INTRODUCTION

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I have become a connoisseur of cemeteries. Bardstown, Kentucky, has two. The good one is near the Old Talbott Tavern. Its jagged stones (the ones that still exist) stick out at odd angles, the grass is not regularly mown, and there are no fences to separate the burying ground from people parking for a quick stop at the bank or to walk the dog. The cemetery can be visited in a minute or two; there’s not much left to see but the ancient markers, a small bit of evidence in this little town of life in the eighteenth century. If there are any distillers here, they are likely forgotten.

Most of the known distillers are up the street, at the city cemetery, which is divided into a Protestant and a Catholic section. Jim Beam is buried here, but so are the founders of Maker’s Mark and Willett, as well as other, forgotten distilleries, long closed. The city cemetery is more conventional, almost suburban: a wooden gazebo, some long straight avenues that keep an orderly rectilinear plan, very few trees. The only thing unusual about it is the peculiar, persistent smell of bourbon mash, which drifts over from the Barton distillery, half a mile away.

Green-Wood in Brooklyn, dark and overgrown, has a surprising share of distillers. With its grand monuments covered in lichen and soot, showing the wear of proximity to the city, it would take weeks to walk the curving lanes and paths throughout the grounds’ 478 acres. Cave Hill in Louisville is cleaner but less grand; its burial markers elegant but less numerous. Spring Grove in Cincinnati has singular large monuments that are spread out like follies in a large gothic garden. The national cemetery in Arlington is a pastoral theme park, with hordes of tourists and school groups wandering in noisy clusters through the ordered grid of government-issue stones. When visiting the grave of Leonard John Rose in Boyle Heights, in Los Angeles, I saw an entire family tailgating at a headstone, a celebratory affair as best I could see from a respectful distance, and a spark of humanity in an otherwise sterile park of grass and stone.

David and I became interested in cemeteries when, in 2011, an employee at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood, the first planned cemetery in New York, came up with the idea for a somewhat unconventional tour: a visit to the graves of former distillers, followed by a whiskey tasting at one of the craft distilleries that had recently established themselves in the borough. In the 1840s, New York made as much as 25 percent of the distilled spirits consumed in the country, but that history is largely unknown to current New Yorkers, as distilleries gradually moved south and west, until the political forces around the temperance movement killed the last one some time after 1917. Then, thanks to changes in state laws, a wave of craft distilleries returned to the city. Kings County Distillery, established in 2010, became the first in the city since Prohibition. As distillers particularly interested in this forgotten history, we jumped at the chance.

This tour of dead distillers proved to be strangely intriguing, more than a stunt to attract morbid neighbors or an excuse to drink in the afternoon. There was something humbling to be surrounded by so many distillers in a city that had abandoned the vocation completely for a hundred years. The immersion in death and quietude had a disjunctive effect—reassuring as much as frightening; somehow the cemetery conveyed both a sense of optimism and pessimism. The cemetery felt like a place of great mystery and possibility, a kind of catalog of stories, lost to time.

Exhuming some of the stories of those we visited on the Green-Wood tour—and viewing them in the context of graves and eternity—led to some revelations about our own chosen profession. There is something allegorical about distillers, liquor, and death. Here, we tried to extract from the stories of individual distillers a distinctly American story (and morality tale), though it is a story without an ending and with a preponderance of subplots. Like the cemetery itself, it is a collection of characters, oddly juxtaposed, arranged more or less chronologically by death date.

This is a book, then, about distillers who have died. Some are well known, either because their names can readily be found on bottles on liquor store shelves or because the alcohol they made was a footnote to an otherwise memorable life. Others remain nameless, known only to history by an account of their accidental death, written in small-town newspapers at a time when every city was a town and when distillery accidents were common tragedies, as much the stuff of morning papers as the price of vanilla beans, hemp rope, or saltpeter. This book takes a broad view of who can be considered a distiller—a factory hand, a business owner, a salesman, a slave.

Americans have been distilling for almost four hundred years, starting with Dutch businessmen Cornelis Melyn and Willem Kieft, who built the first commercial distillery on Staten Island as an adjunct to a plantation. Jim Beam and Jack Daniel were distillers, of course, but so were presidents George Washington and Andrew Jackson. Industrialists Andrew Mellon and Henry Clay Frick were distillers, but so was Birdie Brown, who lived under the Judith Mountains in Montana and, in 1933, blew herself up while making moonshine as she was dry cleaning. Because alcohol has such a contentious place in North American history, our distillers are heroes or villains, existing uneasily in that space between honest businesspeople and merchants of depravity.

Though disparate in historical and geographical circumstance, these distillers often share common traits: humble beginnings, fierce industriousness, ostracism from prevailing society, personal reinvention, a propensity for exaggeration, a contrarian spirit, indomitable energy, superstition, social insecurity, a surprisingly common affinity for fast horses.

