MOONSHINER
UNKNOWN, ACTIVE 1886
Interment unknown
In the late nineteenth century, the production of distilled apple cider—known variously as applejack, Jersey lightning, and apple whiskey—was growing in New Jersey, then and perhaps still the largest producer of apple-based illegal distillate in the country. In those days, applejack cost about one dollar a gallon for new-make spirit, though aged versions commanded up to three dollars.
A Brooklyn Daily Eagle article from 1896 references a moonshine distiller who, ten years earlier, operated on a “wholesale” scale. Investigators fixated on a character “of a lightweight mentally” who was known around Warren County as Crazy Nancy. She lived in the mountains, harvesting wild berries in the summer and hunting small animals for pelts to sell in winter. Nancy was a mysterious woman and didn’t enjoy interacting much with strangers, other than to sell them something. She lived in an old barn originally built to house sheep, up against a bluff so as to be out of the wind. Suspicion primarily came from apple farmers in the Pequest River Valley worried about their disappearing crop; despite setting various traps, they were unable to catch the thieves that might be supplying the moonshine trade.
A detective named Finch was assigned to the case. Finch worked for a neighbor by day and stole away in the evenings to watch over Nancy’s property. One evening, safely hidden behind some shrubbery, Finch witnessed a man approach Nancy’s house with a sack of apples slung over his back. Finch waited but did not see the man again that evening.
Finch, being both fearless and hubristic, decided to pursue the case on his own. He packed a pistol and headed toward Nancy’s place. Ascertaining that no one was home, he picked the lock and entered. Nancy’s house was sparsely furnished, and the only signs of life were a string of dried apples and a few pumpkins. A ladder led to a loft area with only a flour barrel in the corner. Deciding to lay low, he hid himself behind the barrel and waited for Nancy or the man to return. Eventually, Nancy arrived and cooked her supper by the fire. Finch waited upstairs. When Nancy had finished cooking, she came up to the loft, just steps away from where Finch waited. He saw her remove some boards from the wall, revealing a secret tunnel into the hillside. Nancy disappeared into a door at the end of the tunnel. A half hour later, a man emerged from the door, and only when he came into the loft with a lit candle did Finch realize it was Nancy in men’s clothing. She exited the house and Finch maintained his position, hoping to ambush her with a full sack of contraband.
As soon as Nancy was gone, Finch removed the wallboards and snuck into the cave, finding fifty jugs, a barrel of apples, and a full moonshining setup, along with a pile of women’s clothing. Finch went downstairs to wait for Nancy.
Around midnight, she arrived in her disguise, and, upon entering the house, lit a candle. Just when she was going to stoke the fire, Finch leveled his pistol at Nancy’s back, and said, “Hold up your hands.” Nancy whipped around and blew out the candle. Finch, flailing in the darkness, fired his pistol, only to feel the smack of a stool being thrown in his face. As Finch reeled, Nancy ran out the open door and disappeared, never to be seen in Warren County again.
Officials searched the property and found five hundred gallons of applejack hidden throughout the house and in the hillside cave. It was speculated that she hid her jugs in buckets of chestnuts and sold her wares in New York and Philadelphia.
DISTILLER
1820–1902
St. Francis of Assisi Cemetery, Marion County, Kentucky
MINOR CASE BEAM
DISTILLER
1857–1934
Riverview Cemetery, New Haven, Kentucky
THOMAS JEFFERSON POTTINGER
DISTILLER
1851–1911
Private cemetery located off Highway 52 near Gethsemane, Kentucky
The area west of the Appalachians was supposed to be Indian lands. That agreement held for much of the colonial British period. By 1775, there were only two hundred people living in all of Kentucky, and fewer in Tennessee. After the Revolutionary War, nationalism, pioneerism, disrespect for Indians, and entrepreneurship drove settlers into Kentucky, which was not heavily populated by Indians and treated as a communal hunting ground by several tribes. The eastern part of the state was hilly, with narrow valleys unsuitable to farming. The earliest settlers found the rich bottomland of the Bluegrass region to be more hospitable and settled in the tributaries of the Ohio River that cut into the plateaus and knobs of Northern and Central Kentucky.
