DISTILLER
1789–1856
Versailles Cemetery, Woodford County, Kentucky
James Crow was trained as a physician at the College of Medicine and Surgery in Edinburgh and immigrated to the United States around 1822. First settling in Philadelphia, he went bankrupt and headed west. He arrived in Kentucky around 1825 and found work at the distillery of Colonel Willis Field. His medical training, and subsequent scientific approach to distilling, would have a profound effect on the whiskey business.
In an article in the New York Times from 1897, Crow is described as having a “herculean build, broad, intellectual forehead, smooth-shaven face, with the deep blue eyes and sandy complexion characteristic of his race.” According to the Times, distilling at the time of Crow’s arrival in Kentucky was done “after the manner of the old negro mammy’s formula for bread making, taking ‘a passel’ of meal, ‘a passel’ of malt, and about ‘so much’ water, ‘b’iled down’ until it was done.” Crow’s library was described as the most extensive in Kentucky, and his scientific instruments helped him improve—and, crucially, make more reliable—the whiskey-making process. One advancement that Crow likely introduced or perfected is the notion of narrow “cuts.” Crow took only two-and-a-half gallons of spirit per bushel (fifty-six pounds dry), whereas most distillers took twice that, suggesting Crow was interested in a narrower, higher-quality fraction of the distilling run.
Crow became the head distiller at the Oscar Pepper distillery, already a well-established concern near Millville, in Woodford County. After twenty years, he went to work at the Johnson distillery just a little ways down Glenn’s Creek. He died on the job in 1856 (some sources list 1859).
Crow is sometimes credited with inventing the sour mash process, in which fermented mash from one batch is used to jump-start the fermentation of the next. This isn’t true, but he was certainly responsible for sanitary improvements, such as moving livestock pens away from the distillery, and innovations in testing the acidity of mashes, which improved performance in replicable processes. And Crow’s whiskey earned wide acclaim, commanding significantly higher prices than other whiskeys and reportedly favored by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster (and a host of others, including Hunter S. Thompson, much later).
While the name of the distillery was Oscar Pepper, the whiskey was often called “Old Crow’s Whiskey, Oscar Pepper Distillery,” in an unusual instance of a whiskey named simultaneously for its maker and provenance. Oscar Pepper died a little after Crow. In his will, Pepper’s wife inherited control of the distillery, and she leased it to E.H. Taylor (see this page). Oscar’s son, James Pepper, was keen to go into the distilling business himself, but an economic downturn in the1870s hit the distilling business hard and the Peppers and Taylor both went bankrupt.
The Pepper distillery ended up in the hands of Labrot & Graham, and James Pepper launched a new venture with Crow’s acolyte, William Mitchell. Both businesses wanted to use the name Pepper. The court was asked to answer the question: Which was the Oscar Pepper distillery? The site where the elder Pepper had made the whiskey or the family process that James insisted he continued in the new facility? What makes whiskey, the place or the procedure? The law sided with the land, not the blood, and the old Oscar Pepper distillery continues to make whiskey today as Woodford Reserve, just down the road from where old Crow is buried.
DISTILLER
1798–1858
Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York
THOMAS GAFF
SHIPPER,
DISTILLER
1808–1884
Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati, Ohio
CHARLES LOUIS FLEISCHMANN
YEAST MAKER,
DISTILLER
1835–1897
Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati, Ohio
Thomas Gaff was born in Scotland and moved with his parents to New Jersey when he was a toddler. Gaff learned the distilling business from an uncle, Charles Wilson, also born in Scotland, whose Brooklyn distillery opened around 1834 and was described as the oldest and largest in Brooklyn by an 1851 survey, consuming 3,360 tons of grain to make 480,000 gallons of whiskey annually, at a spot between Franklin Avenue and Skillman Street. Charles Wilson’s distillery was probably the largest in the country at the time, making as much as 2 percent of the whiskey produced in America and close to 17 percent of what was being produced in New York City. The business employed eighteen people and supported eight hundred dairy cows with distillery swill, or spent beer.
Thomas Gaff left his uncle’s operation, and briefly opened a distillery in Philadelphia in the 1830s, but when business turned, after the panic of 1837, he moved west and built a new distillery on Hogan Creek in Southern Indiana. His plant, in the town of Aurora, was once part of a string of distilleries that hugged the northern bank of the Ohio River, though now only the MGP distillery remains. (It is in Lawrenceburg, one town upriver from Aurora and not far from the farm in Ohio where William Henry Harrison [see this page] had run a distillery.)
Gaff made bourbon, rye, and Thistle Dew Scotch-style whiskey (say “Thistle Dew” out loud to get the joke). He and his brother Thomas also helped Charles and Max Fleischmann set up a yeast–cake business in Cincinnati; they subsequently opened their own distillery, making Fleischmann gin and whiskey. Charles’s son Julius took over the family business, adding a grain elevator, a malting company, and a vinegar brewery, and he also became president of the Market National Bank. He was a co-owner of a professional baseball team in Cincinnati and owned several racehorses. When he was twenty-eight, he became Cincinnati’s youngest mayor, serving from 1900 to 1905. He died of a heart attack while playing polo in 1925. In 1929, his family’s yeast business was bought by J. P. Morgan—whose great-uncle Hezekiah Pierrepont (see this page) is also a dead distiller. A bottom-shelf version of Fleischmann’s whiskey still exists today, and the company, now owned by Barton Brands, is one of the few labels to make whiskey, vodka, brandy, and gin under the same name.