The act of distilling remains more or less the same today as it did in the 1600’s, when it first appeared on the North American continent. The technology has not advanced substantively, and while the product has experienced eras of boom and bust, we continue to drink hard liquor in roughly the same quantity as our parents and great-great-grandparents. Because spirits are so often aged, the distiller’s art remains a long game, won only after years of toil, and, indeed, sometimes it takes many generations for children to reap the rewards set in motion by their forefathers.

And because the product of distillation—that is, hard alcohol—has often been looked at derisively by the American moral elite, the distiller has often worked in the shadows or at the margins of society. Though federal prohibition against alcohol enacted in 1920 collapsed after only thirteen years, the temperance movement has been a narrative through-line in this country’s history, even to the present day. It has been our conscience, scolding us for trying to buy our joy through drunkenness, holding out for the clearheaded America that we have always believed we want to be, a society of ideas.

Spirits, of course, cater not to ideas but to urges. American distillers have very often been immigrants, slaves, Catholics, Jews, hillbillies, women, the poor, or people otherwise marginalized but aspiring to belong. In this sense, the distillers were like their Pilgrim forebears, seeking asylum of a different sort and using their ostracism to their advantage. They offered everyone in society a way to commute the pains of everyday life, and for most Americans, regardless of their status, in the long history of our country, that has been a comfort.

The men and women in this book labored against all odds to make a living and provide for their families. They went to work every morning, first over a copper pot and a cordwood fire in a field, then in a wooden shanty surrounded by iron pipes and steaming vats of swill, and then in brick factories fitted with brass and stainless steel. They were dogged, crafty, and a bit subversive. They argued over prices with a farmer; they feared the tax man; they struggled to get equipment to do what it was supposed to do; and they repeated, year after year, a process by which they took the stuff of our days—the fruits of soil and sunshine, and the work of tending and harvest—and converted it into the stuff of our nights—the dinners, dancing, and revelry where we all live and celebrate and commune.

For that gracious act, we do one thing in return: We remember.

Making whiskey, gin, or rum conjures the unseen substance of a fermented beverage and transforms it to an essence of its antecedent (alcohol) but also something more—something mythological, potent, and dangerous. The process is incontrovertibly capitalist and classically American. It takes items of nominal value, like grain, wood, and water, and renders them into objects of luxury, aspiration, and fantasy. Distillation was one of the alchemists’ lasting contributions to society: converting alcohol into an invisible vapor, and then returning the vapor to liquid in a potent (and highly flammable) form. Every distiller is flirting with death—death by scalding, death by explosion. To distill is, literally, to summon the spirit, through an act suffused with risk.

After the work of the distiller is done, the work of the drinker begins. Even the experience of drunkenness itself is a flirtation with death. Alcohol, as a sedative, slows the mind artificially, depressing the nervous system and lulling the body into a kind of a waking sleep, a sensation known as drunkenness. Taken further, the mind will stop recording memories, or will shut down completely, as intoxication becomes acute alcohol poisoning. Over time, the effects of repeatedly indulging in this flirtation with death may become permanent, as the deteriorative effects of alcohol affect cognition, memory, and motor skills. Its flirtation with death is aggregate, and depictions of alcoholics from nineteenth-century temperance tracts make perpetual drunks look like zombies, walking dead through the world.

America was most captivated with inebriation in the middle of the nineteenth century, when distilled spirits consumption per capita was at its highest. Like hypnotism and séances, also popular pastimes of the era, drunkenness offered an activity that, before moving images, recorded sound, and modern information exchange, could offer a reliable diversion into an altered consciousness. Almost two centuries later, it remains enormously appealing.

Throughout the nineteenth century, popular culture embraced this shift toward the macabre and the melancholy. Early Victorian Americans were obsessed with romanticism and mysticism: Séances and hypnotism promised to span the divide between waking life and death, and were explored with regularity. Even President Abraham Lincoln allowed a medium into the White House in an effort to communicate with his son Willie, who died at age eleven about a year into Lincoln’s presidency.

Historian Garry Wills describes this period of cultural interest in terms of liminal experiences: twilight, daydreams, premonitions, reveries, omens, and necromancy. This focus manifested itself in all forms of cultural production. “The encouragement of dreamy half-states as revelatory led to the romantics’ drastic upgrading of melancholy,” he writes. “Once considered a physical disorder and a theologically dangerous attitude, it now became a mark of genius.” The country was obsessed with Hamlet; our “luminist” painters learned to explore depth in shadow. And since melancholy was believed to be pedagogical, children were encouraged to visit cemeteries, that “supreme locus of liminality.”

