Sam Pike: Riches from Whiskey and a Song in His Heart

When Jenny Lind, a famous soprano known as the “Swedish Nightingale," sang in Cincinnati in early Spring 1851, sitting in the audience was a successful young liquor dealer named Samuel N. Pike.  Struck to the core by her singing, Pike, shown right, vowed to use his wealth to build an opera house.  He ended up building three and had the following verse written in his praise by the 19th Century American poet, T. Buchanan Read: 

“Who builds a noble temple unto art

And rears sit grandly from his head and heart

Hath done a sacred service, and his name

Shall live upon the gold roll of fame.”

Sam Pike’s past is somewhat shrouded in mystery.  On Federal census forms his birthplace was given as New York.  In 1866, in applying for a passport, Pike swore he was a native-born American citizen.  Yet in his biography of Pike, Ohio Historian Henry Howe claimed Sam was born in 1822 in Heidelberg, Germany, and brought to the United States with his family at the age of five.  Moreover, Howe asserts, the family name originally was “Hecht,” a word in Yiddish that means the pike fish, and later changed to Pike. 

The circumstance of his family and his upbringing are murky but in 1844 at the age of 22, Pike came to Cincinnati and engaged in the liquor trade.  Several years later Pike married Ellen Miller, the daughter of a Cincinnati judge.  Ellen was several years younger than Sam and likely in her late teens when they wed.  As recorded by the federal census in 1850 their household included a three year old son, Lawrence; Ellen’s very wealthy mother, and several servants.   Sam’s occupation was listed as “liquor merchant.”

Then Jenny Lind came to Cincinnati and Sam Pike would never be the same again.  With the famed impresario P. T. Barnum orchestrating her tour, the songstress gave concerts throughout the U.S. spanning 1850 to 1852.   At the time Cincinnati had no opera house so her venue would have been one of the several large theaters downtown.  Although her voice was never recorded, Lind’s singing was singularly impressive to hearers and a revelation to Pike.  He made a personal pledge to build an opera hall for Cincinnati. 

After eight years of selling whiskey, Sam finally had the wealth to make his dream  a reality.  Pike’s Opera House opened in 1859 with a Grand Italian Opera Company performing.  Shown right in a cameo view, it was hailed as an ornament to Cincinnati.  Featuring a grand stairway and 2,000 seats for patrons, the opera house was the first of its kind west of the Appalachians.  Said one observer:  “At that time, there was nothing out West that could compare to it.” 

Meanwhile, the people of Cincinnati began to know who Sam Pike was.  Of medium height and slender, as shown above, he wore a heavy mustache, and though dark complexioned, was noted for piercing steel-gray eyes and a short, abrupt way of speaking.  Noted one observer:  “He always dressed in the height of fashion, wore a silk hat, and used perfume.  As he saunter up town of a morning from his residence on West Fourth Street, smoking his cigar, he looked like an elegant man of leisure, rather than one of Cincinnati wealthiest and most active citizens.”

   

Pike likely was walking to his liquor house, shown above at 18-20 Sycamore.  The building was five stories, giving him ample space to operate.  Although from time to time he referred to himself as a distiller, he was a “rectifier,” buying product from nearby Kentucky distilleries across the Ohio River and blending it  achieve taste and color.  His flagship brand was “Magnolia.” a name he trademarked in 1849. 

In 1866 Pike’s fancy opera house burned to the ground.  A story is told of Sam’s standing calmly on the roof of a nearby hotel watching the conflagration:   “…He saw the structure of his pride and ambition vanishing in the flames.  He quietly smoked his cigar as unruffled as the most indifferent spectator…”  While he stood there impassive, according to the story, a pickpocket relieved him of a very expensive pocket watch.

As an example of what onlookers called his “colossal wealth,” Pike lost no time in rebuilding.  Just a year later a new Pike’s Opera House rose from the ashes.  Just as ornate as the earlier building, this one was larger, filling a half block on Cincinnati’s Fourth Street.   This gesture earned Pike the dedication of a piece of music called “The Opera March” with a picture of his new opera house on the cover.  