As for Gaff, he branched out of the distillery business, with interests in canal construction, mining, public utilities, Louisiana plantations, a jewelry store, breakfast cereal, and a brand of beer considered of such significant quality that it was exported to Germany. He also invested heavily in steamboats, as his position on the Ohio River afforded opportunities for trade downriver, especially with New Orleans. One of his steamboats was used by General Sherman as a headquarters during the Siege of Vicksburg.
His mansion, Hillforest, now a national historic landmark, was designed by architect Isaiah Rogers to echo the maritime architecture of riverboats. Its rooftop belvedere evokes a pilothouse, while its curved portico, thin columns, arched windows, and a flying staircase in the entrance hall all evoke the paddle-wheel steamers so associated with river travel in the nineteenth century.
The Gaffs and Fleischmanns are buried prominently across from each other in Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemetery, on opposite sides of a small lake. Gaff’s tombstone, in pink marble, was a joint expense by three distilling Gaff brothers. The Fleischmann family mausoleum is a white-marble scale replica of the Parthenon.
WHISKEY DISTILLER
1831–1913
Greendale Cemetery, near Lawrenceburg, Indiana
EDWARD R. SQUIBB
MEDICINAL DISTILLER
1819–1900
Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York
There are two Squibbs that became known for distilling, both descended from Nathaniel Squibb, who lived through the Revolutionary War in Pennsylvania. Nathaniel had two sons, Robert and Enoch Robert. Robert stayed in the northeast, and Nathaniel’s grandson, Edward R. Squibb, went to medical school and ran the hospital in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There, he was the first to employ a steam coil, rather than a direct flame, when distilling medicinal ether. In 1858, he left the military and began making his own medicines in a lab on the Brooklyn waterfront. Later, he created a compact medicine chest to treat battlefield victims during the Civil War.
Rather than patenting his medical improvements, he published the technology so that society might benefit from his ideas and practical improvements. His experimentation, if methodical, was also volatile, and his Brooklyn laboratory often exploded; he was badly burned by one episode. His company exists today as Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Nathaniel’s son Enoch Robert moved to the frontier in Indiana. Nathaniel’s grandsons, William and George, entered the whiskey business in 1846 as rectifiers and in 1867 built their own distillery with a capacity of three hundred bushels per day (about nine hundred gallons). Business went well, making Chimney Corner, Old Dearborn, Rock Castle, and Gold Leaf rye. In 1885, a continuous still was added.
In 1913, both William and George died, and their sons rebuilt the distillery to a capacity of three thousand gallons a day. But Prohibition advocates had been circling, and the expansion proved ill-fated. Prohibition should not have been a surprise to the Squibbs: William was constantly facing lawsuits and complaints about his feeding cattle distillery swill, or selling milk from cattle fed on distillery by-products, a common complaint against distillers from temperance advocates. (During the war, William’s son Nathaniel had testified as to the feed value of distillation by-products at a time when nationalistic sentiment, calls to ration grain, and temperance advocacy seemed to fuse in an unholy political marriage.)
With the state of Indiana enacting its own Prohibition in 1917, the Squibb distillery closed. It would later be acquired by George Remus (see this page) and Lew Rosenstiel (see this page). The distillery today is abandoned, on a site just north of MGP Ingredients, which makes bulk whiskey for private bottlers, including Bulleit, Templeton, Redemption, and others.
A TOUR OF GREEN-WOOD CEMETERY
Green-Wood Cemetery is located in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, not far from the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Prospect Park, though Green-Wood predates that park by thirty years. Once a popular tourist destination, second only to Niagara Falls, the cemetery is now a place of surprising quietude in the otherwise bustling City of New York.
1. HEZEKIAH PIERREPONT
Distiller of Anchor Gin, founding family of Green-Wood Cemetery, friend of Robert Fulton, suburb inventor
2. SAMUEL MORSE
Inventor of the telegraph
3. E. R. SQUIBB
Medicinal distiller, improver of distillation technology, founder of Bristol-Myers Squibb
4. BOSS TWEED
Political strategist
5. CHARLES WILSON
Prominent Brooklyn distiller making half a million gallons annually in 1850, mentor to Thomas Gaff
6. CLINTON GILBERT
Civil War veteran, revenue officer, gauger, shot in the groin in the line of duty, only casualty of Brooklyn Whiskey Wars
7. GENERAL JAMES JOURDAN
Commanding officer during Whiskey Raids, personally attended Clinton Gilbert’s injuries in 1871
8. BATTLE HILL
Highest point in Brooklyn, site of most successful American military activity in Battle of Brooklyn
9. RICHARD HAYES MACDONALD
Kentuckian, president of the Bank of California, teetotaller
