Chief Red Jacket‘s 60-Year Buffalo Distillery

Named “Red Jacket” after a Seneca Indian chief, a Buffalo distillery founded in 1848 survived the Civil War, at least two national financial panics, and federal rules that shut down other New York distilleries, to flourish for six decades under the guidance of two remarkable whiskey men, Thomas Clark and his successor, James M. Merritt.

Born in England in 1921, Clark first settled in Perry, New York, then moved to Geneva where he likely learned the distillers’ trade.  He arrived in Buffalo about 1848 at the age of 27 and almost immediately opened his own small distillery in a frame shanty on Seneca Plank Road.  It is unclear why Clark named it after an Indian leader who had fought on the side of the British in the American Revolution and was named Red Jacket from his wearing British red coats.  The Seneca chief, whose real name was Sagoyewatha (He Keeps Them Awake), was adamant against the white man, his ways and especially his Christian religion. Red Jacket had died only sixteen years earlier, detested by many New Yorkers. 

Starting small, Clark seems to have met almost instant success. He not only was making his own whiskey, he also was a rectifiying spirits, that is, blending whiskeys to achieve desirable taste, smoothness and color.  By 1858 Clark was mashing 175,720 bushels of grain annually and producing 709,000 gallons of whiskey, a figure that increased to 790,542 gallons the following year.  

His production was assisted by the availability of grain in Buffalo, a major port on the eastern shore of Lake Erie.  In 1868 seeing an opportunity for further expansion and heading a stock company, Clark erected a grain elevator on the banks of the lake.  Towering 135 feet high, the elevator was called “one of the largest grain receivers in the country.”

Meanwhile Clark had married; his wife was Naomi Macey, a woman eight years younger than he and, like him, born in England.  The 1870 census found the couple living in Buffalo with a daughter and three servants, including a butler, a housekeeper and a gardener.  Indicative of the success Clark had enjoyed were census data on his net worth, $150,000 in business holdings and $60,000 in personal property, the total worth more than $5 million today.

By 1880 Clark was mashing some 600 bushels a day in the Red Jacket facility.  His plant, located on an acre and a half plot on Buffalo’s Seneca Street included a malt house, large warehouse and adjunct buildings.  According to one account, the distillery boasted:  “…The aid of every modern improvement…to produce a production as perfect as possible.”  Whiskey rectifying was carried out at a separate location at the corner of Washington and Perry Streets in a sizable four story building, shown below. It featured capacious storage space and large cellars for aging the liquor.

Clark’s strong production numbers both saved him and advanced his profitability. When he began, New York boasted multiple distilleries, many of them small.  With the Civil War the federal government began taxing whiskey heavily, levying 90 cents per gallon.  The feds also demanded that companies manufacture to at least 80 percent of their capacity, whether it meant a profit or a loss.   Many distilleries were forced to shut down, reportedly leaving only three in the entire state of New York.  One of the survivors was Clark’s Red Jacket.

Although financial “panics” in 1857 and 1873 menaced the distilling industry, Clark weathered both.  The Englishman’s success caused him to be recognized as a leader in Buffalo’s business circles and drew this commentary from a biographer:  “The position which he has invariably occupied in the transaction of a diversified business, has been justly rewarded in the brilliant success achieved, and the high esteem in which he is regarded.”  

As he aged, Clark’s health faltered and he died in September 1882 at the age of 61.  As his wife and daughter looked on at his graveside, the entrepreneur was buried in Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery.  His wife, Naomi, would join him there twenty years later.  Their graves are marked by a large monument.

With no sons to take over the business,  Naomi sold the distillery to James M. Merritt, a native New Yorker who had come to the liquor trade initially as a federal government “guager,” that is, someone who inspected distilleries to determine the amount of alcohol they were producing and thereby set the tax.  The 1870 census found Merritt, age 42;  his wife, Helen (nee Derrick), 34, and two children, Cora and Frederick, living in Buffalo.