The gates of the cemetery, in those days portals between the city and the country as well as between life and death, now serve as thresholds through time—they send us back into a world where distillers are proximate, almost alive again, manufacturing melancholy, liquid liminality.

The Monumental Bronze Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, cast tombstones and other funerary statues in zinc from 1874 to 1914. Marketed as “white bronze,” the headstones were popular and can still be found in cemeteries all across the United States. Over time, the zinc would take on a bluish hue, adding a touch of color to otherwise white and gray cemetery landscapes. (They are now referred to by cemetery aficionados as “zinkies.”) The company was very successful, eventually opening branches in Detroit, Chicago, and Des Moines. The metal headstones were appealing because they were economical, but they were also useful for a reason not obvious at the time: They were hollow.

The story goes like this: A moonshiner, during Prohibition, would bring a few bottles to the cemetery. The headstones of the zinc tombs, though stately, were easy to disassemble. (They had been sold as blanks, with removable panels, so that personalized information could be purchased and installed separately.) Removing these panels revealed a convenient hiding place, one that to the uninitiated was easily lost among a sea of tombstones. It was the perfect drop box. The customer would visit after the fact, find the headstone of the mark, put the cash in the hollow, and take the booze. Whether consumption commenced on the spot was up to the temperament of the customer.

There are published versions of the story associated with cemeteries in Bodie, California; Templeton, Iowa; and Morgantown, West Virginia. It’s easy to see how the cemetery might be a good hiding place, though the similarity and lack of detail in all of these stories suggest the trappings of an urban myth. In Green-Wood Cemetery, where there were already more than one hundred thousand interments during the Prohibition years, it is believed by some that the receiving tomb, a grand catacomb not far from the chapel, was used to store illicit liquor (though no one at the cemetery will give the rumor much credence).

But there is at least some hard evidence that cemeteries were trading grounds, if only thanks to their privacy. Paul Ward ran a speakeasy in Washington, D.C. In the documentary Prohibition, his son says of a customer, “He brought the hearse up into the back alley, and they put everything in the hearse. And where did they go? The safest place that could be, the Arlington Cemetery. And he had a guard stand by and he paid him money to watch it. Who’s gonna stop him? There’s a hearse going into Arlington Cemetery. They gonna stop a soldier from being buried? No way.”

The idea of the cemetery as a liquor-trading ground represents a serious decline from the heyday, in the middle part of the 1800s, when American cemeteries were surprisingly fashionable places to see and be seen. Today, we think of cemeteries as lonely places, but perhaps it is useful to think of them as they were in the 1850s, filled with crowds of people promenading and collectively pondering the mysteries of life—a sort of public indulgence in melancholy.

Early settlers were often buried in plain graves near churches. By the early part of the nineteenth century, graveyards became so filled with bodies that soon the number of dead began to outpace the available space to put them. Basil Hall, a sort of travelogue journalist of his day, described conventional burial at the “soppy church-yard, where the mourners sink ankle deep in a rank and offensive mould, mixed with broken bones and fragments of coffins.”

The solution arrived in a movement to create rural cemeteries following a pattern set by the ancient Greeks. Mount Auburn, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was conceived in 1831 as a place of solemnity and quietude outside the city in a specially designed landscape, created for city dwellers to commune not just with lives past but with nature and the eternal future. Cemeteries were designed by horticulturalists, not as gardens but as landscapes, with varied topography, ponds, and gently curved paths.

Mount Auburn was quickly followed by rural cemeteries in Philadelphia (Laurel Hill), Green-Wood (Brooklyn), Green Mount (Baltimore), Spring Grove (Cincinnati), and Cave Hill (Louisville). Often built on high ground with views of the city, these places served as public parks well into the last century. By the middle of the 1800s, Green-Wood Cemetery was one of the country’s most visited tourist destination in the United States, with a half million visitors each year, second only to Niagara Falls. Families would come to picnic on the lawns, and visit the statues and architectural follies as public sculpture. Henry Arthur Bright, a visiting Englishman, wrote in 1852, “Cemeteries here are all the rage, people lounge in them, and use them (as their tastes are inclined) for walking, making love, weeping, sentimentalizing, and every thing in short.”

In other words, living life. Cemeteries became places where people, by communing with the dead, were able to live their own lives more fully, wandering in the de facto first public parks of the newly built cities. It’s not hard to imagine that drinking might have been one of the activities that Bright was alluding to. Cemeteries served as an alternative to taverns or public houses, a place of leisure where anyone could commune with spirits and distance themselves from the city and its demands.

Paddy “Battle-Axe” Gleason, an Irish immigrant and former distiller in Flushing, New York, decided to get out of the distilling business in the late 1860s when the revenue service, in his own words, “tried to compel me to pay $100,000 per month revenue tax.” What business did he turn to? “I became interested in the railroad business by seeing on Sundays great crowds of people going to the cemeteries,” he said. Gleason made a fortune in streetcars, and became the Boss Tweed–styled mayor of Long Island City.

