Caspar Berry: A Whiskey Man “In the Hands of His Friends”

        

On May 1, 1903, Caspar Berry walked into Boston’s famous Parker House Hotel, shown above, and headed to a banquet room, apparently completely unaware of what was to happen.  He had been told he was there to attend a small dinner party.  As The Cambridge [Mass.] Daily News headlined, however, the Swiss immigrant found himself “in the  hands of his friends.”  Berry, shown right, was the guest of honor that night, celebrating the 25th anniversary of his business career as a successful Bean Town whiskey dealer.

It was an honor that Berry hardly could have dreamed of earlier in life.  He was born in Switzerland in 1846, the son of Mattias and Anna Mathis Berry.  At the age of 26, likely seeking better opportunities in the United States, he emigrated here in 1876, settling in Boston.  My assumption is that Berry served a short apprenticeship with one of the wholesale liquor firms in Boston, learning the trade. 

His company claimed establishment in 1878,  two years after his arrival.  At the banquet, according to the press, Berry said of his beginnings:  “I started in business about 25 years ago, in about as small a way as any man could, but I made it a principle never to work on another man’s capital.”

Starting modestly but energetically, Berry soon grew his firm into a major Boston liquor wholesaler that by 1894 was located in five-story building at 84-88 Leverett.  He called his enterprise “C. Berry & Co, Importers, Agents, and Wholesale Dealers in Foreign and Domestic Wines and Liquors.”  He also was using one of the upper floors of his establishment to “rectify” whiskey, that is, mixing and blending raw whiskeys received by the barrel from distilleries to achieve desired taste, smoothness, and color.  Rectifying was an art and Berry clearly had mastered it. 

In addition to selling his whisky wholesale generically in ceramic jugs, Berry featured a number of proprietary brands.  They included:  "2 Always In Front,” ”Ashland Club,” “Intervale,” “Golden Buck,” “Kurnwood,” "Old Berrywood,” and "Red Arrow.”  He trademarked Ashland Club, Intervale, and Red Arrow whiskeys in 1914.  

Berry’s flagship whiskey was Diamond

Wedding, trademarked in 1906, a brand name that he appears to have purchased from S.A. Sloman when the latter left the liquor business [see my post on Sloman, March 2015].  Berry inherited the clientele

Sloman, through an expensive advertising campaign, had acquired in his efforts to turn Diamond Wedding into a national brand.  Although Berry advertised the label, as shown here, he seemingly was more content with a Northeast regional customer base.

Berry packaged Diamond Wedding in both quarts and flasks for retail customers.  It was sold in glass containers, with paper labels and heavily embossed bottles that carried his name and the name of the whiskey.   As other whiskey wholesalers of his time,  Berry also had a range of giveaway advertising items for his customers.  He provided saloons offering his whiskeys a reverse glass sign, shown above, that colorfully advertised Diamond Wedding Whiskey.   Other Berry giveaways were shot glasses with a pitch for his brands.

Berry was characteristically modest about his accomplishments in the whiskey trade. His success, he told the banquet-goers, had several causes.  “I had a good wife as a partner, and an honest accountant, and I have been blessed with good health.  I have always endeavored to treat my customers fairly and also my employees.”  

Berry’s mention of his wife, is interesting, since his first wife, Elsbeth “Lizzie” Doherty, had passed away in 1896, leaving him to live as widower with two unmarried adult daughters.  At the age of 57 in 1897, he would marry again.  She was Emily Schuebeler, the daughter of Louis F. and Minette Kaufhold Schuebeler and Swiss-born like Berry.  With two wives, it is difficult to determine if Caspar was crediting Lizzie or Emily with his business success.

At the 1903 banquet, the commendations for Berry came thick and fast.  The congressman for the district, the Hon. William S. McNary, told the assembly that he had known of Caspar Berry long before meeting him in person, having heard of him spoken of in the highest terms.  McNary intoned:  “It is customary in this country to hear of successful men in business, but no man is more fitting of a testimony like this than a honorable businessman.”  My assumption is that McNary was a drinking man.

