52, he married Elizabeth Crawford.  But the Thompson “five year curse” struck again.  Elizabeth died in 1877.

Meanwhile Thompson was demonstrating ability as a businessman with interests in banking, natural gas and coal mining.  He also married again.  This time in 1882, he wed Bridget Dawson, a local widow.  Sam was 62.  Bridget outlived the Thompson 5-year curse by three years and was still living with him at his death.  Sam died in December 1899 at the age of 79 and was buried in a family plot in the Beallsville Cemetery, Washington County, Pennsylvania.  It appears that all four of his wives are buried adjacent to him.

In writing about her Montana ancestor, a descendant headlined an article “Franklin James Pierce — A Complicated Man.”  That was an accurate assessment of a saloon keeper and liquor dealer whose labyrinthine ways and tangled fortunes were reflected in his marriages.  An Ancestry.com family history has copies of three Pierce marriage certificates issued within a single decade.  In 1890 when he was 24, working as a waiter in Butte, Frank met an Irish immigrant girl named Julia O’Neil by whom he fathered a son.  He subsequently wedded her.  After a relatively short marriage, they divorced and she returned to Ireland with the boy.  

Eventually Pierce moved to Missoula, Montana, where he owned and managed the Gem Theatre, a vaudeville house. There he met and fell in love with Lulu Inman, originally from Kansas City, a dancer who was performing at the Gem.  They were married on New Years Day 1898.  Lulu rapidly became restless “off the circuit” in Missoula, Montana.  When her chance came to join the Rentz-Santley Novelty & Burlesque Company on the road, Lulu left town and abandoned Pierce.  The local newspaper headlined:  “She Refused to Live with Him; Missoula Man Looking for Divorce from His Spouse on the Ground of Desertion.”  

Before long, however,  Frank found true love in the person of Mary Helena Murphy, born into a New Orleans immigrant Irish family.  She also was a performer at the Gem.  In June 1900 the couple were married by an Episcopal priest at Holy Spirit Church in Missoula.  Pierce subsequently opened a saloon and liquor store in Butte, Montana, featuring a whiskey he called “Green Arbor.”  He bought a large house in Butte.  He needed it.  This marriage was destined to last and produce ten children.  A photo from Missoula taken about 1910 shows Frank and Mary (standing) with five of their brood.  They named the two oldest girls “Missoula” and “Montana.”  While some of his children were still youngsters, Pierce died in 1926 of heart disease at the age of 59.  

During a highly energetic lifetime James R. “Jim” Hogg managed to juggle the responsibilities for making and selling a nationally recognized brand of whiskey, managing an array of successful local businesses, serving as Mayor of Popular Bluff, Missouri, and winning four terms as County Sheriff.  With enough activities to keep most men exhausted, Hogg also found time for multiple marriages over his 74 years.  

Hogg, shown here, was married five times, divorced four times, and married to one woman twice.   She was his first wife, Ida Dillard, the daughter of Louis Dillard, a pioneer farmer who was one of the founders of Hilliard, Missouri, and a man of some wealth.   When Hogg married Ida about 1880, her father gave him a 160 acre farm in exchange for a wagon and a team of horses.  That marriage produced one son in 1881.  By 1884, however,  Hogg had divorced Ida and was married to Susan S. Klutts who bore him twins in February 1885, one of whom died in infancy.

Fast forward to about 1887.  Hogg had divorced Susan and remarried Ida.  In December of 1888, she bore him a daughter.  Then, possibly as a complication of childbirth, Ida Dillard Hogg died.  Her husband’s grief appears to have been short-lived.  Barely a year later he married Clara Catherine Smith of Poplar Bluff, possibly to have a mother for his children.  Jim and Clara would have three sons of their own in what appears to have been the longest of Hogg’s marriages.  The 1900 census found a family of five Hogg children, one of Ida's, one of Sarah’s and three of Clara’s, all living with the couple.

Sometime during the next decade, Jim and Clara divorced. The 1920 census found him, now age 57, married a fifth time to Ruth Naoma Haas (or Hawas), a woman 23 years his junior who was working as a clerk in a dry goods store when they met.  Perhaps because of the age difference this union also was not fated to last. In the 1930 census Hogg was living with his brother and gave his marital status as “divorced.”  When he died by drowning at age 74, the tributes were many, including this one:  “No resident of Butler County was ever closer to his  fellow men than the beloved Jim Hogg during his lifetime.”   The writer might have added  “And closer to Butler County women.”