Around the same time, some Catholics were leaving Maryland (originally a Catholic haven among the thirteen colonies) and moving as a group to Kentucky. Many settled in what was then Nelson County, eager to take advantage of the rich land of the frontier and forge new lives in proximity with other Catholics. This kind of migration by families bound by religion was common. A few minutes’ drive away, a group of Shakers established a village at Pleasant Hill, which can be seen mostly unchanged today. The original Catholic settlement is gone, but there remains a large monastery at Gethsemane, a Catholic college (St. Catharine), and several small Catholic churches. Why the Maryland Catholics chose this area in particular is a matter of speculation, but for a number of reasons it later became the center of modern bourbon country, and many of these early Catholic settlers have become household names in bourbon.
In 1785, sixty families left St. Mary’s County (“like the Israelites,” declared the Courier-Journal in 1895), under the leadership of Basil Hayden, and settled on Pottinger’s Creek in present-day Marion County. This group included Jeremiah Wathen, John Baptist Dant, Philip Mattingly, and many others whose names would have smaller roles in bourbon history. Pottinger’s Station had been established by Samuel Pottinger, a Revolutionary War soldier who mustered in the area with Captain James Harrod and returned after the war in 1781. The Beam family, originally Böhm, first settled in Pennsylvania Dutch Country but moved south to Maryland and ended up traveling the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap on or before 1778; Jacob first settled slightly upriver in a place called Crab Orchard and later built a farm distillery on Hardin’s Creek in Manton. Thomas Lincoln (see this page) was raising his son Abraham about ten miles away.
The settlers in this region worked together to raise families, go to church, grow crops, and distill whiskey. Joseph Washington Dant was particularly well regarded for his log-distilled whiskey, which he began making on his farm near Loretto in 1836. The log method of distillation involved hollowing out a wooden log, which was then split in half and clamped back in place with iron bands. Steam was run through a pipe or a coil inside the log and the distillate would have emerged from a cap into a worm. The second distillation would then pass through a much smaller copper still. For those who had run a small copper still for a while, this was a good way to increase production capacity with very little investment in new equipment. Later, the “log and copper” method of distilling would be improved with a three-chambered wood-stripping still, followed by a second distillation in a copper doubler. In 1870, Dant and his sons built a modern distillery at Dant’s Station, not far from where the Maker’s Mark distillery stands today, and situated such that nearly all of the process could be done by gravity. The mash tub was located highest in the factory; mash flowed from there into fermenters and down other pipes into the still. Unfilled case storage and bottling houses were built lower down the hillside. A letter also exists showing four recipes for yeast that Dant used: for spontaneous, jug, day, and night yeast. Dant’s whiskey became especially revered, and his Yellowstone brand of bourbon eventually became popular around the country. His sons and grandsons would start other distilleries: a large one in Gethsemane, and another distillery in Louisville to make Yellowstone.
The Pottinger family was equally as industrious. Samuel Pottinger’s son founded a town just west of the initial settlement and named it New Haven after the town in Connecticut, which he thought to be the most beautiful he had ever seen while on a visit there. Pottinger’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson, became a very successful distiller, and even filed for a patent on a warehousing technique in 1881. His distillery at Gethsemane would eventually be fully acquired by Minor Case Beam in 1900, making Old Trump and T. J. Pottinger brands.
Jacob Beam had three grandsons: Jim (we know), John (but who is always called Jack), and Joseph B. (not to be confused with his son Joseph L., who is also important). Jack was instrumental in starting the Early Times distillery, and his nephew by Joe B., Minor Case, may have learned to distill while working there. Early Times was a big operation, but Minor Case wanted to get out on his own, and he worked for seventeen years to acquire the old Pottinger distillery, then owned by Francis Head and Orene Parker. Minor Case’s son, Guy, and Michael Dant, a son of J. W., married sisters, so they became partners, in a manner of speaking. The sisters must have been persuasive; hereafter the Beam family, which had been buried in the Protestant cemetery, would be buried across the road in the Catholic cemetery.
The end of Prohibition would mix things up a bit. After Prohibition, the sons and grandsons of Minor Case were increasingly removed from the distillery business, as fewer distilleries dotted the rural landscape and larger ones became giant factories. The Pottingers disappeared from the whiskey business. The Dants sold for around nine million dollars in 1944, a huge sum of money in those days. Minor Case’s grandson Jimmy worked in distilleries here and there, but was often hired because he was a good baseball player and the inter-distillery baseball league needed his talent on the field. Jimmy would tell his son Steve that their side of the family was “blended, not bonded.”