Other encomiums to Berry were forthcoming.  The toastmaster,  Boston City Clerk E. J. Donovan, told the crowd:  “You do not honor him because because he has made a few dollars but because he has been honest to his fellow men.  He has been not only an honor to his own country but to America, also.  There is a good representation present of what the bone and sinew of the American people are.”   

Those present that night included many from the alcohol trade, including representatives of Empire Distilling, Rex Distilling, Massachusetts Brewing, Genessee Brewing, Boston Beer Co., and the California Wine Assn.  The assemblage saw Berry presented with a Masonic charm, studded with five large diamonds, hanging on a double gold watch chain, something valued in today’s dollar at about $7,500.

Immediately following the press report of Berry’s festivities, however, was a brief news note that held portents for the future of the liquor trade.  It recorded that one John T. Shea — obviously not invited to Caspar's party — the very day of the ceremony had been elected recording secretary at a meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Saloon League.

Over the ensuing years, the League would grow increasingly strong, culminating in the imposition of National Prohibition in 1920.  Berry may have felt the anti-liquor tide rising even earlier.  The last business directory listing for his company was in 1916.  He died in 1919 at the age of 73 and was interred in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, a place where many prominent Bostonians are buried.

During the years following the 1903 Parker House celebration Caspar Berry must have thought back frequently and pleasantly on the tributes, among them being termed a “thorough gentleman,” and an “honest and whole-souled man”  — accolades we all would cherish.   

  

Sam Dillinger “Hauled and Delivered” — Good Pennsylvania Rye

  For several years before the Civil War Samuel Dillinger drove a large Conestoga wagon pulled by six horses across the Allegheny Mountains on the Nation Pike, transporting merchandise between Baltimore and Pittsburgh.  It was an arduous journey but Sam was an expert on hauling and delivering.  After settling down in Pennsylvania, he became the second largest distiller in the state, hauling out fifty newly-filled whiskey barrels every day from his distillery to store in his warehouses and then delivering a quality aged rye to his customers.

Shown right in maturity, Sam was born in Westmoreland County in October 1810, the eldest child of Daniel and Mary (Myers) Dillinger, and bought up on a farm.  His father had emigrated from eastern Pennsylvania and evidence exist that the family was of Swiss Mennonite origins.  The name Dillinger was pronounced “Dilling-Grrr” not  “Dillon-Jerr” like that of the notorious gangster.   With only a limited education, as a young man Sam apparently had several occupations, including trading in cattle and horses, and as a wagoneer cross the Appalacians.  Seemingly more important was a stint working at a grist mill and distillery where Dillinger learned how to make rye whiskey and also, it is thought, something about marketing it.

In 1831 Dillinger married Sarah Loucks, related to the famous Overholt distilling family, and soon their wedding after they purchased and located on what became known as “Home Farm” near Alverton, Pennsylvania, shown above.  Sarah  was accounted a woman whose “energy, faithfulness and frugality”  were a definite asset to Sam.  The couple would go on to have a family of ten children, seven girls and three boys.  

Perhaps it was the financial requirements of a rapidly growing family that caused Dillinger to expand his enterprises.  In 1850 he purchased a grist mill in nearby West Bethany and soon added a distillery, shown here.  This he operated with success to a regional clientele for some thirty years, bring his sons into the business as they matured.  

In 1881 the West Bethany distillery was destroyed by fire.  When he rebuilt, it was nearby at a locality known as Ruff’s Dale.  By this time Sam had been joined by sons Daniel and Samuel Jr.  Shown above, this distillery was operated as “Samuel Dillinger & Sons.”   It became one of the best known in Pennsylvania, second in production only to the Gibson Distillery [see my post on Gibson, July 2014].  

In time the distillery had a mashing capacity of five hundred bushels of grain daily, producing 50 barrels of whiskey, and six warehouses with a combined storage capacity of 55,000 barrels.   The Dillingers also operated several bottling operations for their retail sales.  The family name appeared proudly on ever flask and quart of their flagship Pennsylvania Straight Rye Whiskey.

