Adam Dillmann on Milwaukee’s “Whiskey Row”

Students of American spirits are well acquainted with Louisville’s “Whiskey Row,” where so many familiar names in whiskey history had their headquarters.  Less well recognized has been Milwaukee’s Whiskey Row along Water Street, overlooking the Milwaukee River, where more than two dozen distillers, liquor dealers, and saloons plied their trade.  Among them was Adam Dillmann, a German immigrant whose entire business career would be located there,

Dillmann was born in Niederbuchen, Nassau, Germany in October 1939 of unknown parentage and emigrated to the United States in 1855 when he was about 16 years old.  The youth came aboard an American owned ship called the Francis Cutting, named for a New York congressman.  The trip, only the ship’s third,  carried European immigrants from Antwerp to New York. The voyage proved to be controversial.  

First, with no explanation of the delay, the ship’s Atlantic crossing took seven weeks when a normal crossing was about four.  Second, some passengers claimed that The journey had been obstructed by whales butting the ship and that twenty passengers had died in transit, their bodies thrown overboard.  The official log showed no whale attacks and only one death.  While the passengers’ story subsequently was doubted, initially it raised a stir — and headlines — in New York.  

By that time Dallmann likely had headed to Milwaukee, a city with a heavily German community  where he may have had relatives.  Although I have been unable to find his photograph, his physical description on a passport application indicates that Dillmann was just under five feet, six inches tall, with “proportionate features” (except for a cleft chin), blue eyes and a “heathy complexion.”  He also appears to have been intelligent and clearly ambitious to succeed in his adopted country.

 

Shown above as it looked about the time of Dillmann’s arrival, the city on Lake Michigan had grown up around two rivers, the Menomonee and the Milwaukee.  Those waterways allowed sheltered areas for loading and unloading cargo and were a bustling economic zone.  Water Street, as it was then designated, was the center of this activity.  Adam Dillmann made it his business home.

The Milwaukee River

The immigrant youth’s first occupation recorded in Milwaukee directories was in 1863 working with Peter Enders, from a prominent local meat packing family.  Dillmann was listed as co-proprietor with Enders of a saloon located at 223  East Water Street.  Over the next decade, Dillmann struck out on his own, running a saloon at 417 East Water Street.   By 1882, the German immigrant had branched out, recorded with a partner named Ignatz Morqawetz in a beer bottling company at 510 13th Street.  

This may have been a short-lived enterprise because within five years  Dillmann was back on Water Street — 242 West Water — as the proprietor of a wholesale wine and liquor store.  Called Adam Dillmann Company, this enterprise would be his sole occupation until the coming of National Prohibition.  It was located successively at four addresses on West Water, each move indicating a need for more space.   One biography also records Dillmann in 1858 buying the Menominee Hotel on West Water Street, shown right.

As a wholesaler Dillmann featured his own proprietary brands of whiskey. They were “Atlas Pure Rye” and “Old Capital Sour Mash.”  As the bottle shown left indicates, Dillmann demonstrated particularly good artistic sense in the design of his labels.  This attention to detail in design carried over to the back-of-the-bar bottles he gifted to his wholesale customers in saloons, restaurants and hotels.  Because of abuses in their use, back bar bottles would be banned after Prohibition.  

Dillmann also was generous with giving away an array of shot glasses to both wholesale and retail customers. The example at left is a particularly attractive shot with an elaborate etched design that advertises Atlas Rye.  Dillmann always was careful to include his name along with the brand being advertised.

As Dillmann’s business flourished along Milwaukee’s Water Street “Whiskey Row,” the busy proprietor was having a personal life.  About 1861 he had married Louisa M. Wellauer, an immigrant from the German area of Switzerland.  In rapid succession the couple would have four children, William, born 1862, Albert 1863.

 

Edward, 1865, and Louise 1867.  Apparently his family status occasioned Dillman’s interest in becoming an American citizen.  Although he applied in November 1860, his certificate of naturalization was not issued until May of 1866 with no explanation of the long delay.  The certificate was  recently offered for public sale on the Internet for $89.95.

