CHAPTER 2

  

A LOVE STORY

 

  

Seven years after the federal government quelled the Whiskey Rebellion, the United States electorate chose Thomas Jefferson as its third president based on his very popular platform of eliminating the whiskey tax. The promise of a whiskey-bathed frontier continued to pull the adventurous and the hopeful westward across the Alleghenies toward Pittsburgh.

One of the families to heed this call was a group of Philadelphia Mennonite farmers, the Overholts. It’s not clear exactly what motivated them to make the arduous trip west from Bucks County, Pennsylvania—perhaps it was the promise of fertile land, the booming whiskey industry, or the network of rivers in western Pennsylvania that could take products throughout the country and on to Europe.

Whatever the reason, according to K.R. Overholt Critchfield’s edited account of her family’s history, Henry and Anna Overholt packed up their family—thirty-two folks, including children, grandchildren, and in-laws—in a caravan of Conestoga wagons and set off across the state. They stopped in western Pennsylvania at Broad Ford, named by George Washington when he had surveyed the land firsthand. It was here, in 1803, that the Overholts decided they would make a life. And so it was here that Henry’s son, Abraham, grew into the father of American distilling over the next fifty years, creating Old Farm Pure Rye, the gold standard of American whiskey.

According to this same account, “Henry and his family built their homestead upon 150 acres and Henry thereupon stationed himself at the family loom, which was conveniently close to the family still.”

Abraham’s weaving and distilling responsibilities provided him with plenty of alone time. Perhaps more than the rest of his family, he had the time and quiet to think deeply about the whiskey he and his neighbors were producing. He recognized a ripe opportunity. America’s young government had not taxed any other industry in this manner, and it certainly hadn’t enlisted an army of 13,000 men to protect its stake in any other business.

Abraham, by several accounts, was known to be an exceptionally thoughtful man. The economics of whiskey, however, were clear to most farmers of the day. While grain sold for a few cents a bushel in the early 1800s, whiskey, which shipped more easily and was non-perishable, commanded a commendable dollar per gallon. Furthermore, Abraham and others in his community of German settlers spotted an opening in the market. The Scotch-Irish, the real trailblazers on the western frontier, were moving to Kentucky to get beyond the reach of federal tax collectors after the Whiskey Rebellion. This left land, infrastructure, and opportunity for the Germans who had come in their wake.

And so, in 1810, against the wishes of their local Mennonite Church, the Overholts began distilling rye whiskey in earnest. Initially distilling a modest three to four bushels of rye per day, the Overholts immediately expanded. By 1811, their farm housed two 150-gallon stills. In line with many other farms’ still capacities, Abraham continued distilling in this manner, steadily building his whiskey’s reputation until he inherited the farm in 1818. At this point, he increased the capacity of his operation in serial one-hundred-gallon spurts over the course of the next ten years.

As Abraham’s whiskey production grew, so did its reputation. Old Farm Pure Rye migrated westward in wagon trains; riverboats carried it south down the Mississippi; wagons traveling to Lancaster distributed it eastward to Philadelphia and New York. Abraham’s whiskey traveled as far west as California, where it became the reward for gold rushers after a day of digging. In the course of just four decades, Old Farm Pure Rye became the nation’s signature whiskey.

At this time, folks were drinking their fair share of the spirits. Some of Overholt’s customers consumed as much as one gallon of whiskey per month. And the distillery records show that during the summer, whiskey buying hit its peak, with customers purchasing it in four- to ten-gallon lots, presumably to make bounce—whiskey flavored with seasonal berries and other fruits.

Abraham, unsurprisingly, was doing quite well for himself and his family. Across from his first distillery, the Overholts built a mansion—a gracious, substantial brick building surrounded by acres of farmland. He also assembled a staff of fifteen men. By 1829, the Overholt Distillery was an impressive four-still operation.

Nine years later, Abraham overcame one of his greatest obstacles to increasing production—his reliance on the community mill. Up to this point, his sons had transported the grain by oxen to the community mill, a dreaded task that was usually completed in spite of broken wagon wheels and obstinate oxen. But these trips ended when Abraham built a stone gristmill on his farm. This represented a significant capital expansion for his distillery, and made it nearly self-sufficient. It also introduced a new staff position, that of a miller.