Meanwhile, Sam had been expanding further. With growing prosperity he purchased additional farmland adjoining Home Farm until he owned more than 600 contiguous acres, all of it on top of rich fields of coke coal.  That spurred him in 1872 to erect a number of coke ovens, eventually said to total more than 100.  One author has opined: “Dillinger and Sons are therefore entitled to rank among the pioneer coke producers of Pennsylvania.”  Sam also was one of the founders of the Southwest Pennsylvania Railway in 1872 and served as a director for years.  

Denied book learning himself, Dillinger was portrayed as an “untiring worker” for the “free” public school system and he served for years on the county school board.   In addition, he did contract work to build school houses, churches, and other local buildings.  Affiliated with the Democratic Party, Dillinger opposed slavery, but as a Mennonite and a pacifist, was opposed to the Civil War believing that, as a biographer has noted, “…That slavery would terminate its existence by the education of the people to the fact that it was wrong and that this course would better prepare the slaves for their freedom.”  

Marked by extraordinary vigor throughout his life, at age 79 Dillinger in 1889 very suddenly was felled by a paralyzing stroke and never regained consciousness.  With his large family including children and grandchildren grouped around his grave, he was interred in the Mennonite Cemetery at Alverton.  His monument, shown here, was inscribed “Erected to the Memories of an Honest Man and Constant Friend.”

Dillinger’s sons, Daniel and Samuel Jr. continued to operate the highly successful  distillery their father had founded until they were forced to close by National Prohibition in 1919.  At some point during America’s fourteen year “dry” period, the family sold out to the Rosenbloom family who earlier had operated a liquor dealership on Pittsburgh’s North Side.  The Dillingers had known the Rosenblooms for a long time, providing whiskey for their rectifying operation.   As shown here on a post-Prohibition label, the Rosenblooms kept the Dillinger name on their whiskey but now it had become a “blend.”  They also changed the name of the company name to “Ruffdale Distilling Company”  The distillery later would change ownership several times before terminating business about 1966.  Sam Dillinger’s whiskey-making, begun in the 1850s had extended down into the 1960s — a run of more than a century.

Summing up the life of this extraordinary distiller, a biographer echoed the sentiments found on Dillinger’s tombstone:   “He was an honest man, and never feared to express the convictions of his conscience. He was a constant friend and neighbor, and was ever ready and willing to lend a helping hand to the weak and erring or downtrodden.”  Sam also proved without a doubt that a former wagoneer also could “haul and deliver” quality Pennsylvania rye whiskey.

Note: Much of the material for this article and of the quoted material above comes from an article written posthumously about Dillinger for the 1906 publication, History of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, Volume 2, edited by John Boucher for the Lewis Publishing Company, New York.

Stulz Brothers of Kansas City Were “German to the Core”

                  

Although many of our Nation’s early whiskey men were immigrants from Germany, most of them after arriving were quick to “Americanize” their approach to marketing their liquor.  The Stulz Brothers of Kansas City were notable exceptions.  Shown above on their letterhead, the Stulzes — Emil Arnold  (E.A.) left, and Sigmund Carl (S.C.) — energetically pitched their merchandising to a German-speaking populace, estimated at 95% of their customer base.

The brothers were born in Wittich, Prussian Germany, of into a Jewish family that had come to the area from Klattau, southwest of Prague.  Sigmund was born in 1860;  Emil was five years younger.  The Stulz Brothers immigrated to the United States in 1886, settling in Kansas City in 1887, a city with a strong German population.   In 1893, Sigmund married Kathryn Stein,  woman eleven years his junior.  They would have a family of two boys and two girls.  In 1900 Emil married Else Marchand.  They would have one daughter.

In 1893 the Sigmund and Emil opened Stulz Brothers Liquor Company at 605 West Fifth Street in Kansas City.   Their enterprise seems to have met with quick success.   By 1898 they had outgrown that address and moved to 1416 Main Street.  In time their business outgrew that store and the brothers moved to 616-620 SW Boulevard.  Those impressive quarters, shown here, boasted four stories and long frontage on a major street.  As shown below, the building was large enough to hold large vats for whiskey and wine that were decanted into barrels to be sold at wholesale.  The brothers claimed that their storage casks in total held 375,000 gallons.