As his children matured, Dillmann brought them into his Water Street liquor house.  When Dillmann’s eldest son, William, came of age he was put to work as a clerk.  He would be followed several years later by a younger son, Edward.  As the young men learned the whiskey trade, their father advanced them into management.  William became vice president; Edward, secretary-treasurer.  

When Dillmann entered his seventh decade as a Water Street saloonkeeper and liquor dealer, he made one last move to 124 West Water Street, shown here. His health faltered and he died in 1914, age 75 , with wife Louisa and his sons by his bedside.  Dillmann was buried in a family plot in Forest Home Cemetery on Milwaukee’s South Side.  His monument and gravestone are shown below.

Following the patriarch’s death, William Dillmann became president of the company and Dillmann’s widow, Louisa, vice president.  As National Prohibition became an almost certain reality,  the family decided to shut the doors on their enterprise.  In 1919 “Adam Dillmann Co.” disappeared forever from Milwaukee city directories and Water Street.

With the imposition of the total alcohol ban the following January, the West Water Street “Whiskey Row” emptied out.  Gone were the distilleries, wholesale liquor houses and saloons that once had made the avenue a colorful and vibrant part of Milwaukee’s urban landscape.  Today its whiskey history is just a brief mention in historical tours of the city’s downtown.

Notes:  This post was assembled from a number of sources, including city directories and the U.S. census.  The strange story of the 1855 voyage of the Francis Cutting that brought Adam Dillmann to America is drawn from New York Times stories at the time.

Jacob Spears & the Origin of Kentucky “Bourbon”

 For decades the controversy over who first called Kentucky whiskey “bourbon” has persisted without a definitive answer.  Despite conflicting views one individual has emerged as the the most likely candidate.  He is Jacob Spears (1854-1825).  Pennsylvania born, Revolutionary War soldier, early settler in Bourbon County, and pioneer  American distiller, Spears increasingly is being credited as the first to name his distilled product “bourbon.”  Whether or not the attribution is valid, Spears’s history of itself is well worth recounting.

Shown here in maturity, Spears was born in Rockingham County, Virginia, in January 1954, the son of Henry Speers and Regina Froman Speers (family members spelled their surname in several ways).  After fathering ten or eleven of his fourteen children in Virginia,  Henry sold his land and moved the family north to a new homestead on the Monongahela River in Southwest Pennsylvania, near the future town of Belle Vernon.  There Jacob grew up.  He may have had early experience with liquor, recorded by Surveyors Mason and Dixon as having met the youth in the mid-1760s working in a Pennsylvania tavern.

Spears, age 28, next is found as a private in the Pennsylvania militia during the Revolutionary War.  With other militia soldiers, Spears was deployed to garrison duty in Harrodsburg and vicinity, one of three white settlements in what would become Kentucky (carved from Virginia).  This area was prime farming country, with the Licking River providing a water route to the wider America.  Some records indicate Spears had been advanced to sergeant, but his gravestone marks him as a private.  The memorial also cites him as having been present at the 1881 Battle of Yorktown, but I can find no corroboration.

Spears also is recorded involved in a disastrous late-war conflict known as the Sandusky Expedition.  In May 1782 Colonel William Crawford led about 500 volunteer militiamen, most of them from Pennsylvania, including Spears, deep into what now is Northern Ohio to destroy Indian villages that had been harassing white settlements. Getting wind of the expedition, the Indians and their British allies stationed in Detroit gathered to oppose them.

As depicted above a battle occurred on June 4 in which the Americans were badly outnumbered, taking refuge in a grove of trees that came to be known as “Battle Island.”  Surrounded and facing defeat the militiamen attempted to escape after dark.  The retreat became a rout and Crawford was separated from most of his men.  Captured, he was tortured by the Indians and burned at the stake. An estimated 70 militiamen were killed or executed. Miraculously, most of the force found their way through the thick forest back to safety in Pennsylvania.  Spears was among the survivors. 

Living in Western Pennsylvania with the Revolutionary War won, Spears well remembered his days in Kentucky country and the fertile lands around what would become Bourbon County, named for the French Royal House of Bourbon.