Note:  More complete biographies of these whiskey men can be found elsewhere on this blog:  Sam Thompson, September 4, 2012;  Franklin James Pierce, May 22, 2017;  Jim Hogg, November 29, 2013.

John Higgins: Southern Traitor? Pal of the Pope?

In March 1862 as Richmond seemed under imminent attack, Confederate authorities there arrested suspected Union sympathizers, including John M. Higgins,  a prominent Irish immigrant grocer and liquor dealer.  In contrast to other political prisoners, Higgins’ incarceration was short, allegedly freed by the intervention of Pope Pius IX.  Was it true?

Although it was not until three years later that Union forces would take Richmond, the advance of General McClellan toward the city during the 1862 Peninsula Campaign panicked Confederate officials.  They declared martial law and arrested a number of prominent citizens on charges of “treason.” Higgins apparently was targeted because of his relationship with Union Colonel (later General) Michael Corcoran, shown here.  

Because two of Higgins’ aunts had married two of Corcoran’s uncles, the liquor dealer and the soldier had become friendly.  Early in 1862 Corcoran sent a letter to Higgins advising him to move his wife and family North and assured him that he would see them to safety under a flag of truce.  When the letter was intercepted by Confederate authorities they immediately marked Higgins as a traitor.

Along with others seized in the roundup, Higgins was imprisoned at Richmond’s former “Negro jail” on Franklin Street, renamed “Castle Godwin” after a local police official.  Meant to accommodate about 75 prisoners, within five months the small facility held 250 prisoners in thirteen rooms.   An armed sentry guarded the front door.  Meals for prisoners were provided by a nearby saloon.

As he languished for weeks at Castle Godwin, Higgins would have had ample time to review how he had come to that point.  He was born in County Sligo on the northwest coast of Ireland in 1832, the names of his parents unknown.  He arrived in the United States in 1850 at the age of 18 and headed almost immediately for Richmond where he seems to have had relatives in the liquor or grocery trade.

By 1852, possibly with assistance from those same relatives, Higgins opened his own specialty grocery store, shown here.  It stood on the northwest corner of Franklin and Seventeenth Streets in Richmond, with liquor a principal commodity.  

John also married.  His wife was Kate C. Dempsey, born in March 1826 in Cashell, County Tipperary, Ireland.   Their first child, also named John, came in September 1860, eighteen months before his father’s arrest.  The couple would go on to produce seven more offspring, five girls and two boys.  Interestingly, the others were born only after the end of the Civil War.

Because “habeus corpus” had been suspended by the Confederate government for the duration of the conflict, few if any political prisoners were ever tried — merely held and sometimes freed as influence was brought to bear.  Among Higgins’ fellow prisoners was George Washington Frosst, shown here.  Frosst was a Maine-born machinist  who was outspoken in favor of the Union and equally vociferously opposed to Roman Catholicism.  When Castle Goodwin was closed after about two months and Frosst with other inmates were sent to a prison in Salisbury, North Carolina, Higgins was liberated and allowed to go home.

Frosst was outraged, claiming that Higgins was a “papal delegate” and had been released through the intervention of the Pope. Later he wrote:  “Romish subjects were allowed their liberty which were denied those whose fathers had fought and died against European influence and dictation.  At this time ’Hell was smiling’ on the Church of Rome and John M. Higgins, an Irish Pagan, was in clover.”

Not exactly in clover.  The same martial law that had led to Higgins’ arrest also decreed that no liquor could be sold within the city limits of Richmond.  The liquor business that the Irishman had built had to be suspended for the duration of the war.  Higgin’s income and ability to support his family all but vanished.  Setting aside whatever views he may have had on the Confederacy, he took the oath of allegiance and found employment in the office of General John Winder, shown here.  Winder was the chief military officer in command of city forces and supervisor of the prison Higgins had just left.  Even more ironic,  Higgin’s job as a clerk in the Confederate War Department included examination of mail to and from prisoners being held in Castle Godwin, now mainly deserters and soldiers who had gone AWOL.