One of Abraham’s least effective and most-gossiped-about workers was his assistant miller, John Frick. John was known as a romantic, a man who wanted to be an artist, but instead found himself toiling away at a gristmill. In polite circles, he was called unconventional, and in private, rowdy. To make matters worse for him, his bright red crop of hair announced his Irish roots, an unfortunate heritage at a time when German émigrés were the premier class.

Abraham had eight children, including a daughter named Elizabeth, who fell in love with John. Upon hearing of John and Elizabeth’s trysts, the Overholts were not pleased. As Frick’s great-granddaughter, Martha Frick Symington Sanger, writes in her beautiful biography of the family, when “Elizabeth Overholt...announced her engagement to John W. Frick, a locally born, red-haired towdy whose...paternal grandmother was a red-haired Irishwoman, Abraham was furious.” Elizabeth remained resolute in her affection for John in spite of her family’s disapproval, however. When she told them she was several months pregnant with John’s child, Abraham and his wife begrudgingly hastened to see the two of them married.

In 1847, John and Elizabeth moved into a worker house together on the distillery grounds. The house was described as a “spring house,” which had previously been used as a smokehouse and summer kitchen—the equivalent of converting a broom closet into an office today. The snug stone cottage sat quite literally in the shadow of the three-story Overholt mansion. After giving birth to a daughter, Elizabeth quickly became pregnant again. They named their second child, born December 19, 1849, in the shadow of the country’s premier whiskey distillery, Henry Clay Frick.

Henry Clay grew up in a much different manner than his mother had. His father received $30 a month for his work at the Overholt Mill. This income represented his father’s entire personal estate, which starkly contrasted the wealth of the Overholts. Abraham’s estate was valued at $400,000 in 1870, and John Frick’s brother-in-law owned real estate that alone was worth $137,000.

John Frick remained the black sheep of the Overholt family, never able to bridge the gap between his poor Irish background and his in-laws’ wealth. Abraham, it seems, was not immediately fond of Henry Clay, either. In spite of this, the young boy grew up watching his grandfather closely. He did not begrudge his grandfather for holding him or his father at arm’s length. Rather, he admired Abraham tremendously and identified with the prosperity of his mother’s side of the family. Frick even adopted the stately attire of his grandparents—both distinguished Mennonite dressers who wore black silk and cashmere.

Like his father, Henry Clay was not a guy’s guy. Called “Clay” by his friends and family, he was particular, well-dressed, and frail, poorly suited for production work in the distillery. His older sister and his grandmother, both named Maria, doted on him and did their best to keep him well. He made up for his physical shortcomings with his intelligence.

Fortunately, Henry Clay, who was enamored with business from an early age, was surrounded by industrial growth throughout his childhood and young adult life. It was after he was born that Abraham undertook his most concerted and successful phase of distillery growth. In 1850, not only did he have a mill to grind his farm’s grain into grist for his whiskey, but he also introduced a malthouse on the distillery grounds to malt the grains prior to milling. Furthermore, he built a cooperage that produced an extraordinary twelve thousand casks of whiskey per year. In 1856, Abraham added a trail of pens, housing 249 hogs. He fattened them with stillage, the waste product of distillation, and sold them at market. Then in 1859, when Henry Clay was ten years old, Abraham built Broadford Distillery, a six-story structure for milling and distilling.

This was a heady era, not only for the Overholt Distillery, but also for western Pennsylvania rye as a class. By the early nineteenth century, Pittsburgh was making half a barrel of whiskey for every man, woman, and child in the country each year. The style of whiskey that the Overholt Distillery produced—Old Monongahela Rye—became the benchmark by which all other whiskeys were judged. According to the US Census, Western Pennsylvania boasted 1,010 licensed distilleries in 1840, but this number likely does not capture all the family stills that littered the agricultural landscape. That amounts to a licensed distillery for every twenty Pittsburgh residents. That same year, western Pennsylvania distilled 644,722 gallons of spirits, and nearly a third of that was produced in the county inhabited by the Overholt Distillery. In Moby-Dick, published in 1851, the Pequod’s second mate, Stubb, in a celebratory mood after harpooning a whale, yearns for a glass of whiskey. He mentions three great whiskeys in the world, the last one being the “unspeakable Old Monongahela.”