Spears seems particularly drawn by the proximity of the Licking River, the watershed for a major area of Kentucky, flowing north through miles of Kentucky countryside touching 23 of Kentucky’s 120 counties and ending at the Ohio River.  There a one way water route opened up a  significant part of the new Nation via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and onto the Atlantic Ocean.

In 1786 Spears had married a Pennsylvania woman named Elizabeth Kellar. Jacob was 32, Elizabeth, 21.  Their first three children, Rachel, Rebecca, and Solomon were born in Pennsylvania.  Although the historical record is silent, my surmise is that during this period Spears was involved in the liquor trade, running a tavern and possibly experimenting with distilling on the side.  Perhaps with the “Whiskey Rebellion” (1891-1894) brewing in his corner of Pennsylvania, the pioneer lands of Kentucky beckoned to him. Accordingly, Spears moved from Pennsylvania to a homestead near a settlement  that became Paris, Kentucky.

The move to Kentucky enhanced Spears’ opportunity at making whiskey.  He had ample land on which to grow grain, a source for water, and space for a distilling infrastructure.  The couple would have three more children in Kentucky, again giving them Old Testament names:  Noah, Abram, and Sarah.  Spears housed this growing family in a house some dubbed “The Stone Castle.”  Shown above as it looks today, the original Federal style structure was built for Spears in 1790 by Thomas Metcalfe, a future governor of Kentucky.  It has been expanded and altered over time.

Outbuildings, shown above, apparently provided Spears with sufficient infrastructure to accomplish his distilling and ability to store the resulting barrels for aging.  How the distilling process was accomplished is not apparent but the organization of the warehouse was described in 1917 by Journalist Wayne Cottingham who grew up in Bourbon County:  “The racks for holding the barrels were gone but the large timbers which had held them were in place. A door elevated in the wall was used for unloading directly from wagons onto a floor built about four feet above the ground. The old rope windlass employed in raising the barrels to the wooden loft was usable. The age of the loft was shown by the rough timbers sixteen or eighteen inches in diameter, hewn only on two sides.”  The building is said to have held 2,500 barrels of aging whiskey.

Beginning sometime in the 1790s, Spears began a major distilling operation and developed a local reputation for the quality of his whiskey.  As the 19th Century dawned and his production exceeded local demand, he hatched the idea of sending it by water to sell in other parts of the new Nation.  The Licking River would be his highway to the outside world.  The map shown here documents the long and tortuous route via the Licking to the Ohio River.  A modern observer has noted:  “The 1810 Bourbon County Census relays that Bourbon County had 128 distilleries and produced over 146,000 gallons of whiskey and Jacob Spears was at the epicenter of the production…The Licking and Ohio Rivers played an integral part in Mr. Spears success as a businessman.”  Below: The confluence of the Licking and the Ohio.

Barrels of Spears’ whiskey were carried north by flatboat poled with the current, the ultimate destination being New Orleans via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.  It was a oneway trip for the boats dependent as they were on the currents to propel them. Once in The Big Easy, the craft were unloaded and broken up for their wood.  The flatboat men would walk back to their homes.  That chore most often fell to Spear’s adult son, Noah, who is said to have made 13 trips to New Orleans and walked back to Bourbon County with a money bag strapped to his body. Noah used the Natchez Trace trail, below, traversing Indian country where robberies were common.  Spears allowed son Abram to go along when he reached 16.

Spears is believed to have demonstrated uncommon marketing savvy in selling his whiskey in New Orleans, apparently branding it in a way to make it distinct on the city market.  He recognized that New Orleans was a “hyper-French” city.  Bourbon County was named after the French Royal dynasty to which many residents would have had at least some measure of fealty.  Spears seemingly calculated that by marketing his whiskey there as “bourbon,” he could strike a note of recognition among the Cajun populace.  Noah’s 13 visits attests to his father’s success.

Spears later years were marked by relative affluence, surrounded by adult family members, and grandchildren.  Each of his three sons were involved in the distillery, allowing him time to be involved in the local and national politics of the day.  A measure of Spears’ standing is indicated by a February 1799 meeting to nominate representatives to the Constitutional Convention that was held in his home.