Steve Beam, who is very much an alive distiller, married a Dant, further cementing his family ties to history, and started a craft distillery, Limestone Branch, in Lebanon, Kentucky. Asked why so many families got into distilling, and how distilling became so entrenched in the family legacies, he suggested that it was just a reality of small-town life. These families were attending the same weddings and funerals, watching one another rise and fall in business. While we assume that distilling concentrated in Kentucky because of unique geologic conditions that are somehow perfect for whiskey, that is probably no more true than for furniture making in North Carolina or carpet-weaving in Georgia. There were abundant local resources of corn and soft water, as there was wood or cotton in other areas for other industries. But the social geography and familial topography were probably much more important to the establishment of the distilling culture among the Catholic migrants to Nelson, Marion, and Washington counties. Even today, the communities seem to have a forever quality that suggests distilling, Catholicism, weddings and funerals, hard work, and baseball games might go on here for a long time yet to come.
Perhaps the best story to illustrate this was an episode that occurred at Tom Craven’s house in Marion County in 1904. A neighbor had hit a vein of salt water while excavating for zinc, and there were rumors of an old Pawnee gold mine on his land. One day, four buggies arrived with Craven’s son and four men introduced as Joe and Minor Beam, a Mr. Samuels, and a Mr. Dant—all very recognizable as whiskey men. The group went up a creek with a lunch pail and some whiskey bottles and started prospecting. They returned every day over the course of that summer and built a seventy-five-foot mine shaft. But by the end of the summer, they never found any gold and gave up, and it turns out they had commenced the entire project on the word of a traveler who found a rock on the bar of a local tavern and swore it was gold ore. When the flimsy truth of the operation came out, they didn’t mind. They’d had a good time that summer, and even if they didn’t find gold, they found good friends in one another’s company and probably more than a little bourbon.
DISTILLER
CA. 1850–1911
Lynchburg City Cemetery, Lynchburg, Tennessee
“UNCLE” NEARIS GREEN
DISTILLER,
FARMHAND,
SLAVE
CA. 1820–1890
Interment unknown
LEMUEL OSCAR MOTLOW
DISTILLER,
BANKER, MULE TRADER
1869–1947
Lynchburg City Cemetery, Lynchburg, Tennessee
Here’s the part of the story you don’t often hear: In 1909, Jack Daniel found religion and insisted that his name no longer be used to promote the whiskey that made him famous. Let’s take a minute with that one.
Jack Daniel was born the tenth child of Calaway and Lucinda Daniel. His mother died shortly after he was born, possibly from complications from childbirth. Jack’s father remarried quickly and had two more girls, and his stepmother doted on her blood-related children. The Civil War broke out when Daniel was around twelve, his father died when he was fifteen, and with his sisters married off and brothers moved away or fighting in the war and his stepmother looking to remarry, Jack was without a home.
He went to live with the Call family, whose Lutheran lay-minister patriarch, Dan, was fighting for the Confederacy with Nathan Bedford Forrest, and whose young wife, Mary Jane, could use a hand around the house and the family’s general store. Call was still early in his career fathering eighteen children (yes), but even the three that were around were a lot for the twenty-year-old Mary Jane to manage.
Jack, who was short and boyish (he never grew taller than five foot two), was helpful enough, but as things settled after the war, he dreamed of a career beyond the farm, where his size would be less of a disadvantage. The Calls owned a few slaves before the war, and some stayed on even after earning their freedom. One, Nearis Green, served as the master distiller on the property. Uncle Nearis, as he was known, also played the fiddle and was a lively entertainer. Only a few years older than Jack, he taught him all about the still. Most farms of this size had stills, and the Call still, a mere eight gallons, was smaller than others in the county, but it did the job, making a gallon or two of whiskey in a run. Call and his wife also taught Jack to read and write. (Dan Call had himself been taken in as an orphan and saw Jack as a protégé of sorts.)
As Nearis ran the still, Jack went off to sell whiskey. When he turned twenty-five, he inherited a small amount of money from the sale of his family’s farm, and he used it to go into business with a commercial distillery, in partnership with his old friend Dan Call. The new distillery used about a ton of grain (thirty-nine bushels) a day and could make almost one hundred gallons. After the Whiskey Ring scandal, in which distillers colluded to defraud the government of excise tax by recording less whiskey produced than there actually was, distillers were mandated to make three gallons for every bushel of grain they took in, so that output could be standardized based on grain consumed. This, in effect, legislated low-quality whiskey—good whiskey is made with narrower cuts that produce lower yields—but despite sending a coalition of Lynchburg distillers to Washington to argue their case, Daniel and his fellow whiskey makers had to conform to the new requirement.