By this time, Pike was growing increasingly restless in Cincinnati.  Known for being good to his employees, about 1863 he took as partners two of his clerks, Joseph Tilney and George W. Kidd.  While continuing to own S.N. Pike & Co., Sam branched out to New York City, launching a liquor house there.  In 1868, Pike moved totally to New York, selling his building in Cincinnati together with the all apparatus for blending whiskey.  The buyer was Mills, Johnson & Co., local wholesalers and rectifiers.  

In his move to The Big Apple, Pike took with him his family and his partners, doing business at 78 Broadway and listed in city directories as a liquor dealer and rectifier.  The family lived at 613 Fifth Avenue.  By this time, in addition to his wife and son, there were three daughters, Nettie, Hester and Alice.  Indications are that Pike’s move to New York was occasioned at least in part by the desire to join the wealthy social elite that included the Astors and Vanderbilts.   

He succeeded, in part because he immediately began to build a third Grand Opera House.  Shown here, the building cost him $1,000,000 (equiv. to $25 million today.) The first performance, on January 9, 1868, was Il Trovatore, followed during the next four months by  seven Jacques Offenbach operettas.

Successful selling whiskey on Broadway, Sam grew ever richer and expanded into real estate.  He engaged in a major speculation that involved draining New Jersey marshes near New York.  With inventor Spencer Driggs the partners reclaimed 3,000 acres using iron plates as a core for dikes and sold the land to farmers to grow corn. This venture is said to have brought “immense profits” making Pike a millionaire many times over.  He was quoted saying he “…could not see why he should make money — he never fretted himself — he couldn’t help it.”   

Nonetheless, he was able to raise his family in luxury and move among New York’s richest.  After a failed romance with the famed explorer-journalist, Henry Morton Stanley, his daughter Alice married Albert Barney, an heir to E. E. Barney, the railroad car magnet.

In 1872, at the relatively young age of 50, Sam Pike died and was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery, New York.  His gravestone is shown here.  For a time his  Manhattan liquor house continued to be operated under his name by his surviving  partners. They subsequently formed a new corporation under the name George W. Kidd & Co.  That business subsequently was dissolved and the liquor house closed.  

Son-in-law Albert Barney was put in charge of Pike’s financial interests in Ohio and the family moved back to Cincinnati for the next ten years.  S. N. Pike’s Magnolia Whiskey became a brand of the Fleischmann distillers of Cincinnati, the bottle shown above.

Aided by his wealth, Pike had kept his personal vow to Jenny Lind by building no fewer than three opera houses to the memory of her voice.  They would prove to be fleeting tributes.   After watching his first theater burn, Pike was no longer alive when in February 1903, his second Cincinnati opera house was destroyed by a fire described at the time as historically the city’s largest.  The responding twenty-seven engines companies could not save the structure.  A year after opening his New York opera house Pike had sold it to financiers James “Diamond Jim” Fisk Jr. and Jay Gould.  Never financially viable, that building later was converted to a movie theater and torn down in 1960 for a housing development.

Max Fleischmann: Ohio Distiller Extraordinary

Shown here in a caricature at the helm of a sailing boat is Max Fleischmann, whose rich life encompassed infantryman, combat balloonist, yachtsman, big game hunter, world traveler, businessman, philanthropist, and, as we remember him here, distiller of one of America’s most famous brands of liquor - Fleischmann’s. 

The story begins with Max’s father, Charles, and his uncle, Maximilian. The elder Fleischmanns came from Austria-Hungary in the 1860s. With the help of a wealthy Cincinnati businessman named James Gaff they created the cake yeast business that overnight revolutionized baking in America and made the trio multi-millionaires. 

Gaff had made his money in whiskey. In 1843 he and his brother Thomas had built the T.& J.W. Gaff & Co. distillery in downtown Aurora, Indiana, on the banks of Hogan Creek. It made bourbon, rye, and Thistle Dew scotch whiskey. It was perhaps natural that when Gaff linked with the Fleischmanns, they also began liquor-making operations. They founded two distilleries in nearby Riverside, Ohio, about 1872, three years before young Max’s birth. 