In February 1825 Jacob Spears died and was buried in a plot on a site behind his house.  He was 74 years old. His elaborate gravestone, below, told the story of his Revolutionary War service and names his six children.  The farm and distillery became the property of the eldest son, Solomon, who sold them before dying in 1830, only five years after his father.  

Below is a picture of the Spears house and distillery as they look today.  The site, although credited as holding the oldest distillery building extant in Kentucky, is privately owned and not on the Kentucky Bourbon trail.  A historical marker noting Spear’s distillery is located a mile from the site.

Meanwhile the debate on who first attached “bourbon “ to Kentucky whiskey raged on for years.  In his 2016 book “Bourbon: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American Whiskey,”  Author Fred Minnick painstakingly goes through a list of seven Kentucky distillers who have been suggested as the “father” of bourbon and anoints Jacob Spears.  I believe his assessment is accurate and generally accepted in Kentucky and elsewhere. 

Notes:  This post was researched from a wide number of sources.  Major ones are referenced in the text.  The Ancestry website was another with data on Spears and his family.  Additionally, Fred Minnick has written:  “As an author, you hope that one day your words can positively influence another person. The more I dug into Jacob Spears’ past, the more I realized how important he was to our beloved spirit.  And I’m honored that this research toil has led to a magnificent new chapter in whiskey.”  I think Spears would agree.

Native Americans Selling Whiskey II

 Forward:   The official Government view about selling liquor to Native Americans was expressed in an 1833 report by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to Congress:   “The proneness of the Indian to the excessive use of ardent spirits with the too great facility of indulging that fatal propensity through the cupidity of our own citizens, not only impedes the progress of civilization, but tends inevitably to the degradation, misery, and extinction of the aboriginal race.”  Given that warning and federal laws against selling booze to indigenous peoples, it is startling to realize how many distillers and liquor dealers used Indian images on their whiskeys.  This post, my second on the subject, documents nine more.

The first example is a label from Calumet, Michigan, showing a comely maiden in  a headdress advertising “Copper Queen Whiskey,” a blend.  It was produced by Nariso Bianchi, an italian-born 1897 immigrant to the U.S.  About 1904 Bianchi, with a partner, opened a saloon and liquor store.  Although he was a “rectifier” not a distiller, that is, blending whiskeys for color, taste and smoothness, he did his own bottling and labels, advertising Copper Queen Whiskey as proprietary.

By coincidence Calumet at the time was named “Red Jacket,” the same name and personage as the next whiskey.  Red Jacket was a Seneca chief who had fought on the side of the British in the American Revolution and was named for having worn the British military red coat.  His real name was Sagoyewatha (He Keeps Them Awake), and was adamant against the white man, his ways and especially the Christian religion.  Nevertheless, Buffalo distiller Thomas Clark named his facility and whiskey after him.  Red Jacket is shown here wearing a medal later bestowed on him by George Washington, a reward for abandoning the warpath.

Meanwhile, in Chicago a young Bennett Pieters was profiting greatly from selling a highly alcoholic Red Jacket Stomach Bitters.  By wrapping his remedy in an Indian motif, Pieters was tapping into the rampant myth of the times that Native Americans possessed special knowledge of medicines.  For a time it made him rich, until several fraudulent schemes and his own alcoholism led to his downfall.  Abandoning his family, Pieters joined the U.S. Cavalry in 1871, went West, and became an Indian fighter. 

Searching for an image to illustrate his “Old Redskin” blended whiskey, Thomas A. Brownrig of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, chose a scowling chief with a downturned mouth, carrying a hatchet.  American Indians of the Abenaki and other Algonquian languages-speaking nations had inhabited that part of coastal New Hampshire for thousands of years before European contact.  Brownrig advertised widely in local media  calling himself a “Dealer in Foreign and Domestic Liquors, Imported Goods a Specialty.”  He also claimed be Portsmouth exclusive agent for the popular I. W. Harper Whiskey.  

Meanwhile on the West Coast, the Gottstein brothers of Seattle chose a canoe-borne indigenous American to be embossed on their liquor flasks.  Chief Seattle (1786-1866) was a leading figure of the Suquamish and Duwamish tribes who pursued a path of accommodation toward white settlers.  A widely publicized speech arguing in favor of ecological responsibility and respect of Native Americans' land rights has been attributed to him.  