Once the war had ended, Higgins went back to his grocery trade, emphasizing liquor sales once again.   By 1870 his net worth, according to the federal census, had advanced to $15,000 (equiv. to about $330,000 today).   He also was advertising his wares in local newspapers with the slogan “Pure goods, full value for money.”  

With his growing prosperity Higgins was able to move his family into an impressive looking home, shown here left.  In time both his eldest son, John R., and a younger boy, Gerald, were working in the store with him.

Higgins’ popularity as a merchant also assisted him in carving out a political career.  In 1872 he was elected to the City Council of Richmond, a thirty-member body with five representatives from each ward.  He was re-elected numerous times, serving 18 years in all.  Among his duties was oversight of the local police.  In 1901 Higgins announced that he would be a candidate for Police Commissioner of Richmond, citing his experience on the Council’s Police Committee.  I can find no indication that he achieved that post.

Higgins continued to be active even into old age in guiding the fortunes of his company.  He died in July 1906 at age 74 and was buried in Richmond’s Mount Calvary Cemetery.  His gravestone noted his origins in County Sligo. His wife, Kate, had preceded him, dying in August 1892 at age 56.  The family burial plot is marked by a large statue of an angel standing on a cloud.  

What of G. W. Frosst’s charges about the reason for Higgins’ release from jail?  The Irish immigrant definitely was a Catholic and active in local church affairs, including for a number of years president of the Catholic Beneficial Society, a Richmond organization devoted to charitable causes.  Moreover, when his daughter was married in 1880 the ceremony was performed in the city’s cathedral by a newly created Archbishop, indicating Higgins’ importance in the church. No evidence exists, however, of his being a “papal delegate” as charged by Frosst.

Nor is there proof that Pope Pius IX took a personal interest in Catholics caught up in the American Civil War.  While he offered to moderate the conflict between North and South, the Pope also was for emancipating the slaves and withheld formally recognizing the Confederate government.  It is highly unlikely that he would have interposed on behalf of John Higgins.  The more plausible answer to the Irishman’s release was his prominence in Richmond and his willingness to take the Confederate oath of allegiance.

J.W. Swart and His Arizona "Bar Room"

Violence swirled like dust in a windstorm around Jacob W. Swart’s “Bar Room” in Charleston, Arizona Territory.  Located six miles from infamous Tombstone, Arizona, site of the “Gunfight at the OK Corral,” Swart’s watering hole was a favorite hangout of gunslingers and outlaws.  His distant relative (see below) believes that the bearded man standing in the doorway of the saloon wearing a white hat is Swart.

The name is Dutch, derived from the word for “black” and the family settled on American soil in New York State during the 1700s.  Jacob likely was born in 1823 in Dryden, Tompkins County, the eldest child of Elizabeth (nee Winnie) and John Duffie Swart. Census data variously recorded the father’s occupation as laborer or “shingle weaver,” that is, working in a wood mill making shingles for houses.

When Jacob, the eldest child, was just an infant, the family moved to Albany where a brother and two sisters were born.  The 1850 census found him at age 27 still living at home and likely working as a farm laborer.  Later in that decade Swart left his family and moved West, recorded living in Arizona by 1867.  Along the way he appears to have learned something about guns and perhaps about operating a saloon.  In 1879 the Pima County, Arizona, newspaper reported a payment of $11.44 to Swart as a quarterly fee for his services as deputy sheriff.  Such jobs often were awarded to those handy with a six-shooter.

Not long after, Swart moved to Charleston, Arizona, about sixty miles east of Pima.  Shown above as it looked in the late 1880s, Charleston was founded in 1879 as a milling site for the silver mines around Tombstone.  Because water was essential to recovering the silver and Tombstone was desert, the town, located six miles away on the San Pedro River, was chosen for the factories and the ore was hauled there.  The mills held heavy pistons that rose and fell, breaking down ore. The operators then combined the pulverized ore with water and chemicals including mercury to release the precious metal.

