Born into an immigrant Scottish family, brothers Thomas, James and John Gaff found opportunity in America’s midsection to create a business empire of extraordinary size and breadth. Founded on revenues from distilling whiskey, Gaff enterprises encompassed a brewery, a fleet of steamships plying the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, Indiana grain and hog farms, a Louisiana plantation, a silver mine in Nevada, turnpike construction, railroad financing, banking, and likely the world’s first ready-made breakfast cereal.
The Gaff saga began in 1811 when James and Margaret Wilson Gaff pulled up stakes in Edinburgh, Scotland and emigrated to the United States with their three-year-old son, Thomas. The family settled first in New Jersey where James was born in 1817 and John in 1820. Subsequent moves took the Gaffs to upstate New York and then to Brooklyn where Margaret’s brother, Charles, was operating a distillery. There he taught his nephew Thomas the distilling business.
Armed with that knowledge Thomas, eventually accompanied by younger brothers James and John, moved to Pennsylvania. There the Gaff brothers engaged in several businesses, including storekeeping, papermaking, and most important, making whiskey. For a number of years they were highly successful and made money until the financial Panic of 1837 depressed the national economy. About the same time the brothers began having difficulty obtaining sufficient grain for their distilling and found taxes increasing on their liquor, depressing their profits.
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Upon Thomas’ arrival, the Gaffs almost immediately began to build a distillery near town on the banks of Hogan’s Creek, a waterway that emptied into the Ohio River. This distillery eventually produced rye, bourbon, and a scotch-type whiskey that the brothers dubbed “Thistle Dew.” The Gaffs also used the brand names “Excelsior," "Howe & Hubbel Excelsior’” "Pleasant Valley,” "Silver Lake,” "Wild Cat,” and "Wild Cat Family Whiskey.” The latter two names showed a certain sly sense of humor since “wild cat” was a name at the time applied to illegal moonshine. The brothers called their distillery “T. and J. W. Gaff & Co.” By 1850 it had become one of the largest in the United States. An illustration of the complex later in the 1800s shows its growth and proximity to the Ohio River.
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Meanwhile the brothers were having personal lives. Thomas, for whom there are no known photographs, at the age of 27 in 1835 in Brooklyn married Sarah Darling Whipple, a widow four years older than he. The couple would have six children, only three of whom would live to adulthood. At the outset of their residence in Aurora, the family lived in cramped quarters above a Gaff mercantile store, a household that also included Thomas’ mother, Margaret.
With his growing wealth from distilling, brewing and the fleet of steamboats, Thomas Gaff saw an opportunity to provide his family with a twelve room, three story home on a wooded slope on the outskirts of town, affording a view of Aurora below and a broad sweep of the Ohio River Valley beyond. Completed in 1855, Thomas called his mansion “Hillforest.” Shown here, it is an outstanding example of Italian Renaissance architecture.
The ten acres of ground on which the house sits were equally impressive. Influenced by Italian landscaping, the hillside behind the house had formal gardens, a lake, gazebo, terraced gardens, and baths. The ravines of the landscape influenced the use of a rusticated footbridge and a grotto built of local stone to form a barrel vault. On the hill above were vegetable gardens, vineyards, orchards, and pasture land.
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Sometime in the late 1860s, James moved his family to Cincinnati where he engaged in a partnership with Charles and Julius Fleischmann who had emigrated from Germany to the United States to make yeast. Impressed with the brothers, James helped bankroll their efforts in a business called Gaff, Fleischmann and Company, Manufacturers of Compressed Yeast. The investment seemed like a failure until, as a gamble, a pastry shop and restaurant were set up at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition with the yeast used in the baking there. The product revolutionized the industry and made James and the Fleischmanns multi-millionaires.
Because distilling was in James’ blood, he convinced the brothers to make liquor — yeast being a component — and again invested with them. About 1872 the trio founded two distilleries in nearby Riverside, Ohio. Fleischmann distilleries gained a national market by being the first American operation to produce good gin. Rivaling imported Dutch and English gins and less expensive, Fleischmann’s gin proved very popular, amassing more profits for the partners. James Gaff also had a quarter share in the Boone County Distillery, located at the hamlet of Petersburg, Kentucky, a short 25 miles from Cincinnati.
Meanwhile back in Aurora, Thomas was busy investing Gaff family funds in a diverse set of enterprises including the Treasure Hill Silver Mine in Nevada, a strike that between 1867 and 1880 yielded silver valued at the current equivalent of $500 million. Through Thomas the family also was engaged in farming operations, raising cotton and selling horses, owning a plantation in Louisiana, and dealing in land in three states. They owned a foundry and machine works and financed turnpike and canal construction. Thomas was one of the original stockholders of the Ohio and Mississippi Road, a line that subsequently became the B & O.
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Besides their many enterprises, the Gaff brothers were heavily involved in Aurora civic affairs, backing the town's first utility company, the Aurora Gas and Coke Company, and founding in 1856 the First National Bank of Aurora with Thomas as president. Moreover, the Gaff distillery was issuing its own currency, a bill that included two comely women and one of its steamboats. Thomas also helped to organize Aurora's school system, served on the City Council with his brother James (John was mayor), and, with his brothers, bought Aurora a fire engine and town clock.
An 1880 history of Indiana's eminent and self-made men captured Thomas Gaff's wide range of interests, both business and philanthropic, noting: “His executive ability is remarkable. No transaction within the range of his complicated affairs escapes his observation. He is generous, and ready to relieve the deserving poor. Few men have been more liberal in the contributions to religious and charitable objects."
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After Thomas’ death, the Gaff business empire was directed by Thomas T. Gaff, a son of James, who continued add to the family fortune primarily in distilling and the Gaff heavy machinery business in Cincinnati. Appointed by William Howard Taft as a commissioner for the construction of the Panama Canal, this second generation Gaff later moved to Washington, D.C. Thomas Gaff’s Hillforest mansion home remained in the family until it was sold in 1926. Today it is maintained by Aurora townsfolk as a museum and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Note: This post is drawn from a variety of sources, a primary one being an unsigned Park Service document nominating Hillforest for the National Register. The paper contains a great deal of information about the Gaff family and an extensive bibliography.
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