An Indian maiden illustrated “Tippecanoe,” a double fire copper whiskey from Joseph Pfeffer, a Cincinnati liquor wholesaler.  For saloon signs, almost always displayed in places where women and children were excluded, the Tippecanoe husky lass was shown bare-breasted.  When used on the label of a bottle that might find itself on a grocer’s shelf or a druggist’s display case where the eyes of the world might see, the maiden was more chastely dressed. At the bottom of a shot glass, as shown here, it is hard to tell.  

From a letterhead came the Indian chief advertising “Sachem” brand whiskey.  The term “sachem” is defined as a North American Indian chief especially the chief of a confederation of the Algonquian tribes of the North Atlantic coast.  In this case the whiskey was the product of the Rehm-Zeihler Company located in Louisville, Kentucky.  This firm was established by O.E. Rehm in 1904 and continued in business until closed by National Prohibition.

The comely Indian maiden seen here was an advertising element of Isaac and Bernard Bernheim Bros., acclaimed as the most successful distillers in American history.   Located in Louisville, the brothers registered the famous “I.W. Harper” brand. The "I W" initials were borrowed from Isaac's own name, while Harper was the surname of a well known Kentucky horse breeder. The whiskey went on to win multiple medals for quality, the first being at the New Orleans Exposition in 1885.

Our final Native American selling whiskey is a stern-looking chief whose face graced the label of “Old Yock” brand straight rye whiskey from Dillinger Distilleries of Ruffdale, Pennsylvania.  For several years before the Civil War Samuel Dillinger drove a large Conestoga wagon pulled by six horses across the Allegheny Mountains on the Nation Pike, transporting merchandise between Baltimore and Pittsburgh.  After settling down in Pennsylvania, he became the second largest distiller in the state, hauling out fifty newly filled whiskey barrels every day from his distillery to store in his warehouses and then delivering a quality aged rye like “Old Yock” to his customers.

Note:  My first article on this subject was posted on June 8, 2023.  Longer posts on five of the whiskey men noted here also may be found on this website:  Clark, August 17, 2018; Pieters, Jan. 29, 2019;  Pfeffer, Dec. 12, 2016; Bernheim, Dec.10, 2014, and Dillinger, Feb. 12, 2016.

Steuben County to Chicago: The Trek of the Van Housens

Born in Steuben County New York in 1826, by the time he was six years old John Henry Van Housen had witnessed his father, Joseph, die at 28 years old; watched as his mother, Katherine, soon remarried, and he himself sent alone to live with a large family of her relatives.  Shown here in maturity,  Van Housen overcame his beginnings to found a wine and liquor business hailed as “one of the largest and most complete establishments in the wholesale trade” in America. He named it the Steuben County Wine Company, an enterprise he eventually located 600 miles west in Chicago.  

Despite growing up without his parents, young Van Housen early exhibited intelligence and a hard working persona.  After receiving a basic public education in  the schools of Central New York, he left his studies at about 17 to work in dry good store in Bath, New York. Four years later at 21 he was made a partner.  Van Housen continued in that line until 1860 when he left to work in a Bath wine and liquor business.   

That move may have been occasioned by his marriage in January 1854 to Charlottte A. Torrey of Naples, New York.  They would have three sons in rapid succession, Beach Torrey (B.T.), Harry L., and Charles, the latter who died in infancy.  After nine years working in the Bath liquor store, Van Housen struck out on his own in 1869, establishing a wine and liquor house he called “The Steuben County Wine Company.”  

By 1872, Van Housen was finding Bath too small for his ambition.  Moreover, during the 1860s the town had lost population.  Looking for a larger customer base for his enterprise, he chose Jackson, Michigan, a town five times larger than Bath and moved the Steuben County Wine Company there. 

At the time Jackson was doing well economically, with several railroad connections linking it to markets all over the Midwest. The family stayed five years but Van Housen’s vision of his future imagined even wider possibilities.  Looking further west he saw Chicago, then in the midst of boom years.  Uprooting Charlotte and their two boys who now were reaching maturity, Van Housen moved the family to The Windy City in 1876.

