Whiskey Men as “Impresarios” of Recreation

Foreword:   How did Americans “have fun” in pre-Prohibition day a century and more ago? More people were living in cities and feeling the stress of an increasingly mechanized environment.  Looking for new ways to recreate, many Americans were eager to spend their leisure time in more adventurous forms of entertainment.  Better transportation options like the railroad, streetcars and automobiles made it possible to travel distances to recreate. Liquor sales had given whiskey men the money to extend their enterprises to include such opportunities.  This is the story of four of them.

Edwin S. Hughes, shown here with a fancy mustache, was New Jersey born but early in life gravitated West.   After stints in Leadville and Aspen, Colorado, in 1887 he moved to Glenwood Springs, Colorado, and started his own bottling company.  Shown below, Glenwood Springs, originally called “Defiance” by its rambunctious residents, was anything but a tourist hub.  Located in a mountain valley at the confluence of the Colorado and Roaring Fork River, many more saloons, gambling houses and brothels existed than grocery stores and restaurants.  As one local historian has put it:  “More saloons existed here than a city needed, honestly, but we had them.”   

As a newcomer, Hughes had the wisdom to see the potential of the area in the extensive geothermal resources that existed, most famously in hot springs, shown here.  It was an era when many believed that mineral waters held restorative qualities and could even cure diseases.  He saw that a market existed. The arrival of railroads, the Denver and Rio Grande from the east, the Colorado Midland from the south, meant that people could travel to Glenwood Springs in relative comfort.  Hughes would provide encouragement.

Over time Hughes gained control of the hot springs, garnered the exclusive right to bottle the “medicinal” waters, and was elected to the town board where he became a force for better streets and sidewalks and curbing gambling and prostitution.  Opening his own liquor store in 1894, for a time he exercised a monopoly in Glenwood Springs to dictate whiskey and beer supplies, pricing, and even the establishment of new saloons.

After helping to tame this “rowdy” town and make it a tourist destination, Hughes capitalized by buying the Hotel Colorado, patterned after the Villa de Medici in Italy.  Hotel Colorado became a favored destination for Easterners lured by the mineral water baths.  Arriving mostly by train, they reveled in the comforts it afforded as well as its firework displays, live music and elegant dining.  After extended stays there by Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Hotel Colorado gained the name “Little White House of the West.”  With considerable help from Ed Hughes, Glenwood Springs had become a retreat for the rich and famous.

Able to prosper as the proprietor of a liquor house in Salt Lake City, Utah, the heart of Mormon country, Jacob Bergerman seems quickly to have achieved recognition in local business circles as a canny operator.  During the early 1900s, he was entrusted with being the proprietor and manager of Calders Park, a well-known Salt Lake City recreational site and resort.  He ran a saloon on the premises where both boisterous drinkers and more respectable sorts, as the pair shown in a 1900s John Held New Yorker cartoon, could have their leisure.  

In 1904, Bergerman was awarded a lease to manage what the press called “an ideal pleasure resort” named “The Lagoon.” Hired by a regional railway company,  Jacob was put on notice that his contract was dependent upon enforcing order among patrons and insuring that “all concessions in the shape of restaurants, bars, etc. must be conduct (sic) in first class manner.”   It was not until 1817, and statewide prohibition, that Bergerman had to cease all liquor sales at Calders Park and the Lagoon.

As a partner in The Levy and Lewin Mercantile Company, Albert Lewin, who came from Germany with his family as a baby, had made a reputation in Denver as an accomplished liquor dealer but found his interests moving in other directions.  In March 1907 he joined a group of investors that incorporated the Lakeside Realty and Amusement Company to create a large amusement park adjacent to Denver.  Managed by Lewin, Lakeside also incorporated as a municipality in order to be free of Denver’s restrictive laws on the sale and serving of alcohol.  An employee of Levy & Lewin Mercantile was elected mayor.  