People seeking work in the mills poured into town.  At its zenith in the mid-1880s Charleston boasted four general stores, a meat market, drug store, two restaurants, two laundries, two hotels, several boarding houses and an estimated thirteen to fifteen saloons.  One of the earliest drinking establishments was owned by Frank Stillwell, a noted gunslinger, outlaw and businessman who also owned an interest in silver mines, two livery stables, a wholesale liquor business,  and a saloon.  In 1881 he sold the saloon to Swart.  A year later Stillwell, left, was dead, shot at close range by Marshall Wyatt Earp in revenge for the killing of his brother, Morgan.

In the years following Swart’s proprietorship of the saloon, it became known as a handout for a loose group of outlaws known as the “Cowboys.”  The photograph shown here is believed to depict a number of those desperadoes, several of whom subsequently would be involved in the notorious 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, an epic clash that has been dramatized repeatedly in motion pictures and other media.

  

Jeff Swart, a distant relative of Jacob Swart, has spent years analyzing the photo of the saloon and believes it is a group picture of the Cowboys.  He believes that the shot was taken in 1881 by Charles O. Farcoit, an itinerant photographer in the Southwest, not long before the Tombstone shoot-out.  Among those gathered at Swart’s place for the photo, says Jeff, were:  

*Ike Clanton:   Joseph Isaac Clanton was a member of the Clanton-McLaury gang that confronted the three Earps and Doc Holiday in Tombstone.  Reputedly unarmed, he fled the gunfight scene in which his younger brother, Billy, was killed.  Shown here, Ike later filed murder charges against the quartet, but after an 30-day court inquiry, the judge ruled that the lawmen had acted within their authority.  Six years later Ike was killed attempting to flee from a lawman seeking to arrest him for cattle rustling.

*Tom McLaury:  McLaury and his brother Frank owned a ranch outside Tombstone and had ongoing conflicts with Marshall Earp and his brothers over the McLaurys’ cattle rustling and other offenses.  They frequently had threatened the Earps and both were at the OK Corral on that October day.  Both were killed in the virtual seconds of gunfire that ensued.

*William Brocius:  Better known as “Curly Bill,” Brocius was a gunman, rustler and known murderer. One observer called him “Arizona’s most famous outlaw.”  Brocius had numerous run-ins with the Earps and was linked to the killing of Morgan Earp.  An Earp-led posse unexpectedly encountered him with other Cowboys at present day Mescal Springs, Arizona, in March 1882.  During the ensuing shootout Wyatt Earp killed Curly Bill.

*Pete Spence.”  Born Elliot Larkin Ferguson, Spence was a hanger-on of the Clantons and McLaurys.  Suspected of stealing mules and robbing a stagecoach, he nonetheless was hired by an Arizona town as deputy sheriff.  On the job he pistol-whipped and killed a man, resulting in a sentence of 18 months in jail.  Despite his fierce demeanor here, Spence retired from crime to raising goats and running supplies to Arizona towns by mule train.  He died in bed in 1914.

The sign that hung above the door to J.D. Swart’s Bar Room, pricing drinks at 12 and 1/2 cents deserves some explanation.  His customers would know that the reference was to a “bit.”  The “bit” was a unit of common currency derived from the early tradition of cutting a Spanish milled dollar into eight pie-shaped pieces or bits, each worth 12 and 1/2 cents.  “Two bits” made a quarter as that coin sometimes is called today. 

In addition to running his drinking establishment, Jacob engaged in family life.  During the early 1870s he had married an Hispanic woman named Sacramento who had been born in the Mexican state of Sonora.  Fourteen years his junior, she apparently had been married before.  The 1880 census indicated that her son was living with the Swarts in Charleston, along with her brother and a niece.  The couple had three children of their own:  John, 7, likely named after his grandfather;  Charles, 5; and Peter, a baby of 10 months.   Jacob, age 52, was listed in the census as “keeping saloon.”

The violence that marked this part of Arizona did not leave Swart untouched.  During the mid-1880s, the saloonkeeper had an altercation with a man named Chambers, a manager at one of the Charleston mills.  Swart shot and killed him.  In the West of those days if the dead man was armed and shot in the front, the verdict almost inevitably was “not guilty” and the shooter was not jailed.  In this case Swart found himself facing Justice of the Peace James Burnett, a man known for assessing large fines for infractions and pocketing the money.  Likely reckoning Swart a rich man, Burnett fined him $1,000, equivalent to $22,000 today.  Rather than pay up, Swart hustled out of Charleston just ahead of a posse sent to arrest him.

