Whiskey Men: The San Francisco Quake and Fire

 

Foreword:  At 5:12 A.M. on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, an estimated 7.9 earthquake hit San Francisco.  Within 30 hours of the quake’s first jolt, an ensuing firestorm had consumed much of San Francisco. In the inferno that swept through the city for three days, more than 3,000 people died. Twenty-eight thousand buildings were destroyed over 500 blocks of the city.  Property damage has been estimated at $235–500 million in 1906 dollars — equivalent to the entire 1906 Federal budget.  Today the amount would be between $4.8 and $10 billion.  Among those affected were many San Francisco liquor dealers.  Here are the brief stories of four.

John Lutgen and his whiskey company had gone from success to success in  San Francisco,  moving each time to larger quarters and in 1906 occupied a spacious building at 29-31 Battery Street. A local writer had opined : "Their trade has been prosperous from the start, and has since extended not only throughout the State, but also throughout the coast, their establishment being one of the representative liquor houses of the Golden Gate City."  

In 1904, Lutgen’s firm had incorporated with a value of $250,00, several million dollars by today’s reckoning.  He and a partner each received 3,998 shares, valued at $25 each.  About the same time, once again needing more space, the company moved to the Battery Street address. Increasingly John Lutgen was being recognized as a major figure in the community. He was a member of the Board of Library Trustees in Alameda and active in several German benevolent societies and Masonic orders.

Then came that fateful morning in 1906.  Among buildings destroyed was the Battery Street building housing the Wichman, Lutgen Company.  Going up in flames were thousands of barrels and cases of whiskey, the firm’s records and all its equipment.  If Lutgen was tempted to quit, he gave no indication.  Almost immediately he made plans to relocate the company into temporary quarters at 431-439 Clay Street  to carry on the whiskey trade.  Meanwhile he planned, designed, and supervised the construction of a new building at 134 Sacramento Street.  The company moved there in 1911, its final home.  The following year Lutgen reported very good sales.

Among others burned out of their business quarters were Louis H. Barner and Henry Kehlenbeck, thriving wholesale liquor dealers at 324 Clay Street. The earthquake triggered a fire at the California Fireworks Company on Front Street, burning north to Clay Street and creeping up that thoroughfare slowly but steadily.  Shown right are a group of onlookers on Clay Street, including anxious shop owners that may have included Barner and Kehlenbeck, watching as the flames drew nearer.  Along Clay some buildings were blown up as a preventive measure but the progress of the fire was not halted. 

Burned out of their business, Barner & Kehlenbeck disappeared from directories and the telephone book briefly, displaced along with tens of thousand of other San Franciscans.  Fearing future quakes some business owners simply moved away.  Not  Barner or Kehlenbeck.  By early 1907, just a few weeks after the earthquake, they were back in business at Devisidaro Street, an area of town that had not been ravaged by fire.  By the end of that same year they had rebuilt permanent quarters at 714 Kearney Street and moved in to resume operations.

The sign left is brim full of confidence.  Goldberg, Bowen & Company  in 1915 were proclaiming the specialty grocery and liquor firm  a “Master Grocer” with a “The World Our Field.”  The claim was backed up by illustrations of goods delivered by ship and rail from all over the globe.  Many San Franciscans, however, could remember when Jacob Goldberg, and the Bowens, Charles and Henry, posted a quite different sign on the burned-out shell of their headquarters. 

The sign made clear that despite the blow the disaster had leveled on them, the partners were determined to press on.  It read: “Goldberg, Bowen and Co. Grocers Will Open a Grand New Store, Van Ness & Sutter.” True to their pledge by 1909 Goldberg, Bowen was back in business at the old address, with a building, bigger and better than the one before.  Shown here, it still stands at 242 Sutter.  The company eventually would have four stores, including one in Oakland. Despite calamities Goldberg, Bowen Co. was on its way to “World Reach.”

 

The earthquake and subsequently burning of San Francisco in 1906 was greeted by a good many clergymen as divine retribution for the city’s wicked, wicked ways. The fact that houses of worship were incinerated right along with everything else — while a huge whiskey warehouse was spared — inspired this immediate verse by Frisco poet and wit Charles Kellogg Field:

'If, as they say, God spanked the town

For being over frisky,

Why did He burn the churches down

And save Hotaling's whiskey?’”

Anson P. Hotaling was the largest liquor wholesaler in San Francisco  with a sales volume of 1,750 barrels annually.  Hotaling’s salvation may have been by the grace of God, but there also were more earthbound causes.   According to accounts, the warehouse was threatened and saved three times:  First by a fireman who hacked off smoldering roof cornices.  Second by a single length of hose from a Navy fireboat in San Francisco Bay that firefighters dragged over the ridge of Telegraph Hill for over a mile and eleven blocks to the Jackson street site. There they sprayed water on the building.

The final salvation was a bucket brigade, many of the participants Hotaling's workers, who slopped a compote of sewage and sea water on the structure from an adjacent site.   The mixture steamed and stunk as it hit the hot exterior but as one writer reported, “the muck did the trick.”  Moreover, while other liquor dealers in the city suffered from looting, authorities allowed the Hotalings to hire a hundred men to stand guard. The firm lost nothing.