Lewin became a darling of the Denver press.   When the 100,000 lights in the park were turned on for a test, the whiskey man was quoted.  The Denver Republican also reported that Lewin had successfully tested the motors on all the park rides.  When the park opened the same paper declared that the Lakeside management had given the people of Colorado “the greatest and finest amusement park ever attempted West of Chicago.”  Shown above, it was, indeed, a spectacular scene.

Two years after his success at Lakeside, Lewin looked for a new challenge.  He found it in an earlier amusement park built near Denver called Manhattan Beach.  After it burned in 1908, Lewin headed an investment group that rebuilt it, adding a roller coaster, shown here, an over-the-water dance pavilion, and a new theater.  Renamed “Luna Park,”  venture was not as successful as Lewin’s earlier venture.  Lakeside has remained a favorite recreation spot for Coloradans;  Luna Park eventually was razed.

While still a teenager, Columbus Ed Carmichael, known as “C. Ed,” moved to Ocala, then just a sleepy Florida town, where he helped his father establish a combined saloon, wholesale whiskey business and grocery store, and eventually took over its management.  By 1906 Carmichael had sufficient funds to buy land in an area near Ocala called Silver Springs, shown here.  The springs are among the largest artesian spring formations in the world, producing nearly 550 million gallons of crystal-clear water daily.  They form the headwaters of the Silver River, a part of the St. Johns River System.  Carmichael initially used the site as a steamboat landing for passengers and freight, shown here.  At the other end of the steamboat line was Jacksonville, Florida.  A railroad spur ran to Ocala.

At the same time anti-alcohol sentiments were rising in Florida.  As an alternative to selling liquor, C. Ed determined to develop Silver Springs into a tourist destination.  The old freight depot and other ramshackle buildings were torn down.  In their place he constructed a large bathhouse with facilities for men and women. He also built a pavilion at spring side, shown here.  Almost single handedly Carmichael had turned Ocala into a tourist destination.  

In 1924, now 61 years old, Carmichael leased his Silver Springs holdings to other entrepreneurs who greatly expanded the tourist facilities he had initiated.  Among innovations were glass bottomed boats that floated over the lucid waters allowing people to see more than forty feet to the bottom.  Postcards from Ocala often featured the boats with passengers eager to feel the beautiful cool waters.  Today Silver Springs is a national landmark, advertised as Florida’s “original attraction.”  Thanks to the whiskey man, C. Ed Carmichael.

Note:  Longer treatments of each of these individuals can be found on this blog: Edwin S. Hughes, November 23, 2016;  Jacob Bergerman, July 18, 2012;  Albert Lewin, May 13, 2018;  C. Ed Carmichael, December 11, 2016.

C. Ed Carmichael and the Making of a Tourist Town

 

During the 19th and 20th Centuries whiskey men dealt with the forces of prohibition in a variety of ways.  Some fought it.  Others tried tactics to get around it.  Still others submitted, went into a different occupation or retired.  C. Ed Carmichael employed a considerably different strategy.  He used “going dry” as a incentive to make his home town of Ocala, Florida, into a tourist destination through a distinctively “wet” idea.

The youngest of four children at his birth in 1869, he was christened Columbus Ed Carmichael, likely a capricious choice of his father, George, and a laugh for his older siblings. Shown above as a young man, he preferred through his life to be known as C. Ed Carmichael.  His father initially worked a farm in Alabama and that is where C. Ed was born.  George Carmichael, a native of the state, eventually grew tired of  both agriculture and Alabama, and in the late 1880s found Florida a more appealing prospect.   It is something of a mystery, however, why he chose Ocala, at that time a sleepy town located in Marion County.  Downtown Ocala in the early 1880s is shown below.

Developed around the site of a fort about 1849, Ocala did not get rail service until a relatively late 1881, a development that spurred modest growth by allowing greater access to markets for citrus and other agricultural products.  In 1883 much of the downtown was destroyed by fire on Thanksgiving Day.  Encouraged to rebuild with brick, granite and steel, by 1888 Ocala was known statewide as “The Brick City.”