Jacob, presumably with his family following, moved 300 miles west to Yuma, Arizona, on the Colorado River near the California border.   Yuma was a far different place from Charleston and Tombstone.  City Historian Tina Clark has called Yuma a “precious river town.”  It was the first stop in Arizona for trains and steamboats coming from urban centers like Los Angeles and San Francisco.  Tastes in Yuma were more refined and life was calmer.

There Swart opened a new watering hole he called “The Identical Saloon” at the corner of Main and Second Streets.  In a 1891 advertisement, one that misspelled his name, he boasted of always having on hand “First-class Whiskies, Wines and Brandies” as well as “Choice Key West Cigars.”  Jacob clearly had taken his drinking establishment up a notch on the elegance scale.  Noting his “Cosy Club-rooms” suggests that he was entertaining gambling or perhaps something more intimate.  At that point the trail goes cold on Swart.  I have been unable to track his final years or his place of burial.

The fate of Charleston, however, is well known. When the silver mines in Tombstone flooded in 1886, the mills were forced to shut down and the town declined sharply in population.  That blow was followed by a major earthquake that struck in May 1887.  It left the town’s adobe structures in ruins and sealed its fate.  By 1889 Charleston had become a ghost town, as it remains today.

Although the population of Tombstone also declined sharply, it remained the seat of Cochise County and beginning in the 20th Century began to flourish economically on tourism and the sale of Western clothing and memorabilia.  Annually some 450,000 visitors are drawn to the town by its history of violence, particularly the gunfight at the OK Corral.

Note:  Although this post was gathered from many sources, key was a post by Jeff Swart on his blog on February 2, 2014.  He has done some excellent genealogical work on his family and apparently ferreting out the identities of the men in the photo of Swart’s Charleston Bar Room.  My efforts to reach Jeff online have proved unsuccessful.  Photos of the four outlaws are from Wikipedia.

The Bevan Brothers: Three Lives in a Bottle

  

The mid-19th Century amber bottle at left is accounted a singularity with nothing like its shape and decor before or after in American whiskey annals.  It was the product of the Bevan Brothers — Ebenezer,  Thomas and Benjamin — immigrants from Wales who during their foreshortened lives fashioned a thriving liquor business in East Central Pennsylvania and established reputations for fair dealing.

The Bevans originated in Blaenavon, a town in southeastern Wales, lying at the source of the River Afon Lwyd in historic Monmouthshire County.  Shown below in the 1800s, parts of the Blaenavon are a UN-designated World Heritage Site.  The brothers were the sons of Philip and Rachel Lewis Bevan.  Ebenezer, born in 1824 was the eldest, followed by Benjamin, 1826, and Thomas, 1828.

Receiving their education in the schools of Wales the Bevans also had some work experience behind them when they immigrated to the United States during the late 1840s, settling in Pittson, Pennsylvania.  Pittson is a town in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, situated between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. It gained prominence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a bustling anthracite coal mining city, drawing a large portion of its miners from European immigrants, many of them from Wales.

The early years in Pittson for the brothers may have been in the mining industry.  Benjamin, shown here,  possibly drawn by the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, then left the family and went to California in 1849.  Whatever his occupation there, when he returned two years later he had sufficient cash to help set the brothers up in business.  Thus in 1852 the wholesale wine and liquor house of “E. & B Bevan" was born.  It is shown below.

The eldest brother, Ebenezer, was the president of the firm and owned the building that housed it.  The structure was two stories, covering a site of fifty feet of front and 135 feet in depth on Pittston’s Main Street.  As recorded in a press report, the Bevans’ company prospered, achieving “a splendid reputation throughout northeastern Pennsylvania, both for the character of its transactions and the quality of its work.”  The 1860 census put the net worth of the brothers at the equivalent today of a half million dollars.