My guess is that Merritt was known to Clark because his was one of the distilleries regularly visited by the federal official.  The 1880 census suggests that Merritt subsequently was hired by Clark as his plant superintendent.  Merritt’s early advertising showed considerable deference to the deceased owner emphasizing that he was “Distiller, Rectifier and Manufacturer of all the Celebrated Thomas Clark Brands.” Merritt also maintained Red Jacket as the name of the distillery.  With the passage of time the reputation of the Native American chief had risen considerably among New Yorkers, some of whom recalled Sagoyewatha had received a medal from President Washington, evident in the picture above.

Merritt successfully piloted the Red Jacket Distillery for the next eleven years,  gradually putting his own brand on the company.  Although he continued to operate out of Clark’s four-story “rectifying” building, he substituted his own name.  In time Merritt no longer was citing the founder in his ads.  

He also added his own flagship brand, “Canoe Club Rye.” This whiskey that found an audience outside of New York State, bore an interesting label that featured Victorian type and ornamentation along with an image of a man and woman canoeing. As his son Frederick reached maturity, the father brought him into the firm, first as a clerk and then as a traveling salesman, taught him the business, and circa 1900 made him the sole vice president.

Prosperity in making and selling whiskey meant that the Merritt family, which boasted family ties back to the Revolutionary War, could move into a house in a more fashionable Buffalo neighborhood.   Shown here as it looks today, according to the 1900 census, it provided a home for James; wife Helen; son Frederick; daughter Cora; her husband, Harry Reynolds; granddaughter Bessie; and two female servants, one Irish and one Scots.

Born in 1827, James Merritt no longer was a young man when he assumed control of the Red Jacket Distillery.  As he entered his mid-70s, Merritt’s health failed and he died in 1903 at the age of 76.  Like Clark, he was buried in Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery, his grave located in Section 9, Lot 193.  Red Jacket Distillery continued to operate for the next several years but was shut down in 1906.  

By this time Red Jacket had become Buffalo's favorite Indian. Streets, awards, memorials, and contests were named after him. Feeling guilty about the past, community leaders decided to exhume the chief’s body from an out-of-the-way Indian burial grounds and move it to Forest Lawn Cemetery.  Red Jacket’s remains were placed under a huge statue of himself.  This occurred in direct opposition to Sagoyewatha’s specific wishes that no white man dig his grave and that no white man bury him.  Moreover, the chief now lies not far from the graves of Thomas Clark and James Merritt, the two palefaces who appropriated his name for sixty years of successfully making and selling whiskey.

Note:  This post draws on multiple sources, principal among them the “History of the City of Buffalo and Erie County:  Volume II,” edited by H. Perry Smith and published by D. Mason & Co., Syracuse N.Y. in 1884. Thanks go to Joe Gourd for other material.

Adolph Schwarz: A Wealthy Patron Was No Guarantee

Most immigrants to these shores in the 1800s arrived with few if any dollars in their pockets and no wealthy relatives to welcome them.  When Adolph Schwarz arrived from what was then Bohemia, awaiting him was his cousin, a wealthy and well-placed New York City lawyer.  That connection, however, did not shield Schwarz from the vagaries of the liquor trade in America.

Schwarz, shown here in a newspaper illustration, was born in 1847, a cousin to Samuel D. Sewards, a prominent New York attorney.  Sewards was particularly active in German-American circles, the president of two elementary schools in Manhattan devoted to the education of German-speaking children not able to attend public schools because of their lack of English.   For some time Sewards had urged Schwarz to come to the U.S. and when Adolph reached the age when he could travel alone across the Atlantic, he came.

Using his contacts, Sewards secured a place for his cousin in the house of a dry goods company, a job Schwarz reportedly found tedious.  He stuck at it for a number of years, saving his money and achieving a level of economic independence.  Thoroughly sick of dry goods, and perhaps seeking some distance from Sewards, he left New York City about 1867 for Paterson, New Jersey.  That city was booming with dozens of mill buildings, and firearms, silk, and railroad locomotive manufacturing industries that had attracted tens of thousands of immigrant workers.  They in turn had spawned dozens of saloons.

