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.

Whiskey Men in Mormon Land

                                          

Foreword:  For every fourth post on this blog I currently am consolidating brief stories of whiskey men previously profiled who have similar characteristics in order to obtain a broader picture of them and their times.  This post is devoted to those who were involved with liquor in a seemingly unlikely place — Mormon Utah.

Terming the Mormon leader Brigham Young a “whiskey man” might strike some as an absurdity, given the injunction against strong drink that has been a traditional teaching of the Church of the Latter Day Saints.  The facts seem otherwise.  For example, in 1873 at Young’s request the Utah territorial legislature granted him the exclusive right to manufacture and distribute whiskey and other spiritous liquors.  “Valley Tan” was the name of his principal brand.

Young seems to have been of two minds on the subject of strong drink.  Although indications are that he drank beer when polluted water was an issue, he is said never to have tasted whiskey.  Brigham is recorded saying:   “If I had the power, I would blow out the brains of every thief in the territory, and I despise the whiskey maker more than I do the thieves.”  Strong words indeed from a religious leader and sometime distiller.  

Valley Tan predates Young’s monopoly over Utah whiskey.  The name itself was associated with a range of goods produced by Mormons in Utah.  One of the first industries they introduced into Salt Lake Valley was leather tanning.  Because their tanning process often was done crudely, the term became associated with any article of home manufacture done in a rough-hewn way, including distilling liquor. 

Another link from Brigham Young to Valley Tan was its sale in the department-like store the leader had established to provide necessities to Mormons in Salt Lake City, ostensibly because non-Mormon local merchants were gouging his people.  Called Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI), the store, shown here, sold Valley Tan.   That could never have occurred without the leader’s blessing.   Because Young died in 1877, however,  his whiskey monopoly may have lasted only a short four years.

After Young’s death,  number of liquor stores were established in Salt Lake City, among them Henry Sadler’s emporium, just a little over a block way from the spires of the Mormon Temple.  There Sadler, an immigrant from England, successfully ran a saloon and sold whiskey to both the wholesale and retail trade, beginning after 1880.  Shown above is the front window of Sadler’s Mercantile Company.   It was located on South Main Street, a major thoroughfare that originates immediately south of Temple Square.  Note that the window contains full a display of “Old Ripy,” a well-known Kentucky bourbon.

Sadler’s sales room occupied the front portion of the building and was 24 by 75 feet in dimensions.  The center was the saloon portion of the establishment where Budweiser could be had on draught.  In the rear was the bottling and shipping departments.  The Deseret News, a Salt Lake daily owned by the Mormon Church, enthused:  “The company [is] extensive bottlers of fine wines and liquors and have every modern facility for bottling, corking and labeling, the packages they put up are noted for their neatness as well as purity and excellence of contents.”  

Sadler saw his liquor business slowly dwindle as Prohibition forces took the offensive.  Both Idaho and Colorado voted bans on distilling or selling alcoholic beverages in 1916.  Utah followed in August of the following year.  The Mormon Church itself remained largely neutral on a liquor ban, reputedly fearing a backlash by non-members.  As will be seen later, however, other forces were at work that eventually would cause Sadler to close his doors. 

To quote one observer:  “It is a sight you would never encounter today: liquor bottles proudly displayed to the public in a big shop window, only a couple of blocks from Temple Square, right out there on a bustling thoroughfare for the whole world -- Mormon and gentile alike -- to admire.”  He was talking about the picture shown above of the Salt Lake City store where Jacob (“Jake”)  Bergerman sold whiskey.  Bergerman called his firm the Utah Liquor Company.

Bergerman’s liquor store and saloon first shows up in Salt Lake City directories in 1898. From the outset,  he was not shy about selling whiskey in the heartland of the Mormons.   For example, he issued a metal token good for 12&1/2 cents in trade that had an image of the Mormon Tabernacle on the reverse.  

Bergerman also showed considerable imagination in the containers he chose for his liquor.  Among them are patterned molded gray canteens with cobalt decoration that depict on one side a scene of men drinking and on the other has the address of his firm.  They were made by White’s Pottery in far off Utica, New York.

Ironically, the man principally responsible for prohibition in Utah, Gov. Simon Bamberger, was a close friend of Bergerman.   On August 1, 1917, the governor, a Jewish immigrant from Germany,  pushed through a law making it a crime to manufacture, sell or consume alcohol.  The local press estimated that the law would affect four thousand persons in Salt Lake City alone who were dependent on the liquor trade.  Among them obviously was Jake Bergerman.  As the deadline approached, he and others sold their stocks at bargain prices. The Salt Lake Tribune estimated that hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of liquor had been so acquired and was stored in the cellars of Salt Lake residents.  

After a young manhood of restless wandering through America, another German immigrant, Frederick “Fred” Kiesel,  settled in Ogden, Utah, where in 1887 he established a liquor house and became known for his staunch opposition to Mormon church rule in the state.  Although he was frequently involved in politics and served a term in the Utah Legislature in 1901-1902,  Kiesel, shown here,  was primarily an entrepreneur.  He incorporated his business in 1887 under the name of Fred J. Kiesel and Company,  of which he was both president and manager.

Kiesel’s willingness to tweak the nose of the religious advocates of prohibition and the Mormon Church was epitomized by an 1909 ad that he placed in a magazine called The Western Monthly.  Claiming that “Uncle Sam Is Our Partner,” Kiesel boasted of being able to reach into “dry” Idaho Counties and other parts of the West where alcoholic beverages had been banned.  He said he was able to supply all demands of the thirsty, including “Ministers, Bootleggers, or even Politicians, from the Governor down to the least official.”

Among Kiesel’s jabs was issuing his own Valley Tan whiskey and advertising it with a picture of the Brigham Young monument that stood in downtown Salt Lake City.  Shown here is a celluloid match safe with an ad touting Valley Tan as “Pioneer of Whiskies.”  The other side of the safe advertised “Brigham Young Tonic Bitters” with a picture of the Mormon leader.  As with Sadler and Bergerman, Kiesel was forced to shut down when Utah went dry.

The history of whiskey in Utah is far more complicated and interesting than it might seem at first glance.   Events took several interesting twists and turns — from Brigham Young as a state-sponsored whiskey dealer, “Gentiles” running thriving liquor houses in the shadow of the Mormon Temple, a Jewish governor  responsible for the state going “dry,” and Young’s name, figure and face being appropriated for a whiskey and a highly alcoholic bitters.