While dealing in imported and domestic wines, brandies, and liqueurs, the brothers were specializing in whiskey.  Pennsylvania was rife with distilleries, many making rye and corn-based liquor.  The Bevans were buying their products by the barrel, likely “rectifying,” i.e. blending, and selling whiskeys said to be “remarkable for strength and purity.”   Although many U.S. liquor dealers were content to market their wares with labels on plain flasks and quarts, the Bevans determined to issue their “I.X.L. Valley Whiskey” in a more costly uniquely shaped, embossed glass container.   They possibly designed and definitely directed a Pittston area glassworks to craft the special bottle that opens this post.   

Blown in a mold and bearing a pontil scar, the whiskey bottle features a small cylindrical base with a larger octagonal paneled body tapering at the shoulders into a long neck and applied double collared mouth.  The embossing features the name of the whiskey and company along with four five-pointed stars.  The color varies from a brilliant amber to a darker hue.

As they were growing their liquor trade, the Bevans also were having personal lives.  Not long after his arrival in America, Ebenezer wed Jane Rowlands, a woman six years his junior, in Carbondale, Pennsylvania.  Accounted “a woman of beautiful character,” Jane like her husband had been born in Wales.  They would have seven children, three boys and four girls.   Meanwhile Benjamin had married Mary Ann Jones, a Pennsylvania-born woman seven years younger. They would have eight children, four boys and four girls.  The two Bevan families lived next door to each other in Pittston.  According to the 1860 census, Thomas Bevan, still unmarried at 32, lived with Ebenezer’s family,

The Bevans increasingly were being recognized as progressive, civic minded additions to the town and surrounding region.  Said the Wilkes Barre Times Leader:  “From the year 1852, the family of Bevan has been a prominent one in this community and has done its share in procuring the development of Pittston’s capabilities and resource.”   Unfortunately, the brothers had limited time to enjoy their joint prosperity and local acclaim.

Ebenezer was the first to go.  At the early age of 44 in 1868 he died while still guiding the fortunes of E & B Bevan.  With his extended family grieving by his graveside, Ebenezer was buried in Pittston’s Forty Fort Cemetery. His grave marker is shown here.  At the time, four of his children were still minors.  His widow married again, perhaps to have a father for her children, and became Jane Watkins.  Almost immediately Benjamin assumed control of the business, re-naming it “B. Bevan & Bro.”

That brother, Thomas, who had been part of the firm from the beginning, was said to be “widely known and respected throughout the county.”   For the next eight years he worked beside Benjamin at the liquor house as the business continued to prosper.  Throughout his life, however, Thomas had been plagued with depression.  The crisis came in April 1876, when he left home one morning and was found three hours later hanging from a beam in the Bevan & Bro. warehouse.   Age 48 at his death, Thomas was buried near Ebenezer in the Forty Fort Cemetery, the marker shown here.  He had married and was the father of five young sons.

With Thomas’ death, Benjamin became the sole proprietor and the company name changed to “B. Bevan.”  This brother expanded his entrepreneurial skills to other areas, for a time president of the Niagara Engine Company and a director of the Pittston streetcar line.  Benjamin’s health began to fail late in 1880 and took a turn for the worse in January 1881.  He rallied sufficiently to witness the marriage of his eldest daughter but died several days later, leaving three minor children.  His obituary in the local paper, accounted Benjamin as “a man generally esteemed for his genial manners and kindly nature.”  Fifty-four years old at his death, he was buried near his brothers under the gravestone shown here.

At Benjamin’s death ownership of the liquor house devolved to his widow, Mary Ann Jones Bevan.   She was assisted in managing the firm by C. W. St. John, her son-in-law, who continued to operate the business successfully for a number of years.  The last directory entry that I can find for the liquor house is 1888.  The legacy of the Bevan brothers — three immigrants from Wales — is embodied in the iconic whiskey bottle that bears their name.  Eagerly collected, one recently sold for $2,691.00.

Notes:   The information for this post came from a number of sources.  Key among them were an article on the Bevan liquor business that appeared in an October 1888 issue of the Wilkes Barre Times Leader and the newspaper obituaries of Thomas, Benjamin and Ebenezer’s widow, Jane.  Subsequent to the posting of the vignette, Matt Wheeler, a descendant of Thomas Bevan was in touch with additional information and the portrait of Benjamin and a photo of the company -- for which I am most grateful. Matt informed me that C.W. St. John was Benjamin's son-in-law, a correction I have made.