The Stulz Brothers offered a blizzard of brands to their a claimed continent-wide clientele, “from Maine to California, from Texas to Minnesota, from Florida to British Colombia.”   They included many of the best known American brands and added their own proprietary labels for whiskey they were blending and mixing on premise.  Those included: “Peacock Rye,” “Mocking Bird Whiskey,” ”S. B. Monogram,” "S. B. Our Own Sour Mash,” "S. S. B. B. Double Copper Distilled.” “Stulz Brothers Autograph,” seen here in a 1919 ad, came in straight rye, straight bourbon and a blend, both in quart and gallon sizes.  The brothers packaged it in both ceramic and glass bottles.

Like other major whiskey wholesalers, Stulz Brothers provided a range of giveaway items to favored customers, including saloonkeepers, bartenders and even faithful retail customers.  Among them were a variety of shot glasses carrying the Stulz advertising.  Other more expensive items 

were a match case advertising Mocking Bird Whiskey and their house brand beer, “Gutschluck.”  They advertised:  “Whoever brings us a new customer will always receive a lovely gift.”  

In order to handle the immense amount of business their liquor trade was generating Stulz Brothers was obliged to have a large employee force.  Many of them seem to have been young women.  The photo below shows no fewer than twenty-nine damsels, all chastely dressed in high-buttoned blouses and shirts, who are said to have been employed in Stulzes' Kansas City offices.  The German text accompanying this photo said: “…We offer a picture of a few of the pretty gals in our office. These aren’t all of them, as a few were too bashful to appear in the picture.”

Although all of the labels and ads shown heretofore were in English, Stulz Brothers were more comfortable addressing their customers in German.  As an example, about 1913 they self-published a 240-page book of German songs under the title “Neuestes Deutsches Liederbuch” (New German Songbook).  Professor Kevin Kurdylo, an expert on German language and literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has translated much of the book.  In it the Stulz Brothers claimed that 95 percent of their customers were good Germans who had been buying their liquor and wines for twenty years.  According to Kurdylo, the book was aimed at preserving the German language and culture in America.  

He notes about the Stulz brothers:  “This book, they believe, will help the children of German-speaking immigrants appreciate the language of their fathers; singing these songs will make them proud to be and to remain German. The brothers ask, ‘Are there any more beautiful, more graceful, more euphonic melodies, than the German?’  By having your children sing these German songs, they insist, you not only help preserve the German language, but you make them aware that  ‘the blood of the heroes of Germany’ flows in their veins.”

“The brothers are confident that these songs will help to instill and sustain such German traits as loyalty, honesty, sincerity, brotherly love, and gratitude (particularly toward their parents) in the young generation, making them “gute und brauchbare amerikanische Bürger” (good and useful American citizens) imbued with German virtues and a German conscience.”

The Stulzes also used the songbook to take a swipe at the movement to monopolies in the American whiskey industry, often identified as the “Whiskey Trust.”  Kurdylo translates:  “‘Die Trusts bedrücken die Farmer, den Geschäftsmann, den Handwerker, Ar- beiter, wir haben nichts mit den Trusts zu thun” (Monopolies oppress farmers, merchants, craftsmen, and workers—we have nothing to do with monopolies).”

The German songbook was not the only item published by Stulz Brothers to celebrate their native language and beloved culture.  Shown here is book entitled “Zum Wohlsein!,” translated from the German it means “For Well-Being.”  Despite the American eagle and Old Glory on the cover, it is a 64-page booklet of German toasts.  This publication likely was a “nice gift” the Stulz’s gave customers.

Not all the Stulz’s printed materials were in German.  Although made in Germany, the children’s book below was written in English.   Carrying advertising as did all Stulz publications, this one was a child’s “play” book.  The images inside were printed in two colors and done in such a way that the first image presented a scene and text.  For example:  “Where are the fish?” — had a picture of a fisherman.  When a red plastic sheet included with “Wonderpictures” was placed over the image, the original scene vanished and a new one appeared of a fish swimming in a stream.

