Few men have experienced the tragedies that during his lifetime beset Cincinnati liquor dealer and entrepreneur, Jacob Schmidlapp. Fewer still have been able to rise above their pain and sorrow to do so much for their fellow Americans in need and to advance the cause of world peace.
Jacob Godfrey Schmidlapp, right, was born in Piqua, Ohio, on September 7, 1849, the son of Adam and Sophia F. Haig Schmidlapp. He received his education in the local public schools of Piqua, a city of some 20,000 in Miami County, in the southeastern quadrant of the state. Perhaps seeing a lack of opportunity in his home town, not long after the end of the Civil War he launched his career working in a large Memphis department store called B. Lowenstein & Bros., shown below. Jacob worked as a cashier, likely in the liquor and cigars department. After a year learning the trade, in May 1868 he opened his own cigar store in Memphis and, according to a biographer also “became interested in distilling enterprises.”
Schmidlapp as a Liquor Dealer. In the aftermath of the war Memphis struggled during Reconstruction. The economy suffered; race riots ensued. Yellow fever epidemics periodically engulfed the Tennessee river town as deaths and residents fleeing from the disease depopulated the city. Assessing the situation, Jacob decided that Cincinnati, 80 miles directly south of Piqua, offered better opportunities. He moved there about 1874 and opened a liquor store at 22 Vine Street.
Schmidlapp from the outset was a “rectifier,” that is blending his own whiskey on premises from liquor stocks likely purchased from Kentucky distillers across the Ohio River. He was bottling them in glass with proprietary labels and selling them at retail. His early brands included “Amazon,” “Ceres,” "Clifton Springs,” “Venus,” and “Live Oak.” He appears to have trademarked only two of his brands, Live Oak Bourbon and Live Oak Rye, registering those labels in 1876,1895 and 1907. By 1885 his company had become Schmidlapp’s Live Oak Distillery.
Jacob had a flair for advertising and from early on was marketing his whiskeys to all parts of the country. Shown above is an ad from the Pacific Wine and Spirits Review identifying his San Francisco outlet. At left is a 1900 ad that appeared in Buffalo newspapers. He issued advertising shot glasses for Live Oak and other brands. They would have been given to saloons, restaurants and hotel bars stocking his whiskeys.
Although Jacob actually would not own a distillery until 1889, he apparently had an assured supply of raw whiskey that encouraged him as the Live Oak Distillery to issue a blizzard of brands. They included “Antelope,” “Applewood,” “Brookvale,” "C. T. Harvey,” "Clifton Club,” “Eastbourne,” "Fernvale", "Four Seasons,” "Good As Gold,” "Hard To Beat,” “Imperial," "King Lear,” "Lake Mills,” "Maple Grove,” "Old Todd,” “Palmetto,” "Pleasant Run,” ”Reindeer,” "Rock City,” "Runnymede Rye,” "Silver Star Rye,” "Southern Cross,” "St. James,” “Starbuck,” "Stone Ridge,” “Tiger,” "Tom Peck,” ”Village,” "Virginia Club,” and “Zebra.”
As a result of his strong business sense, Jacob’s profits from his liquor enterprise were substantial and allowed him with partners to acquire a distillery in Hamilton County not far from Cincinnati, shown below. Established in 1849 the facility was located between the Mill Creek, the B&O Railroad, and the Miami-Erie Canal. It had a troubled past, in 1857 destroyed by fire and in 1872 shuttered by the government for non-payment of taxes. Jacob and his partners bought the property in 1889, incorporating it as the Clifton Springs Distillery Co. Eventually the property included a plant with a mashing capacity of 4,000 bushels of grain per day, a 100,000 bushel capacity grain elevator, three warehouses holding 35,000 barrels, and three drying silos producing 6,000 tons of feed annually. As shown below it was a major operation.
Schmidlapp as a Family Man. Despite his growing wealth, Jacob already had known great sorrow. In 1877 he had married Emelie Balke, a local Cincinnati woman, the daughter of Charlotte and Julius Balke, a billiard table manufacturer. Emelie was 19 at the time of their wedding; Jacob was 28. Their first child, a son they called Julian, was born in September of the following year. After seven months of winning the hearts of his parents, to their great sorrow, Julian died.
The 1880s, however, brought joy as in rapid succession four more children were born healthy, Emma in 1881, William in 1883, Charlotte in 1887, and Charles in 1888. Then death came again. Rudolph, a son born in September 1893 lived only five months before dying in January 1894.
By this time Jacob could afford to move his family into a large home in the East Walnut Hills area of Cincinnati, shown here. He called the mansion, “Kirchheim,” after the town in Baden-Wurttemberg from whence his family had originated. It was located on 49 acres overlooking the Ohio River. Indicating the kind of wealth he had amassed selling whiskey, he purchased the mansion in 1895 for the equivalent today of $3.3 million and put more than $300,000 into remodeling.
The 1900 census found the family there, augmented by Jacob’s brother- and sister-in-law and their young son, and a live-in staff of six, including a housekeeper, governess, laundress, nurse, food server, and general servant. Tragically missing were Jacob’s wife and daughter, Emma.