The temperance movement eventually claimed Call, who had an increasingly difficult time squaring his ministerial work in the Lutheran Church with his distilling. By 1882, Daniel was on his own in the business. Soon, his No. 7 whiskey, named fondly after his first registered distillery number (distillers are all obsessive numerologists when it comes to their registered distillery numbers) came to be well known. Government reorganization of his revenue district forced Daniel to take a different number, so by putting “Old No. 7” on his label, he helped customers understand that the whiskey from No. 16 was the same stuff they used to like from No. 7. In 1884, he moved the distillery to its current site in Lynchburg to take advantage of the limestone spring that flowed from a scenic cave. In 1885, corn displaced rye as the more popular grain from which to make whiskey (a position it has held ever since), and Daniel’s sour-mash, charcoal-mellowed whiskey stood out from cheaper whiskeys as customers got more particular about what they drank. Still, Daniel was as much a whiskey dealer as distiller. He bought whiskey stocks from other distilleries when prudent, which helped him expand sales when demand allowed.
Daniel hired a nephew, Lem Motlow, and taught him the business. He also hired Nearis’s children and created contests around the distillery for the best still hand. One test was to lift a four-hundred-pound barrel on one knee and drink from the bunghole while holding it steady. Daniel “loved fine horses,” according to grandnephew Felix Motlow. “He kept two thoroughbred Kentucky horses and drove one of those spirited horses from his home to his place of business.” The still hands had a gag where they stood under one of Daniel’s horses and lifted it for the amusement of visitors. Recognizing that amusement sometimes behooves the distiller, Daniel organized the Silver Cornet Brass Band in 1892 to play distillery functions, town parades, and funerals around Lynchburg.
Daniel never married, although he once asked a pianist thirty-five years his junior to be his wife. Her father declined and Jack attended her wedding some time later, giving her a ten-dollar gold piece.
Daniel’s whiskey was now being sold in bottles, and the square shape was something he thought would make the whiskey distinctive (and would travel efficiently in boxes and crates). In 1904, his whiskey won a gold medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis (as anyone who’s read the bottle knows). And then, as it is told, one morning Daniel arrived at work before anyone else and, forgetting the combination to his safe, kicked it with his foot in frustration. His toe swelled up, the injury proved fierce and stubborn, and Daniel died from the wound.
At least that’s the story, and it’s true, mostly. He actually lived for a few years thereafter, walking with a cane for a while, then bedridden and trapped in his house, though it was probably his poor diet and stress that eventually did him in, in October 1911. With temperance forces swirling around Tennessee, it was easy to see that his life’s work might be ended by the stroke of a pen in Nashville. He willed his distillery to nephews Lem Motlow and Dick Daniel in 1907. Lem bought Dick out for ten thousand dollars, knowing that his heart wasn’t in the game.
Tennessee did go dry. Gubernatorial candidate Edward Ward Carmack, a fiercely dry Prohibitionist, squared off with incumbent Malcolm Patterson, who favored local-option laws. Carmack lost the primary but held a grudge. The two met on a Nashville street in 1908 and drew pistols. When the gunfire ended, Carmack was dead. Dry forces turned him into a hero, and this incident swiftly mobilized the state legislature to pass laws first prohibiting the sale of alcohol, followed a year later by prohibiting the manufacture of alcohol. Lem moved the whiskey barrels and some distilling equipment to Saint Louis in the hopes of saving the business.
Newspapers reported that Jack Daniel got saved in 1909 and no longer wanted his name on whiskey. The first part is accurate. Daniel had participated in church functions as a community member, but never as a believer, though when contemplating his legacy, he joined the church and distanced himself from his whiskey. With the distillery being dismantled and moved, he may also no longer have wanted anything to do with a business that appeared to be sinking in a sea of opposition, and which he could no longer personally oversee. Near his headstone, two cast-iron chairs were placed, to accommodate female mourners. The chairs remain.
Motlow picked up where Daniel gave in. He sold much of his Saint Louis distillery to George Remus (see this page). He got staggeringly drunk on a train to Saint Louis and shot a conductor during an altercation with a black porter. He hired several high-powered lawyers to blame the altercation on the porter, and the all-white jury acquitted him. The justice department sued him for his business with Remus but later dropped the case. The old Lynchburg distillery burned. When Prohibition ended, Motlow petitioned the state to build a distillery to sell whiskey out of state, but the Lynchburg residents resisted. He worked around them and eventually got permission. His Jack Daniel’s distillery reopened in 1938, and though he had a stroke a year later, Motlow wasn’t going to let physical incapacity hold him back as it had done for his uncle. He went to work in a wheelchair. He also discouraged his four sons from marrying, thinking that women would distract them from the distillery business.