During their period of success in Kansas City, each brother returned to Germany from time to time.  A city directory indicates that Emil was residing overseas in 1912.  By 1915 he had returned to Kansas City, however, where in 1917, at the untimely age of 52, he died.  Surrounded by friends and family, he was interred in Elmwood Cemetery.   Meanwhile, Sigmund pressed forward with business, ever conscious of the advances that anti-alcohol forces were making in state after state.  Stulz whiskey had been confiscated in Oklahoma in 1909, but the brother won in court and got it back.  The Stulzes were not above heaping derision on the prohibitionists.  Kurdylo’s loose translation of a poem in the songbook seems illustrative of their feelings:

Schnadahupferl aus Drytown

Water does not whet my whistle,

But here we can’t get wine,

Because the Prohibition thistle

He has smothered the good vine.

But soon I’ll have my druthers,

I write Stulz’s for a little wine

And then those Temperance Brothers

Can slide off my behind!

Sigmund Stulz continued to pursue the interests of Stulz Brothers after his brother’s death, although closing the brewery in 1916 and moving to smaller quarters at 2043 Main Street.  The last directory listing for the firm was 1918.  Sigmund did not live long enough to see Repeal, dying in 1928.  He was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Kansas City.  Ironically, this Stulz's death preceded by only a few years the rise of Adolph Hitler in Germany when those “German traits” the brothers extolled so highly led to the Jewish Holocaust.

Note:  Most of the quoted sentences above are from an article by Prof. Kurdylo entitled “Stulz Brothers, a German-American Business in Kansas City,” Winter 2011, publication unknown.  The article can be found in its entirety on the Internet.

W.W. Cooper Understood “These Little Town Blues”

These little town blues

Are melting away

I'll make a brand new start of it

In old New York

   — from the song “New York, New York”

William W. Cooper may never have gotten to New York City, but he might have wished he had.  He contracted a bad case of those “little town blues” when he was forced to close up his prosperous distillery and liquor business in Marion, McDowell County, after the State of North Carolina banned making or selling “spiritous liquors” in towns of fewer than 1,000 residents.  Marion missed the cut and Cooper had to shut down his operation and move.

From the photo of its main street in the early 1900s, it is clear that Marion was a “one horse” town.  Earlier a North Carolina business directory listed only two “manufactories” there; one outfit made linseed oil and the other constructed buggies.  When Cooper arrived on the scene he started another enterprise, “rectifying" — mixing and blending — whiskey.

Cooper was born in Statesville, N.C., the son of a prominent businessman there.  He was educated in local schools and for the first years of his working life may have been assisting his father's interests.  Historical records indicate that about 1904, about the age of 28, Cooper moved 70 miles west to Marion began a liquor rectifying operation, located in a four story brick building designated No. 3 on the map above, now part of the “Depot Historic District."  Constructed several years earlier and known originally as the Buffaloe Building, the structure initially housed a “whiskey-cutting” operation known as R. H. Bennett’s Wholesale Liquor Sales and Rectifying.  When Bennett relocated to another nearby location, Cooper moved in, enlarged the space, and developed his own whiskey-blending operation.  He also appears to have had a retail outlet across the street, No. 4 on the map.

The location was a good one, right across from the depot for the Clinchfield Railroad.   That line, founded in 1902, ran from the coal fields of Virginia and Elkhorn City, Kentucky to the textile mills of South Carolina and connected with major lines. (Note below that one informant believes that the Southern Railroad provided service to Marion as early as 1870.)  The railroad’s entry into tiny Marion was a definite boost to economic activity there.  It also meant that many rural distillers scattered over the North Carolina countryside could send their raw whiskey to Cooper’s rectifying plant by train.  Moreover, Cooper could send his products by railway express to other parts of North Carolina and throughout the South, many of them into “dry” counties.  His location opposite the train depot also meant that thirsty travelers could step out of their coaches and into his emporium for a bottle or jug.

Cooper sold his liquors in a variety of containers and provided them with highly colorful and interesting paper labels.  One shown here for his “Sweet Mash Corn Whiskey” featured the North Carolina seal and and the state motto in Latin.  Translated it means “to be, rather than to seem.”  It is taken from Cicero’s treatise on “friendship” and translated liberally can be taken to mean that North Carolinians are truly friendly and not just pretending.  The state was the last of the original Thirteen to adopt a motto and by then, it occurs to me, the good mottoes likely were taken. 