Fleischmann distilleries gained a national market by being the first American operation to produce gin during the 1870s. Rivaling imported British and Dutch gins, their American made -- and less expensive -- product proved to be highly popular. A 1900 ad boasted that the company was “The Gin Distillers of the United States.” Among its brands of “dry, sweet and neutral” gins were Pilgrim, Perfection, White Tavern Tom, and Dan Duke. As the Fleischmann company was flourishing, Max was growing up. Even before his graduation from the Ohio Military Institute in Riverside 1896, he began working in the family liquor business. 

His career was put on hold in 1898 by the Spanish American War. Young Max enlisted in the First Ohio Volunteer Infantry and was sent to Jacksonville, Florida, where the Ohio troops stayed in reserve until the the war ended. He was ordered back to Cincinnati, discharged, and went back to the family business. While thus engaged, Fleischmann also became a world class balloonist, as shown here in his 1907 ascension. As recounted by the New York Times, after taking off from Cincinnati, Max reached 5,000 feet. As he descended, he is reported to have jettisoned some liquor. At the outset of World War One Max enlisted, was sent to France, was injured in a poison gas attack, and became commandant of the U.S. Army Balloon School in Arcadia, California. All his life he would be addressed as “Major.” 

The Fleischmanns produced popular brands of whiskey. The flagship label was "Magnolia Whiskey,"  shown here in a 1909 ad. It came both in amber and aqua embossed bottles. The Magnolia brand had been bought from S.N. Pike and Company which first sold it in 1849. Fleischmann also marketed a range of liquors in fancy ceramic jugs and merchandised its other brands with ads in national publications and through glass-painted saloon signs, as shown above. 

In the two decades between the wars, Max proved to be a brilliant marketer and strategist for the firm, but something less than a day to day manager. His major interests lay in his hunting, specimen collecting and scientific expeditions around the world as well as yachting, horse racing and part ownership of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team. Max’s exploits earned him national press attention while his brother Julius ran the Fleischmann distillery and yeast empire. Things changed radically in 1925 when Julius suddenly dropped dead. Max rushed back to the U.S. from an expedition exploring the White Nile of Africa and immediately was elected Chairman of the Board. 

Prohibition shut down the firm’s distilling business for a time but the Fleischmann interests, perhaps because of their diversity of products, and unlike many others, survived the loss. In 1929 Max masterminded a series of mergers with other firms to form Standard Brands. He became first board chairman and the largest stockholder of the new firm that eventually included the Nabisco line of foods. Max continued to serve as Chairman of the Finance Committee of Standard Brands until his death in 1951. 

After the end of Prohibition in 1934, the Fleischmann Company began producing alcoholic beverages once again. In 1940, operating under the Fleischmann name, Max bought out the Daviess County Distillery in Owensboro, Kentucky. That distillery had a long and hallowed history in Kentucky bourbon manufacture but had been sold to the American Medicinal Spirits Company during Prohibition. Max’s firm based its revived distilling operations in Owensboro, producing brands like Preferred Blended Whiskey, Royal Vodka and distilled Dry Gin. In time it expanded its production facilities to Dayton, New Jersey; Plainfield, Illinois; and Clinton, Iowa. 

 Major Max characteristically watched this growth from afar -- at his home in Santa Barbara, California, or aboard one of the 22 yachts he owned in his lifetime. In subsequent years, Max, shown here in later life, and his wife became known for their philanthropy. They are remembered best for their substantial contributions to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and, in their final adopted state, the University of Nevada Agricultural College, which is named for Max. The couple also gave large donations to many other worthy causes. Max died in 1951 at the age of 76, a much beloved figure. Today Fleischmann is still a familiar brand on liquor store shelves, part of Barton Distillers which in turn is part of the Constellation Brands group. Barton’s production facilities are located at Bardstown KY. Among current products are Fleischmann’s Vodka, Gin, Preferred Whiskey, Brandy, Rye and Flavored Vodkas.