The Hotaling Company continued to prosper at its Jackson Street address until shut down by National Prohibition in 1919.  Subsequently a bronze tablet with Field’s verse on it was attached to the Hotaling warehouse where it still can  be found.  In addition, nearby Jones Alley was renamed Hotaling Way. 

In 1909 San Francisco threw a three-day party called the Portola Festival to celebrate the rebuilding of the city in so short a time.  San Francisco virtually had been made anew — 20,000 buildings erected in three years.   As one observer at the festival told the press:  “Who would have imagined that just a few days after, that people would step up and seek to rebuild…in the miraculous way that we see it here today?”  Among those responsible for the San Francisco “miracle,” its liquor dealers must surely be granted a role.

Note:  Considerably longer posts on each of the whiskey men profiled briefly here may be found elsewhere on this website:  John Lutgen,  July 23, 2012;  Barner & Kehlenbeck, December 8, 2015;  Goldberg, Bowen, July 20, 2021; and Anson Hotaling, March 29, 2013.

C. P. Moorman and the Cutter Connection

On February 27, 1875,  John F. Cutter stormed into the offices of liquor wholesaler Charles P. Moorman, his father’s former business partner,  and threatened him bodily with a sword cane unless Moorman stopped claiming a monopoly on the use of the Cutter name on Kentucky whiskey.  The events that had brought things to such a violent confrontation — one that would end in John Cutter’s death — is a story that spans America from coast to coast.

The Cutters originally were from Hollis, a town in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, the offspring of Phebe Jewett Tenney and Benoni Cutter, a farmer.  The couple had several sons among whom was John Hastings Cutter, born in 1807.  He was only age nine when his father died and he was left in the care of his widowed mother.  Speculation is that older brothers,  R. B. Cutter and Ben B. Cutter determined to make their fortunes further west and fetched up in Louisville, Kentucky, where they entered the liquor trade.  When John was old enough to make the journey, he joined them there.

Because whiskeys exist with the initials of each Cutter, the Wilsons in their book on Western bottles speculate the following:  “As each member of the Cutter family matured in the liquor business he evidently had the right to formulate a brand in his own name.”   They dated R.B.’s whiskey from the early 1850s and discontinued in the 1860s;  Ben’s from the early 1860s to the mid-1880s.  John H.’s proved the most successful with his brand, beginning in the late 1860s and running until National Prohibition.

The Cutters did not own a distillery and are reported to have obtained product from at least two Kentucky whiskey-makers.   One was a plant owned by Mary Dowling at Lawrenceburg (RD #59, 8th District ).  The other was the a distillery (RD #241, 5th District) owned by W. B. Samuels, located at Samuel Depot in Nelson County on the L&N Railroad. The Cutters were “rectifiers,” blending whiskeys according to formulae reputedly kept within the family.

In 1858, John H. Cutter made the fateful decision to merge his by-then established whiskey firm with that of Moorman.  Moorman was a native Kentuckian, born in Breckinridge County in 1829, the son of  David M. and Judith Venable Moorman.  Some 22 years younger than Cutter, Moorman had come to Louisville as a youth, clerking in a liquor house.  By 1855 he had obtained sufficient knowledge and financing, with a partner to open his own wholesale whiskey business.  Successful from the outset, in 1857 he bought out the partner and the following year joined forces with Cutter.

A junior partner after the merger,  Moorman soon was joined by a second junior partner, Milton J. Hardy, Cutter’s son-in-law.  Hardy became the firm’s East Coast representative, stationed in Boston and marketing the Cutter whiskey line.  Meanwhile, John H. having made his fortune in Louisville, returned to Hollis, the home of his childhood.  The 1860 census found him there with his wife, Susan, six children, three servants, and five field hands.  Although his occupation was listed as “bourbon whiskey manufacturer,”  Cutter actually was occupied as a gentleman farmer and New Hampshire legislator.  Not recorded in the household was son John F. Cutter, 23, by that time likely involved in the family whiskey business in Boston.

That same year, 1860, John H. Cutter died at the relatively young age of 53, the cause given as “disease of the liver.”  He was buried in South Cemetery near his home place in Hollis.  His passing triggered significant changes in his company, allowing Moorman to buy a controlling interest in the J. H. Cutter brand.  Now the focus shifted to the West Coast and San Francisco.  According to the Wilsons:  “To the Eastern folks that came around the Horn or made the trek to the West in the early pioneering days, the J. H. Cutter brand name was already well known and popular with westerners from the time the first barrel was shipped to California.”

In the early 1870s Moorman’s interest in whiskey appears to have waned.  This may have coincided with his marriage to Kentuckian Lucy Beckley, the daughter of John and Elizabeth Long Beckley, and the birth of their first child, a boy. Moorman turned to banking as the vice president of the Kentucky National Bank.  He also was running a commission house in non-whiskey merchandise.  Milton Hardy assumed managerial control of the liquor company, emphasizing markets in the West, especially California.  In 1874 he bought the controlling interest from Moorman, who came to regret his decision and three years later returned to the whiskey trade.  He cut a deal with Hardy in which Moorman became the sole owner of the J. H. Cutter brand name and the two men broke off their formal business relationship.  