Of course, the cities often grew to engulf these once-rural places. Walk outside the gates of any rural cemetery today and one is squarely in the city, not the country. But even now, Green-Wood Cemetery remains a pastoral refuge, despite being located a few miles from the Brooklyn Bridge. Spring Grove in Cincinnati might as well be the English countryside, with its rolling hills and wooded valleys that could lose a visitor. At Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, the road must be marked with coded lines on the pavement that conveniently allows the visitor to find the way to Colonel Sanders or the exit, but the middle is a warren of knobs, dales, and waterways that make it easy to get lost in the woods with the dead.

Today, stewards of the rural cemeteries, faced with declining revenues as available spaces for burial are filled, are repurposing their grounds, catacombs, and chapels as spaces for parties and cocktail gatherings. Cave Hill Cemetery, with the highest concentration of dead distillers, hosts a bourbon-fueled, cocktails-by-the-lake fundraiser. Green-Wood in Brooklyn has opened its doors for late-night tours, cocktails, and live music in its catacombs. Both cemeteries offer whiskey-history tours.

It is my hope that the reader will visit the cemeteries in this book—the graveyards haunted by the ghosts of distillers long dead—perhaps thereby rediscovering the Victorian concept of reverie, or a kind of productive daydreaming in the presence of great things. There are maps of a few cemeteries included here for that very purpose. Whiskey or gin may have bought the stone that marks the grave, but one is often prompted to a sense of awe, of reverie, even, not by the stones above the ground, but by imagining the great multitude of loves and lives beneath.

—C. S.

THE ROOTS OF AMERICAN WHISKEY

American whiskey distilleries and brands have had convoluted histories, as distilleries folded and were restarted, and brands changed hands frequently. This chart catalogues many of those shifts over the last 250 years. The width of each root roughly correlates to the productivity of each distillery under each owner, and brand names are scaled to their estimated size in the market based on news reports, historical accounts, and published company narratives.

CAPTAIN GEORGE THORPE

LAWYER, MINISTER, COLONIST

CA. 1576–1622

Berkeley Plantation, Charles City, Virginia

George Thorpe sailed across the Atlantic Ocean on a supply ship to the Jamestown Colony in 1620. In England, he had been—by alternate accounts—a lawyer, physician, minister, and a gentleman, though his journey to America was an opportunity to make even more of himself in the colonies; to be a founder, and, as deputy governor, a leader. Somewhere in the belly of that ship was a small copper alembic still, suitable for making limited amounts of brandy or whiskey. While early settlers were often adventurers, they were also businessmen, and distilled spirits were gaining in popularity. They traveled well (brandy, it has been argued, was invented as a way to transport wine more efficiently), and concentrated the value of fermented products to many times their weight and volume.

Thorpe established residency at the Berkeley Hundred plantation, up the James River from Jamestown. He was charitable and industrious, hoping to learn from the native population as much as he expected to educate them in Christian teachings. He planted vineyards, though he did not live long enough to see them bear usable fruit. In the meantime, Thorpe tinkered with alternative fermentables. At one point, Thorpe wrote a cousin, “Wee have found a waie to make soe good drink of Indian corne I have divers times refused to drinke good stronge English beare and chose to drinke that.”

Some early accounts of whiskey in the United States describe the spirit as “corn brandy.” In context, Thorpe seems to be writing about corn beer—still popular as chicha in South and Central American countries—and not its distilled brother, which today is corn whiskey or aged bourbon. Still, the idea of distilling fruit, grain, and molasses were very much on the minds of colonists. Whether Thorpe ran his beverage through his still is not known, but it’s plausible, if maybe unlikely, that Thorpe was America’s first distiller. (The first record of a commercial still in the New World was twenty years later and 350 miles north, in New York City.)

Thorpe spoke well of the native population. In one incident, the Indians complained about English dogs, and Thorpe ordered them killed in front of their owners as a gesture of respect. He felt no need to flee when the Powhatan Confederacy began attacking settlements in a concerted effort in March of 1622. Thorpe was approached under a friendly pretext by unarmed assailants, and then killed with whatever farm implements were at hand, his body mutilated to send a bloody message to survivors. The Powhatan were known to scrape the brains from settlers’ skulls with mussel shells, stuff their mouths with bread (as other settlers were starving), or flay the skin from their bodies before burning them alive. Corpses were tied to a tree or dragged around the property. A mostly peaceful people, the Powhatan employed infrequent violence to maximum effect.

When Thorpe’s possessions were inventoried, the copper still was estimated to be worth three pounds of tobacco.