Schwarz almost immediately joined the firm of Ledner & Steppen, a newly-established house in the wholesale and retail wine and liquor business.  When that partnership dissolved sometime later, Adolph stayed with one of the partners for several more years, until he had saved a substantial sum and earned the respect of potential clientele in Paterson.  Then he went into the liquor trade on his own account, locating his establishment at the corner of Straight and Mechanic Streets.

His wholesale liquor business seems to have been successful from the start. It resulted in his issuing a number of liquor containers, varying in size from half gallon to gallon jugs and glass bottles from half-pints to quarts.  Examples are shown throughout this post.  Schwarz proprietary brands included “Old Family Rye,” “Canoe Club Whiskey,” and “Forest Club.”   He never bothered to trademark any of them.

Meanwhile, Adolp was having a personal life.  About 1876 he wed Bertha, like himself, an immigrant, having been born in Prussia.  He was about 26 at the time of their marriage, Bertha was 22.  The 1880 census found the couple living in Paterson with their daughter, Isabelle, known as “Belle,” who was five.  Later Schwarz would commission a noted local architect, F. W. Rumpf, to design an elegant residence for the family, shown here.

So robust was his trade that Schwarz decided to establish two branch outlets, one on the corner of Main and Water Streets and the other at 96 Broadway.  He had not, however, reckoned on the vagaries of the U.S. economy.  The panic of 1873 was a severe nationwide economic depression that lasted until 1877.  Paterson’s industries laid off hundreds of workers.  Business at local saloons dropped off precipitously and along with it Schwarz’s sales of liquor.  He was forced to close the two branches and confine himself to his original location.  As the economy improved into the 1880s, his business rebounded and he moved to single larger quarters at 99 Main Street, occupying an entire building.

Schwarz also had noted an increased demand for domestic wine. In order to satisfy customer requirements he made arrangements directly with growers in Ohio, Missouri and California for shipments of product.  His ad for champagne claimed that “Mrs. Langtry Drinks our Wines.”  The reference was to Lily Langtry, the English actress, a subject of much public attention, who made several tours of the United States, undoubtedly tasting domestic wines along the way.

In 1881 Schwarz had a carload of wine shipped from St. Louis that was shunted onto a siding and forgotten.  The wine spoiled with a consequent major financial loss to Schwarz.  One observer wrote:  “But, undaunted, he sent another order which turned out in a much more satisfactory manner, and led to the success which is attending him today.  He is at present the proprietor of one of the largest establishments in this city and is agent for four of the largest distilleries in the United States.”

Meanwhile Adolph was diversifying his enterprises, becoming a prime investor in the Paterson Plastic Company and other businesses in New Jersey.  He also conducted a busy social life, with active memberships in the Masons, Old Fellows, Knights of Pythias and several German-oriented societies.  Now a citizen, Schwarz, it was said, “has been importuned on more than one occasion to accept the nomination for public office, but has alway declined.”

Unfortunately, Adolph Schwarz died before his full potential could be achieved.  It occurred on February 27, in either 1896 or 1897.  Both years have been recorded.  At that time he would have been about fifty years old.  Because Schwarz died intestate, it may indicate that his death came suddenly and unexpectedly.  He was buried in the Mount Nebo Cemetery at Totowa, New Jersey.

 The wholesale liquor firm Schwarz had founded continued on without him for a few years, now under the management of his son-in-law, Isaac Basch, married to Adolph’s daughter, Belle.  In 1897 Basch incorporated the business, keeping the respected Schwarz name.  Under that regime, the company continued to be listed in Patterson directories until Basch died about 1919 and the company and its brands with him.

Note:  Much of the information for this article and Schwarz’s likeness and that of his home came from an unsigned, undated article in a Paterson newspaper found on the Internet at the New Jersey Bottle Forum.  The Forum author speculates that Schwarz “...was maybe the most prolific bottler of whiskey and spirits that Patterson has ever known.”