The arrangement proved problematic.  In the interim,  John F. Cutter, the son, had entered the picture.  He had developed a whiskey of his own formula and marketed it under the label, J. F. Cutter.  Confusion between the two brands was inevitable.  Moreover, the company in the past had used several agents for their West Coast operations, among them Ed Martin and Anson Hotaling.  After the split with Hardy, Moorman favored Hotaling, one of San Francisco’s strongest liquor houses, but John F. hooked up with Martin, physically moving into his offices in 1871 and for four ensuing years supervising merchandising and sales to insure the “J. F. Cutter” brand was well established.

Hotaling, as the sole West Coast agent for J.H. Cutter whiskeys, was enraged.  Highly competitive, in 1871 he earlier had convinced Moorman to sue the West Coast agent for Jesse Moore for trademark infringement simply because it was shipping its whiskey from Kentucky to California in barrels similar to those of J. H. Cutter.   A San Francisco judge found the charge ludicrous, dismissed the complaint and charged Moorman court costs.   Hotaling also continually pressured Moorman to sue Martin and John F. Cutter on trademark grounds.  

Both sides went public, telling their side of the story in long newspaper ads.  In 1872, John F. told readers:  “My whiskey is a distinct, independent article, sold under trade-mark totally different…and never has been and cannot be mistaken for theirs by any purchaser….If it has realized a more extensive sale than theirs, that fact may be owing to its quality and popularity rather than any attempt at imitation.”   Martin followed up with ads that declared that J. F. Cutter bourbon “…is superior in quality to any other brand of Cutter whiskey,”

Hotaling, on his part, accused Cutter of selling his family name to Martin for 30 years for a pittance, later insisting:  “…John F. Cutter never made any whiskey and knew nothing about it except to drink it.  He was a wild, roving, ne’er-do-well, a nuisance to his friends and of no benefit to himself…The only thing of actual value about him was the name his father gave.”

Increasingly under pressure from Hotaling and Moorman,  John F. sued claiming that his adversaries had never bought the trademark for J. H. Cutter whiskey and that it remained part of the estate bequeathed to Cutter’s children and thus was his property.  The defendants, however,  were able to prove in court their purchase from the father before his death.  A California judge ruled that even if the trademark had remained part of the Cutter estate, John F. had no status in court because the trustees were withholding his share “owing to the erratic habits of Cutter.”

This ruling seems to have unhinged young Cutter who soon after traveled from San Francisco to Louisville, apparently in an effort to establish new business alliances.  Finding doors shut to him despite his name, John F. stalked into Moorman’s offices on that February day with a sword cane and threatened him with it.  Subdued by onlookers he was fined $100 and given a sentence of 30 days in jail.  Apparently ill, Cutter died — “miserably” said one observer — in the workhouse as he served out his sentence.  Only 37 years old at his passing, John F. was buried next to his father in the Hollis cemetery, a joint monument shown here marking their graves.

John F.’s death did little to end the West Coast competition between the two Cutter brands.  In 1885 Moorman filed suit in a California U.S. court against the owners of the J.F. Cutter brand alleging that it infringed on his trademark.  The federal judge found that J. F. Cutter labeling was significantly different from J. H. Cutter whiskey.  To argue otherwise was, the judge said: “…To my mind, the utterance of an absurdity that the senses of the most ordinary observer would at once rebuke.” He found for the defendants.

Moorman, employing a fulltime manager as he aged, continued to be involved with his liquor house, known for a number of Cutter offerings including: "J. H. C.,” "J. H. Cutter,” "J. H. Cutter A,” "J. H. Cutter A No. 1 Old Bourbon,” "J. H. Cutter Bourbon,” "J. H. Cutter O. K. Old Bourbon,” "J. H. Cutter Old Reserve,” "J. H. Cutter Pure Old Rye, and ”J. H. Cutter Rye.”  The company also issued an "Old Moorman” brand, along with “Green Label, ”Uncle Jake,” and "V. F. O. Rye.”

Charles Moorman died in 1917 in Louisville at the age of 88,  He was interred in Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery where many other Kentucky whiskey men are buried.  Moorman lies beside his wife, Lucy, who had preceded him in death 26 years earlier.  His company survived for two more years until National Prohibition. Moorman is remembered in Louisville as a philanthropist having left funds for the Moorman Home for Women to care for the elderly indigent female population of Jefferson County, Kentucky.

As a conclusion to this story, the Wilsons make no comment on the feud over the whiskeys, observing:  “It is difficult to say which achieved the greater sales, but suffice to say both houses did a very good job of selling the brands.   The Cutter name reined as king in the western states straight through to Prohibition.”

Note:  Much of the information about Moorman and Cutter is taken from “Spirit Bottles of the Old West” by Bill and Betty Wilson (1968).  Those interested in learning more about Anson Hotaling may wish to see my profile of him on this blog, March 29, 2013.  Mary Dowling was featured January 22, 2014.