With each of Abraham’s expansions, he improved the efficiency and integration of his distillery operation. With increased capacity, his distillery was able to produce an extraordinary 860 gallons of whiskey per day. By contrast, a large craft distillery today, even with its modern advantages, might produce one-tenth of Overholt’s production.

As Abraham’s operation grew, nearby Pittsburgh was experiencing its own industrial boom. An influx of German and Irish immigrants made their way to the region, home to approximately 122,000 people, to fill industrial jobs. While the rest of the country relied on charcoal for their energy, Pittsburgh began using cheaper and more efficient coal to heat homes and businesses. Pittsburgh, which burned more coal than any other American city, was dubbed the Smoky City.

Abraham first dug up coal on his land in 1820 while looking for a spring. It so happened that the coal that he dug from his West Overton land was part of the Pittsburgh seam, the richest coal seam in the entire United States. And the most abundant strip of this famous seam, the three miles packed with the deepest deposits and the greatest economic promise—the Connellsville Seam—surrounded his distilling operation. Abraham uncovered the famous Connellsville coal, but it was his grandson, Henry Clay, who ultimately seized the full breadth of its opportunity.

For a time, even with this abundance of coal at their feet, Abraham and his neighboring farmers in western Pennsylvania focused their production pursuits on whiskey because of its easy transport and hefty profits. The coal Abraham dug from his land was fuel to grow his distillery operation, but it was not mined as a product for sale itself.

However, with the Civil War, the market for coal became undeniable. During the war, the Pittsburgh region became an epicenter for arms production. Eyeing the tremendous increased need for fuel, the Overholts made a fortune buying and selling coal rights to their neighbors’ land. During these years, the Northern troops came to rely on the Overholts for two essentials: Old Farm Pure Rye Whiskey, which became the unofficial whiskey of the Union troops and President Lincoln, and the coal beneath their land.

During the war, Henry Clay was a young teenager, working as an office boy in the Broadford Distillery for $25 per month. Economic success stories were emerging in the Pittsburgh community, including one of a young capitalist named Andrew Carnegie, who was reportedly earning an astonishing $50,000 per year. Henry Clay, surrounded by wealth and industry, had lofty financial goals and dreamt of being a millionaire by the time he was thirty. He knew that wouldn’t happen if he remained an office boy.

So he decided to pack up and move to Pittsburgh to work as a salesman in upper-crust haberdasheries. He quickly developed a reputation as the most productive salesman everywhere he worked. He easily charmed the ladies who came in to shop, and was soon making more money than he had been at his family’s distillery. In 1869, however, he contracted typhoid, which sent him home. Just as they had over the course of his childhood, his grandmother and sister nursed him back to health.

Abraham was duly impressed by the independence and ambition that his grandson demonstrated during his time in Pittsburgh. To test his talents further, Abraham appointed him chief bookkeeper of the Broadford Distillery in 1869 with an annual salary of $1,000—not quite in millionaire territory yet, but a nice bump from his office boy wage.

Henry Clay proved himself a talented manager of the distillery’s accounts. He also began to flex his entrepreneurial muscle with his grandfather’s guidance. He purchased 300 acres of his neighbors’ land and established his first fifty coke ovens.

Abraham grew especially close to his grandson during these entrepreneurial years. So it was a devastating surprise to Henry Clay when his grandfather passed away in 1870 and left nothing of his large estate to him. The silver lining in the inheritance was that Frick gained a controlling interest in the Old Farm Pure Rye Distillery, which in 1870 earned $40,512 (in excess of $1 million today). The family renamed the whiskey Old Overholt in honor of Abraham.