Motlow died in 1947; that same year, his sons sold the business to Brown-Forman.
DISTILLER
1784–1870
Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania
HENRY CLAY FRICK
INDUSTRIALIST,
PHILANTHROPIST,
DISTILLERY
BOOKKEEPER
AND OWNER
1849–1919
Homewood Cemetery, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
ANDREW MELLON
SECRETARY OF THE
TREASURY,
DISTILLERY OWNER
1855–1937
Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery, Upperville, Virginia
Western Pennsylvania had always been fertile ground for distillers (see John Neville, this page) and its rye whiskey often appreciated as emblematic of the spirit of the frontier, of rebellion, and of the rural mountaineer of the northern Appalachians. While historians have often focused on settlers of Scotch or Irish descent, there were also many Germans in the area, many of whom were more industrious at making whiskey. And while Pennsylvania long ceded its title as a whiskey-making state, its influence persists in ways that are written into the fabric of our economy. Take, for example, Henry Clay Frick.
Henry Oberholtzer, a Mennonite and distiller from Bucks County, moved west in 1800 with his wife and settled at Broad Ford, Pennsylvania, with his twelve children, including Abraham, whose surname would later be simplified to Overholt. Abraham, already sixteen at the time of the move, started contributing to the family farm by weaving, but after working the loom in his early years he became more interested in distilling. The whiskey from the Overholt farm on the Youghiogheny River earned a reputation, and traders could command higher prices for his barrels, prompting Abraham to expand the distillery business. In 1859, Overholt built a new distillery, six stories high and one hundred feet long, whose building still stands in West Overton. (The modern-era distillery, now defunct, stands on the river at Broad Ford.)
Overholt’s rye-based whiskey came to represent the whiskey of the Monongahela region; it was reportedly favored by Doc Holliday (this is likely), Ulysses S. Grant (plausible), and Abraham Lincoln (specious). Abraham died in 1870, and though his son Henry Stauffer had inherited some of the day-to-day operation, it was one of his grandchildren, by his daughter Elizabeth, who would eventually run the company.
Henry Clay Frick, born in 1849, was never that interested in the distillery business. After working in a shop in Pittsburgh, an illness sent him back to the family farm, where he ended up clerking in the distillery office and rising quickly to a management position. But Frick was most interested in coal—and, by extension, coke, iron, and steel—and used his earnings from the distillery to buy the mineral rights to many coal seams in Western Pennsylvania. When he ran out of money, he went to Pittsburgh to approach Judge Thomas Mellon for a loan. Frick expected a friendly audience: The Mellons once lived in Westmoreland County, and Judge Thomas knew his mother when they were younger.
In fact, Judge Thomas’s father had been a distiller, and the boy had assisted him in setting up a crude still to convert his family’s peaches and apples to brandy when there was no immediate market for the produce. He wrote in his autobiography that two rock outcroppings in the ravine above their farm supported a straw roof with a cool spring running through the improvised structure, perfect for supporting a still. Young Thomas gathered peaches and apples, counting it as some of the hardest work he’d ever done, hauling them in bushels to the still house. So it was not a stretch that Frick found favor with the Mellons, became fast friends with Thomas’s son Andrew, and with loans from the Mellon Bank, Frick acquired more mineral rights and was quickly controlling 80 percent of the coal output in Western Pennsylvania.
In 1879, Frick had achieved his life’s ambition, to be a millionaire by the age of thirty. He celebrated with a Havana cigar. In the next two years, he outmaneuvered other relatives and came to control the family’s distillery business, as well as the world-famous A. Overholt & Co. and Old Farm brands. He was ruthlessly obsessed with increasing his own wealth, at any cost. In an effort to boost his profits, he built houses near his mines and rented them to miners. He set up company stores and paid his employees in scrip, redeemable only at those stores. He hired Pinkerton strike-breakers to shut down labor organization. He built railroads and charged others to use them. He was shot twice in the neck during an assassination attempt by an anarchist and labor sympathizer.
And if these aspects of Frick’s character seem ruthless, nothing quite matches the Johnstown Flood, wherein a dam collapsed at his private hunting club, which he shared with Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, and other industrialists. Due to poor maintenance, the dam’s failure sent a wall of water downstream that killed 2,209 people and destroyed entire towns. Frick and his partners successfully avoided criminal prosecution or legal culpability, though Frick donated to recovery efforts.
