Beginning in 1831, John Kammerer and his son Joseph through their enterprise founded multiple industries, including a distillery, that resulted in the rapid settlement of their section of Washington County in western Pennsylvania. They called the village at the center of this activity “Kammerer.”
Born in Germany about 1790 and educated in the public schools there, John Kammerer was by all accounts a man of multiple talents. Although biographies differ on details, John would seem to have been a master mechanic, millwright and carpenter. As an expert workman he came to America about 1831 to work on a German government financed project, expecting to return home after completing a two-year assignment.
John already had a wife and children in Germany, the result of two marriages. In 1820, according to one account, he married Margaret Dunker, who gave him five children over the next decade and died in February 1830. Needing a mother for his young children, John married again six months later. She was Elizabeth Etta Bender. “Then bidding goodbye to his Fatherland, wife and children, he sailed for America.”
John’s initial destination was Baltimore, Maryland. From there his assignment took him to Pittsburgh, then to Wheeling, West Virginia, and finally to Washington County in Pennsylvania. He is said to have spent some time working on the National Turnpike Road that ran between Cumberland, Maryland, through Wheeling, and west through Ohio. Having found Washington County to his liking, John decided to stay in America. After finding a suitable place for a home, John called for his family to join him. In 1833 after a 66 day sea voyage, they arrived and found their way to Washington County. Now they were six; the youngest was Elizabeth’s new baby.
With seven mouths to feed, John Kammerer got busy. He found work as a mechanic and later as a carpenter, earning enough money to build and open a general merchandise store. He subsequently built a tavern with sleeping rooms, a few yards east of the store building. He called it the Kammerer Hotel. In 1846 John built a mill for making flour from locally grown wheat and rye. When it burned three years later, he had sufficient resources to build back a bigger and more modern stone structure. The settlement straddled a portion of the National Turnpike that was the boundary line between Somerset and Nottingham Townships. The place initially was known as “Dutch John’s.”
As the community John created grew and prospered, it officially became Kammerer, Pennsylvania, a town with its own post office. As Joseph matured he initially was put to work as a clerk in the general store. When he quickly showed a talent for the trade, while still in his teens, the establishment was put under his management. By 1852 Joseph was traveling to Philadelphia regularly to purchase stocks of goods that included farm implements, boots and shoes, produce, groceries and grain.
Joseph also married. In 1860, he wed a Pennsylvania woman named Lucinda Howden. They would have five children. The 1880 census found the family together in Washington County. The eldest daughter, Elizabeth, 19, was working in the general store while Margaret, 17; Joseph, 14; Albert, 12; and Annie, 8 were all in school. The household had one female servant and a male boarder who was clerking in the store.
As he aged, John’s heath faltered and he died in 1856 at the age of 65. Says one biographer: “In the course of years he became a man of large consequence in this section and through his enterprise started industries which resulted in the rapid settlement of the section in which the larger part of his life was spent.” As a well known and respected resident of Washington County, John Kammerer was given a well attended funeral and buried in the German Lutheran Cemetery in Somerset Township. Elizabeth would join him there three years later. Their joint grave monument is shown here.
Joseph took over running the Kammerer enterprises and expanded on the work his father had begun. Turning his attention to the milling business he installed new machinery. A local publication reported: “It is now strictly a modern plant…with rolls for ten breaks and six reductions, Nordyke & Marmon machinery, George T.Smith purifiers, low grade reel, redresser and three-high Monitor feed mill.” The mill could turn out 75 barrels of flour a day. Advertised as “The best winter wheat flour made in Western Pennsylvania,” Joseph’s “Ocean Spray” brand found a ready market. Eventually other area mills disappeared leaving this mill the only one within a radius of ten miles of Kammerer, seen below as it looked in 1876.
Noting that rye and wheat yields of local farmers were steadily increasing and exceeding flour needs, in 1859 Joseph bought a small second-hand distillery and placed it in the basement of his flour mill. After operating this plant for two years, he built a separate building and increased mashing capacity from ten to twenty bushels daily. When the water flow proved insufficient to run both the flour mill and the distillery, Joseph moved the latter to a new location near Mingo Creek. Converted from an old sawmill, it was a modest-sized plant with the capacity to mash thirty bushels of grain a day. He later added a warehouse and put his operation under federal “bottled in bond” regulations. He called the enterprise “The Kammerer Manufacturing Company, Ltd.,”
Despite the relatively small output, Joseph advertised his whiskey vigorously. Shown here is a trade card cum ink blotter that claimed: “Kammerer Pure Rye Whiskey has no equal for medicinal use when a stimulant is needed.” He sold it by age on a sliding scale of price. Eleven year old whiskey fetched $5.00 a gallon, two year old just half of that amount. Said a contemporary observer: “Kammerer Pure Monongahela Rye Whiskey had a wide reputation for fine quality, and was sold and shipped to almost every State east of the Mississippi for medicinal purposes.”
In addition to his flour and liquor enterprises, Joseph owned 200 acres of land on which he grazed a herd of prime cattle. This farmland was also yielding coal and gas. In addition to maintaining the hotel, he expanded the Kammerer general store, reputed to have a stock of goods valued at $75,000, equivalent to $1.6 million today. Joseph also was appointed postmaster at Kammerer.
Of all his investments, Joseph’s distillery may have offered the most problems. The still house burned down on June 26, 1897, a total loss. Luckily, the bond house in which he had stored 11,000 gallons of whiskey remained intact. Washington County had been a center of the tumult over whiskey taxes known as the Whiskey Rebellion. As a result, the area’s distillers were under heavy scrutiny. Liquor licenses were issued on a yearly basis by the county requiring Joseph to make annual pilgrimages to the courthouse to apply. As shown here, in 1906 Joseph was advertising that his license would expire on May 1, would not be renewed, and customers should order immediately.
Joseph, four month’s shy of his eightieth birthday, died in February 1915. The cause given on his death certificate was “severe gastritis & supposed passage of gall stones.” He was not buried in the family plot at the Lutheran Cemetery where his parents lay, but chose burial at the nearby Pigeon Creek Cemetery connected with the Presbyterian Church. His gravestone is shown here.
After his death, it was revealed that Joseph’s attempt to sell his whiskey before losing his license in Washington County had not been entirely successful. His estate included 245 gallons of whiskey said to range in age from 20 to 45 years. While this dating seems exaggerated, the value of the liquor still would be substantial. Without a license to sell it, Joseph’s executors were forced to pour it down a sewer. The incident made headlines.
Although Washington County today has more than 200,000 residents, Kammerer is just a bump on Pennsylvania Route 135. The post office has been closed for years. Gone is the flour mill, the hotel, and the general store. Only the name remains to remind a current generation of a German immigrant father and his son who through their hard work and enterprise (including making whiskey) created a once thriving community in western Pennsylvania and thereby helped build 19th Century America.
Note: This post principally was drawn from two sources: 1) 20th Century History of the City of Washington and Washington County, Pennsylvania and Representative Citizens, Joseph F. McFarland, Chicago, Ill., Richmond-Arnold Pub. Co., 1910. 2) Pennsylvania Roots: Bringing Our Past into the Future, posted by Carole Eddleman, April 3, 2006.
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