Even with this healthy revenue stream, whiskey no longer seemed to offer the same financial promise to Frick that it once did. He had witnessed firsthand in Pittsburgh the economic power of coal, and he saw the weight of his family’s fortune shifting to this alternative fuel. While he maintained his bookkeeping post at the Overholt Distillery, he purchased twenty acres of land nearby and became the manager of the mine without pay. Emboldened by what he came to know of the coal business, Frick began putting together packages of personal loans, backed by the famous Overholt Whiskey name, drawing on the community’s trust of his family’s legacy.

Frick was full of ambition, according to one anonymous account:

“In the evenings, after finishing with the accounts at the Distillery, [Frick] drove throughout the whole region, sometimes on horseback, sometimes in a buckboard calling upon farmers. He optioned coal land right and left. His savings were exhausted with the payment of hand money and he borrowed everywhere he could. He rushed about the whole night long, with sheaves of promissory notes in his coat pocket—optioning, optioning!”

With land in hand, Frick set out to build more coke ovens. He understood that the market would move from coal to coke, which was easier to transport and burned more efficiently. In Pittsburgh, Andrew Carnegie continued to grow his iron mills and was in desperate need of coke to fuel his enterprise. The coal coming out of the West Overton area was quickly becoming known as the best coal for making coke. Frick was anxious to get ahead of the market and meet Carnegie’s needs.

One obstacle stood between Frick and his ovens: he was out of cash. He did, however, happen to own the famous Overholt Distillery. So at twenty-one years of age, he traveled into Pittsburgh to visit the bank of Judge Thomas Mellon, also formerly of Westmoreland County, and an old friend of his grandfather. Mellon also came from a farming and distilling family, and so his agreement to meet with the young Frick was likely a favor to his old friend, Abraham.

Using the Overholt Distillery as collateral, the very determined Henry Clay convinced Mellon to loan him $10,000. Just a couple of months later, he returned to Mellon’s office to request another $10,000. Concerned that Frick had so quickly burned through his first loan, Mellon sent his partner out to examine Frick’s operation and determine how all the funds were being spent. The examiner’s report deemed Frick was too distracted by his distillery bookkeeping and his art, which seemed to be an interest inherited from his father. (Frick’s proclivity for art collecting would manifest years later with two major collections—one in Pittsburgh and the other in New York City.) Mellon, however, viewed Frick’s distillery salary as an asset rather than a risk, and sent another advisor for a second opinion, who filed a more positive report. Frick received a second $10,000 loan from Mellon to build another group of coke ovens, according to Mellon biographer David Koskoff.

By 1871, Frick boasted 1,200 coke ovens to his name, and in another year, his company became the largest single coke works in America. He built railroad tracks and bridges to ensure the transport of his products. No longer a pastoral landscape, Connellsville now contained railroads running eight to ten tracks thick. Frick was transforming the place his grandfather had settled, and the community around West Overton had begun its evolution from America’s whiskey town into America’s coal town.

Industrial growth seemed to have its full grip on West Overton and Connellsville, but in two years, everything turned quiet for a time. Eighteen seventy-three opened with fortitude. The construction of railroads and steel mills, which were financed through bonds sold in Europe, continued at a fast clip. However, a financial panic struck Europe by spring, which soon crippled the heavily-leveraged enterprises in western Pennsylvania. The price of coal and coke plummeted, forcing most suppliers to halt production. America’s burgeoning workforce spiraled into a 25 percent unemployment rate.

Frick decided to soldier onwards, betting that the economy would ultimately pick back up. The steel industry did of course bounce back, and with ferocity. Frick was able to increase the price of his coal fivefold.

Frick emerged from this crisis stronger and more emboldened than ever. Judge Mellon rewarded his acumen in 1876 with a credit line of $100,000. Mellon also introduced the entrepreneur to his own son Andrew. The younger Mellon, six years Frick’s junior, was known for being socially removed and for living with his parents. Andrew, however, was so struck by Frick that the two became close friends and business partners.

The Mellons were not the only eminent Pittsburgh industrialists to take note of the young Frick. Accordion to Quentin Skrabec’s work, Andrew Carnegie noted to his partners in Pittsburgh: “We must attach this young man Frick to our concern. He has great ability and great energy. Moreover, he has the coke—and we need it.”