During February of the previous year, possibly to escape the Cincinnati winter months, Jacob had sent them off to enjoy the warmth of California. We can image the excitement of the 42-year-old Emelie and 19-year-old Emma as they traveled around the West, sending postcards back to Jacob and the children still in school. Then came the awful news. Both had been killed in a railroad accident. Their bodies were returned to Cincinnati where they were buried in Spring Grove Cemetery at the Schmidlapp plot (Garden Lane, Sec. 29) next to Julien and Rudolph. After 23 years of marriage Jacob, 51, was now a widower. Remembered as a “loving and caring father,” he never remarried.
The fates had one more blow to deal Jacob. When his daughter, Charlotte, reached maturity, she yearned to travel in Europe, especially to see France and Germany. Recalling what had befallen Emelie and Emma, the father likely hesitated but eventually acceded to the girl’s desires. In the autumn of 1908, age 19, Charlotte departed from ship from New York for Europe, on the trip of her lifetime, likely landing in Le Havre. Days later the message reached Jacob — she had been killed in an auto accident in France. Her body was returned and laid beside her mother and three siblings. For many fathers it might have been a blow from which there would be no recovery. But not Jacob.
Schmidlapp as Banker and Beyond. About 1890, with his profits from his liquor business, Jacob organized a group of local business men to found the Union Savings Bank and Trust Company, serving as its chairman and guiding light. The bank met with almost immediate success, with its $500,000 in assets growing to $5 million, paying liberal dividends for most of its existence. Union Trust was accounted as one of the foremost financial institutions of the Midwest. Under Jacob’s leadership, in 1900 the bank erected the first tall building built in Cincinnati, shown here.
Describing his occupation as”capitalist” to the census taker, Jacob could point to a dozen or more enterprises in which he was a director or trustee. They included the American Surety Company, Equitable Life Insurance Society, The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, Degnon Contracting Company, Degnon Realty and Improvement Company, Queens Place Realty Company, Electric Securities Corporation, Montana Power Company, Champion Fibre Company, Monitor Stove and Range Company, and the Export Storage Company. He also sought to improve transit in Cincinnati by offering a plan for a tunnel to facilitate railroad and interurban rail access to downtown.
Schmidlapp as Philanthropist and Peace Advocate. Jacob is best remembers in Cincinnati today, not as a liquor dealer or banker or wealthy business man, but as an outstanding philanthropist in city history. Following the deaths of his wife and daughter and accelerated by Charlotte’s death, Jacob began giving away large portions of his millions. He financed a “magnificent annex” to the Cincinnati Art Museum, built a dormitory for the Cincinnati College of Music, and created an institution for women’s education in the name of daughter Charlotte. He also gave a library and memorial monument to Piqua, his home town.
Jacob is said to have been particularly proud of Washington Terrace, Walnut Hills, a development of more than 400 homes he built to house working class African-Americans, “in whose welfare he was deeply interested.” Said an observer: “His model homes form the most outstanding effort along this line in the country.” Jacob also was a trustee and contributor to Cincinnati’s McCall Colored Industrial School.
Jacob’s philanthropic works did not end with his death. He did not leave his money to his two sons, William, a prominent Cincinnati attorney, and Charles, a New York City banker. Having given most of his money away during his lifetime Jacob willed his residual estate, then amounting to about $1 million, to the Union Bank to create a charitable trust. Roughly a quarter of that amount went to the Charlotte R. Schmidlapp Fund, created to empower and advance young girls and women. What started as a $250,000 fund has grown to almost $30 million in assets. It began by awarding interest-free loans to aid young women in pursuit of higher education and continues to finance scholarships for women.
Funds in the Schmidlapp Trust also go to other worthy causes in Cincinnati. For example, in 2014 the bank’s trustees awarded $1.5 million to a charitable coalition dealing with 1) reducing preterm births in neighborhoods that are disproportionately affected by poor pregnancy results and infant mortality, 2) strengthening health education systems for pregnant women, and 3) assisting children vulnerable to “toxic stress” from unfavorable home environments.
Jacob’s other concentration was on international peace and arbitration of conflicts. He was a director of the Carnegie Peace Fund and treasurer of the American Society for the Judicial Settlement of International Disputes. Noting the years he devoted to these causes, one biographer commented: “It is to such men that the world looks for leaders in the movement for peace…when all the races of the earth shall dwell in harmony.”
Active into the last days of his life, Jacob as peace advocate lived just long enough to see the end of World War I; as a whiskey man he died just before the imposition of National Prohibition. He passed away on December 18, 1919, in Cincinnati and was buried in the Schmidlapp plot next to Emelie and the other family members.
The encomiums written about Jacob after his death were voluminous and full of praise. I have chosen one to end this vignette about a truly extraordinary man who rose above the grief and pain of personal loss to assist his fellow human beings in need: “Mr. Schmidlapp represented American manhood in the ideal — courage, honesty of purpose, simplicity and the power of preserving friendships. He has left a record after which the youth of America might well pattern their lives.”
Note: This post was gathered from a variety of sources. Most useful were two short biographies, one written while Jacob was living, the other after he had died. They were “Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1788-1912,” edited by Charles Frederic Goss, Clarke Publishing Co., Cincinnati & Chicago, 1912, and “The Historical Register,” edited by E.C. Hill, 1921.
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