There Van Housen incorporated his Steuben County Wine Company at $200,000, installing his two sons as incorporators, stockholders, employees, and eventually as executives.  Beach became secretary and Harry, treasurer.  The company initially was established at 220 Wabash Avenue, moving between 1878 and 1911 to successive locations on Madison Street, the busy Chicago thoroughfare shown here.  With growing success the Van Housens needed more space, finally settling into large quarters at 227-229 West Madison..

Van Housen was wholesaling his alcoholic products in ceramic jugs of varying sizes from a single gallon to three gallons.  Those would be distributed by his saloon, hotel and restaurant customers into smaller containers and then poured over the bar into glasses.  Shown above are two jugs bearing the earlier 212 Madison Street address and below are jugs from the West Madison Street headquarters.

The company issued only limited whiskey brands, chiefly bearing the name of the German general who helped Washington train his Revolutionary War troops:  Baron Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand von Steuben. For obvious reasons he is usually just referred to as Baron von Steuben.  Shown below is “Old Steuben Rye” in half-pint and pint flasks. 

Van Housen also marketed a highly alcoholic “Steuben Celery Bitters,” advertised on a colorful trade card showing a youngster dressed in a military uniform carrying a lighted pipe.  Although it is a puzzling image, it is very like  figures found on German beer steins of the time.  The message on the back is equally perplexing.  It begins by extolling the nostrum’s medicinal qualities:  “A sure cure for Dyspepsia, Indigestion, Sleeplessness, Sick Headache and General Nervous Disability, affording immediate relief, and if its use is continued a permanent cure guaranteed by the proprietor.”  That proprietor (one assumes Van Housen) then suggests that wine merchants sell his Celery Bitters as a mixer for drinks, for just plain drinking and for soups because “it imparts a delightful flavor and is a wonderful Nervine.”

Van Housen rapidly gained a reputation as a leader in Chicago and throughout Illinois as a result of his strong support for domestic wines and whiskeys against imported goods.  His liquor house carried only American made products and he publicly preached the ascendancy of domestic alcoholic beverages.  Noted a biographer:   “The prediction made by Mr. Van Housen years ago, that, owing to the advantage of the American climate,…America would excel the world in the manufacture of pure wines, brandies, champagne and whiskey, has been verified and the public now realize that that the American product, in every respect, is as good as the foreign and of purer quality.”

Van Housen’s foresight, along with his personal qualities, gained him a reputation  as one of the leading businessmen of Chicago, extolled in print for his “…native sagacity, sound business judgment and tireless energy, coupled with a frank, genial and generous temperament that wins him many friends.”   Van Housen’s  trek across America had ended in success.

As he aged, Van Housen apparently moved into another profession, becoming known as a contractor and builder in Chicago.  The liquor house was turned over to Beach and Harry. It was reported that their father’s “…remarkable success in business is attributable, in part, to the efficient cooperation of his two sons, who are actively associated with him in management.”  By 1911 Beach was heading the company as its president and Harry was secretary.  The company added a new brand to its list of whiskeys called “Beach Run,”  trademarking the name in 1905.

With advancing age, Van Housen, with wife Sarah, retired to the family home, shown here, and watched helplessly as National Prohibition shut down the Steuben County Wine Company he so carefully had nurtured and taken cross country.  Van Housen died at age 81 in May 1936 and was buried at the family burial site in Chicago’s Mount Hope Cemetery. Charlotte would join him there five years later.

John Henry Van Housen lived long enough to have the satisfaction of seeing National Prohibition repealed.  He had followed his vision across 600 miles and four states to foster American wines, liquors and whiskey, achieving resounding success and personal recognition.  Now, after a 14 year hiatus and Repeal,  made in the USA libations once again were flowing. Van Housen must have been proud.

Note:  Among a number of sources for this article, by far the most important was “Encyclopedia of Illinois, Cook County Edition (Vol. II),” by Dr. Newton Bateman and Paul Selby, Munsell Publishing, Chicago, 1905.