C. Ed, while still a teenager relocated to Ocala with his family.  He helped his father establish a combined saloon, wholesale whiskey business, and grocery store there.  He also met Lula Wilkins, shown right.  She had been born in Georgia, the daughter of Robert and Eliza Wadsworth Wilkins.  At the time of their marriage in 1899, he was 19 and she was 15.  They would have one son, born in 1894, whom they named Weller Larue.

The liquor business of Carmichael & Son proved very successful as they developed a thriving mail order business for their whiskey.  Even then under local option, communities in Florida and adjoining states were going “dry” but their residents could still obtain liquor shipped from elsewhere under the protection of the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution.  

The Carmichaels shipped their liquor, perhaps distilled on their premises, usually by rail in ceramic jugs. These half-gallon and gallon containers in several formats are shown here and elsewhere in this post.  They have been found at sites far from Ocala.  The Carmichaels also are known to have used embossed glass containers for their beverages.

The wealth generated by the liquor trade allowed C. Ed in 1906 the money to buy land in an area near Ocala called Silver Springs.  Those springs are among the largest artesian spring formations in the world, producing nearly 550 million gallons of crystal-clear water daily.  The springs form the headwaters of the Silver River, a part of the St. Johns River System.  Carmichael initially used the site as a steamboat landing for passengers and freight, shown here.  At the other end of the steamboat line was Jacksonville, Florida.  A railroad spur ran to Ocala. 

Carmichael also was sensing a rising tide of prohibitionist feeling in Marion County, as groups like Women’s Christian Temperance Union went on the warpath.  They forced a “wet-dry” county referendum in 1908 that apparently sent off alarm bells for C. Ed.  If it had passed, the Carmichael enterprises would have been summarily terminated.  As an alternative to selling liquor, he determined to develop Silver Springs into a tourist destination.  The old freight depot and other ramshackle buildings were torn down.  In their place C. Ed constructed a large bathhouse with facilities for men and women, shown below. He also built a pavilion at spring side.  Plans to build a large hotel on the site were derailed by the onset of World War One.

In 1915, same year his father, George, died, Marion County by referendum voted to ban all alcohol sales within its boundaries.  Carmichael & Son with its thriving mail order whiskey business was forced to close down.  Meanwhile, C. Ed had been concentrating his attention on Silver Springs.  He built a house there made of bamboo.  A newspaper photo showed its location at the edge of the water and featuring a small dock.

Meanwhile Carmichael’s marriage to Lula was faltering.  Perhaps she was not happy about moving away from town life in Ocala to the banks of Silver Spring.  They divorced.  C. Ed later married a second time.  She was Helen Hoag, a school teacher originally from Minnesota who was considerably younger.

In 1924, now 55 years old, Carmichael leased his Silver Springs holdings to other  entrepreneurs who greatly expanded the tourist facilities.  Among innovations were glass bottomed boats that floated over the lucid waters allowing people to see more than forty feet to the bottom.  Postcards from Silver Springs often featured the boats with passengers eager to feel the beautiful cool waters.

Carmichael remained active in on the Ocala scene, serving as a Marion County commissioner and owning a successful tourist court near the springs.  Shown above is a postcard view of C. Ed’s bamboo home on the adjacent Silver River. I speculate that the man sitting comfortably in a rocking chair at the right side of the porch is none other than Carmichael himself, content to look out at the tourist mecca he had helped create.

C. Ed died in 1940, age 71, and was buried in Marion County’s Woodlawn Cemetery as his widow and his many friends mourned by his graveside.  Helen would join him there twenty-six years later.  Carmichael had lived long enough to see National Prohibition come and go.  As he contemplated his long life, he must have smiled at his decision not to let the forces of “dry” alter his commitment to his adopted town but rather to use them as an incentive to make Ocala the tourist destination that it remains today.