Even more interesting was Cooper’s label for his “Laurel Valley Corn Whiskey,” a brand he trademarked in 1905.  The highly colorful paper label featured a log cabin nestled in the mountains, one that houses a traditional distillery. Outside a gent is loading a ox-cart with barrels, preparing to take the whiskey to market.  This bucolic scene, of course, is a far cry from the warehouse across from the train station where Cooper actually was concocting his liquor.  Other labels, shown throughout this post, are notable for the colorful rendering of a ear of corn on Cooper’s “Mountain Corn” and the apple on “Cooper’s Apple Brandy.”

Cooper’s seemingly was a profitable operation from the outset.  Government documents record an auction sale in the basement of the Marion Post Office where 4,500 gallons of confiscated corn whiskey was on the auction block, said to be “the best 100 proof stuff, made in the mountains.”  It had been seized by the U.S. Revenue officers for “irregularities, such as the failure of the maker to affix the stamps which the government said to be on the barrels.”  In other words, this was illegal moonshine.  It auctioned at $1.30 a gallon.  Cooper was on hand to buy 56 barrels, the majority of the lot.  Since most whiskey barrels held 60 gallons, assuming they were full, he paid $4,360 for the corn squeezings — equivalent to more than $109,000 today.  Since the U.S. required “cash on the barrel head,” Cooper must have been doing very well, indeed.

His success, however, was destined to be short-lived.  As early as 1881 anti-liquor forces had tried to push through a statewide referendum to require total prohibition of alcohol.  The good people of North Carolina rejected the effort by a four to one vote.  But slowly the pendulum swung.  In 1902 the state legislature passed the Watts Act that banned the manufacture and sale of “spiritous liquors” outside incorporated towns.  To get around the ban, many rural distillers simply incorporated their neighborhoods, held phony town elections, and went on making their whiskey.

The prohibitionists did not take long in figuring out that dodge and several years later expanded the ban to towns with populations of fewer than 1,000.  The law effectively ended distilling and liquor sales in 68 of North Carolina’s counties.     Although Marion’s population at the time was almost up to the thousand mark, it apparently was among those where liquor was banned. 
  

Note that on Cooper's letterhead above, “Marion” is crossed out and “Statesville” was pencilled in. That North Carolina city is about 70 miles east of Marion and during Cooper’s time boasted some 14,000 residents, sufficient to remain legal for a liquor enterprise.  With his wife, Camille, in tow and still a young man, Cooper closed up shop in Marion and moved back to Statesville.  His former address in Marion became Blanton’s Wholesale Grocery, an enterprise that continued on into the 1950s.

Meanwhile prohibitionary forces were on the march again.  Carrie Nation, the ax-wielding crusader against drinking and smoking, toured North Carolina, branding one of its towns second only to Chicago as “the whiskeyest-soaked city in the United States.”  By 1908, the “drys” were ready for another statewide referendum.  This time it passed by 62% of the vote.  North Carolina became the first state in the South to ban the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages, and the first state in the U.S. to do so by popular vote.

Meanwhile in Statesville, Cooper was forced once again to shut down his liquor business.  Just 34 years old at the time, he was recorded in the 1910 census living with Camille at 683 Rase Street in Ward 4 of Statesville.  His occupation at that time was given as “Agent, Restaurant.” . 

We likely will never know if W. W. Cooper’s “little town blues” ever melted away in Statesville.  Nor is there any way to determine if he ever ventured to “New York, New York.”  We can imagine, however, that wherever Cooper was located he never forgot those glory years in Marion when he had the resources to plunk down the equivalent of more than one hundred grand for barrels of moonshine.

Afterword: When I wrote the above with the "little town blues" theme, it was without any idea that W.W. Cooper was afflicted with depression and later showed signs of being suicidal.  In recent days, however, a thoughtful resident of Statesville after reading my post has sent me news stories, including the excerpt below.

After returning to Stateville, William was institutionalized several times and in June 1913 ended by taking his own life, surely a tragic end for so young and talented an individual. Only one of the news stories directly addressed his character and it is that on that note that it seems most fitting to end:"...Mr. Cooper was a kindly, generous man and readily made friends."  May he rest in peace.