In 1884, Carnegie convinced Frick to have lunch with him and his mother in New York, where Frick was honeymooning with his new wife. After touring the city, including walking across the latest Carnegie steel structure—the Brooklyn Bridge—the couple met with Andrew and Mrs. Carnegie. Frick and Carnegie were able to successfully grow their joint coke and steel business over the next decades.

The financial and personal lives of Frick and Mellon also continued to intertwine, as their political, social, and business proclivities became indistinguishable. According to Mellon biographer David Cannadine, they regularly lunched together at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Club. To celebrate Frick’s becoming a millionaire, they set out to Europe together to educate themselves on art and European society. In addition to the sheer amount of time the two shared in each other’s company, their friendship revealed itself in the vast capital the Mellons entrusted to Frick—his personal loans from Mellon Bank amounted to $148,000 in 1885.

In 1887, Andrew Mellon and his brother purchased a portion of the Overholt Distillery, which had expanded production earlier in the decade so that it was producing an extraordinary 3,450 gallons of whiskey per day. Old Overholt Whiskey continued to flourish, and other manufacturers tried to cash in on the premium by incorporating flavor additives known as “Pittsburg Rye Essence” and “Monongahela Essence” to their neutral alcohols.

Mellon and Frick also used their prized whiskey as a political lubricant, bribing the Republican leadership with bottles of Old Overholt and contributing to a notoriously corrupt political machine that favored business interests above labor.

In 1899, the Broadford Distillery was rebuilt. Additional barrelhouses were added to accommodate an increasing supply of Old Farm Rye Whiskey, with the capacity to move through thirty-seven tons of grain per week. The expansion was completed in 1905, just fourteen years before the onset of Prohibition. Through the growth of the distillery, Mellon and Frick’s friendship continued to flourish. By 1902, Frick was a major shareholder and director of the Mellon National Bank.

By 1917, it was clear that the federal government was getting ready to take on alcohol, and Mellon became anxious about the future of his and Frick’s whiskey business. On October 28, 1919, the Volstead Act, or the National Prohibition Act, was enacted. Within five weeks, Frick, America’s Coke King and the owner of America’s original brand of rye whiskey, died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-nine. Mellon, his closest friend and business partner, became trustee to Frick’s estate, gaining control over America’s most legendary distillery.

Mellon’s interest in the Overholt Distillery became problematic when he was appointed secretary of the treasury under President Harding in 1921. In his new Cabinet position, Mellon was, in effect, the United States’ chief prohibition agent. And in a remarkable twist of history, it was the same position Alexander Hamilton had occupied when his whiskey tax inspired Abraham Overholt to start Old Farm Pure Rye Whiskey.

Mellon took reluctantly to his alcohol enforcement duties. He believed Prohibition was draconian and ineffective, and rightly felt that the Treasury Department was incapable of enforcing such a broad law. Furthermore, the teetotaling philosophies of Prohibition’s proponents were a far cry from his personal interests. So Mellon did what any creative politician would do. He granted his Overholt Distillery one of the few medicinal whiskey licenses that were available to existing distilleries. Throughout Prohibition, the Overholt Distillery continued filling barrels with thousands of gallons of whiskey. Some was sold by prescription for medicinal “needs,” but much of it likely found its way to the occasional speakeasy as well.

Ultimately, Mellon disposed of the politically troublesome distillery in 1925, selling all of his interest to an investor. Schenley Distillers, another Pittsburgh distillery, purchased Overholt’s remaining whiskey stores, and National Distillers Inc. purchased the Overholt Distillery brand. The brand then transferred to Jim Beam in 1987. The whiskey Beam produces, made with a high-corn mash and on a continuous still, is a distant cousin of the original American whiskey that Abraham Overholt, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon would have made on their copper pot stills in western Pennsylvania. The brand, however, remains the longest-running thread between pre-Prohibition American whiskey and the bourbon-centric American whiskey industry of today. Years before Pittsburgh was a steel town, it was a whiskey town. And years before America’s whiskey was Kentucky bourbon, it was Pittsburgh Monongahela rye.