DISTILLER, OWNER OF ANCHOR GIN
1768–1838
Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York
Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont invented two things: American gin and the American suburb.
Born in New Haven, he dropped out of college (he was uninterested in the study of Greek and Latin) and made his way to New York City, working for a time in the customshouse. His shipping firm, Leffingwell and Pierrepont, fared well in trading with France during the revolution, where supplies were often thin, until the capture of his ship, the Confederacy, by French pirates in 1797.
He lived off and on in Paris for seven years, witnessing the public guillotining of several French revolutionaries, before moving back to New York in 1800. Two years later he married Anna Maria Constable, the largest owner of “wild land in New York.” Seeking to settle down, perhaps, and disenchanted with international trade, he engaged Colonel James Anderson (of Connecticut; not to be confused with his contemporary James Anderson of Mount Vernon) to build a distillery for him at the old Livingston distillery, which had burned at some point, probably near the end of the Revolutionary War.
Pierrepont’s Anchor Gin, as it was branded, was renowned for its smoothness, having been aged a full year in the distillery’s warehouses. He improved the distillery’s remaining structures and built a windmill on the dock to power the grain mill. Pierrepont’s success was also his downfall: After fifteen years in business, his product was so widely copied that the distillery was no longer profitable and the buildings were sold and converted to candle making. Later owners, including the concern Schenck & Rutherford, used the site to distill rum well into the mid-1800s.
In his time, Pierrepont bought up some of the larger old estates of Brooklyn and moved into a mansion built on Columbia Street, overlooking New York Harbor from the vantage point of Brooklyn Heights. Pierrepont’s style was described as “substantial, but modest elegance.” Over his mantel hung a painting of George Washington, which can be found today in the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Arkansas. He befriended Robert Fulton in Europe and helped him establish steam-powered ferry service between Manhattan and Brooklyn. (They were close enough that Pierrepont named one of his sons Robert Fulton Pierrepont.) Through his investments with Robert Fulton, Pierrepont helped to turn Brooklyn into America’s first suburb, incorporating the town in 1815. He laid out a grid of wide streets, which appealed to wealthy bankers and merchants who could use Fulton’s regular ferry service to avoid the densely packed, dirty streets of Manhattan.
Pierrepont’s son Henry Evelyn would assist in the development of the borough, siting the town’s city hall (now Borough Hall) on a triangle of unused land. Henry had studied cities in Europe and applied some of what he had learned to the development of the young town. Henry would also be instrumental in the founding of Green-Wood, New York City’s rural cemetery, in 1838, and Hezekiah has a prominent burial there on top of a high knoll, their funerary pavilion designed by Richard Upjohn, who is best known for designing Trinity Church and for founding the American Institute of Architects.