By the 1880s, Frick was in an uneasy partnership with Carnegie and quickly becoming one of the richest people in the world. Still, he probably kept a soft place in his heart for the distillery. He made arrangements to lease it, then sued to get it back. He made deals with the Mellon family to share the ownership, and upon his death in 1919, a controlling stake passed to his long-time friend Andrew Mellon, probably the only person he trusted with it.
Shortly after, Mellon was nominated as secretary of the Treasury—a position once held by the foe of Western Pennsylvania distillers, Alexander Hamilton—and served from 1921 to 1932, placing him in the awkward position of owning a distillery during a time when distilling was banned. Still (and perhaps not coincidentally), the Old Overholt distillery was one of a few distilleries that were permitted to make medicinal whiskey, and it operated during the later parts of the Prohibition era.
It’s possible Mellon never had the same fire for the alcohol business as his friend Clay. In 1900, when he was forty-five, he married the twenty-one-year-old daughter of one of the owners of the Guinness brewery, Nora Mary McMullen, but the two divorced acrimoniously in 1912. Mellon never remarried; their son would go on to breed racehorses. Years later, Mellon was impeached for financing an army of homeless Pennsylvanians who marched on Washington in protest, known as Cox’s Army, a politically complicated act that seemed to contradict his place in Hoover’s administration. His conduct was called into question, his ownership of the distillery during Prohibition scrutinized, and he resigned and retired to private life. Mellon sold the distillery to Seton Porter, whose National Distillers would consolidate many of the brands produced by regional distilleries like Overholt.
The Guinness company grew to become the largest liquor company in the world, now called Diageo, maker of Johnnie Walker, Bulleit Bourbon, and George Dickel. Henry Clay Frick’s art collection can be seen at the Frick Collection, an idiosyncratic gallery housed in his former mansion in New York City’s Upper East Side. Andrew Mellon’s collection would become a significant part of the National Gallery of Art. And the Old Overholt brand of rye whiskey is still being made, though it is now distilled in Kentucky by Beam Suntory.
The Johnstown Flood
FIREMAN
SANDY
MILLER
FRANK TRENNOR
ASSISTANT FIREMAN
FRANK PODRATZ
COAL-WHEELER
JOSEPH AND MRS. HORAKA
SHAVING-PUSHER
JACOB KAKUSKA
ENGINEER
ALL DIED 1880
Interments generally unknown;
Kakuska is buried in Bohemian National Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois
Under the massive headline “BLOWN TO ETERNITY,” the Chicago Tribune described the explosion of a steam cooker at Simon Powell & Sons Distillery in 1880, which was located at South Canalport Avenue and South Morgan Street. The engineer had built a pressure cooker for the mash, which was desired to improve efficiency at the distillery, though at the time of the accident, it had been used only a few times. The distiller on duty had a clog in the line and directed the engineer to increase the steam to blow the clog through. The boiler exploded. “It was blown through the roof, and went almost straight up into the air, some say until it looked no larger than a flour-barrel. The main portion landed on the west side of Morgan Street, about 175 feet west and a little to the north of its original location … the jagged edge of the riven iron looked like a mammoth fruit can which had been chopped open with a dull instrument.”
Six died in the explosion, including Sandy (his last name went unrecorded), a Scotsman who was mortally injured by the concussion and scalding, his body “badly mangled and so horribly scalded that the skin and portions of the flesh peeled off to the touch.” When fireman Daly’s wife found her husband’s body, “her grief became uncontrollable, and it was with great difficulty that she was taken from the room to prevent her from throwing herself prostrate upon the disfigured remains.”
The saddest story of all was Joseph Horaka, whose wife was bringing him supper at the time of the explosion. Both were buried in the wreckage. “In the mass of bricks and shavings a young man found a shawl and a piece of a dress. ‘Here’s the woman,’ he shouted, and immediately a crowd gathered about him. A few began digging into the shaving with their hands, and soon a slipper and a dinner-pail were brought out.” But after several hours of digging the bodies could not be found. Their fifteen-year-old daughter came to the scene, “crying as if her heart would break,” whereupon she claimed the shawl and other articles. “She identified them all at once. But even this did not add to her already strong conviction that both her parents were in the ruins.”
Joseph Denny, John Brooks, Harvey Day, William Bergman, and M. K. Reilley
THE NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 20, 1880
