by James Higdon
In 1785, five years before the Irish priest's arrival, Basil Hayden chose to establish his community on the banks of Pottinger Creek, a small waterway unnavigable by canoe. Few settlers in Kentucky at the time lived outside fortified encampments because attacks from natives came often and savagely. Hayden settled land about nine miles upstream from Pottinger Station, a fort built in 1781 between New Haven and the Trappist monks by Samuel Pottinger, a Revolutionary War veteran.
Hayden's band of fifty families immigrated together to the fertile center of Kentucky in a collective bargaining effort-the power of their numbers, they hoped, would force the church to send a priest to tend to them, but Archbishop Carroll of Baltimore, the only prelate in the New World, denied them. Then the Reverend DeRohan, the hopeless drunk, stumbled upon Holy Cross from the south.
When the archbishop learned that DeRohan was in Kentucky, he demanded that the Irish priest return to Baltimore, but DeRohan, insubordinate when he drank, refused. Instead, the Irish priest helped Hayden and his settlers build the first Catholic church west of the Appalachian Mountains out of rough-hewn logs.
Once Basil Hayden established a foothold at Holy Cross, more Catholics came, all seemingly possessing the same genetic predisposition toward bold action and risk-taking, a spirit of adventurism matched only by the community's devotion to the church. Fertilized in the fecund Kentucky bottomland, that devotion blossomed into abundant families of strong faith, who sent more than their share of sons and daughters into the clergy and cloistered religious life.
With the sudden abundance of frontier Catholics making a go of it deep in the uncharted darkness of Kentucky, Archbishop Carroll realized that his drunk priest in Kentucky needed help. At the same time, French and Belgian clergymen were fleeing to the New World by the boatload to escape the guillotine. Among them was a stern seminarian named Stephen Theodore Badin. Upon Badin's arrival in Baltimore, Archbishop Carroll promptly ordained him and sent the young priest to Kentucky.
It wouldn't go well.
For years Father Badin tried to impose his brand of Old World order upon the New World Catholics, with mixed results. Although Badin succeeded in founding the Sisters of Loretto, an order that continues today, he could never bend the people nor local church leadership to his will. In a letter to Archbishop Carroll, Badin speaks poorly of his whole flock, referring to one local patriarch, John Lancaster-a survivor of a storied Shawnee attack who was later sent to Frankfort by his peers as their representative and then their senator-as "the Kentucky Robespierre."
Badin's unpopularity extended to fellow clergymen as well, including Bishop Flaget, a Frenchman; the two agreed on very little. When Flaget decided to move the cathedral from rural Bardstown to the growing metropolis in Louisville, Badin would take no more. As soon as the bishop consecrated the ground for the new cathedral in Louisville, Badin circled the property chanting the Dies Irae, the Latin song of death, then left Kentucky for Europe. Among clergy even today, Badin is talked about as a stern authoritarian whose worldview, which teetered perilously close to Jansenism, made the Flemish cleric a borderline heretic.
Badin would later return to America but not to Kentucky. Instead, he traveled to northern Indiana, where he bought the land upon which the University of Notre Dame was founded. A dormitory there bears his name.
By the time Badin died, a small town bloomed about ten miles south of his convent in Loretto, built along a buffalo trace and a small river named the Jordan (pronounced locally as "JER-den"). They named the town Lebanon for the abundance of cedar trees. It was settled first by Presbyterians from Virginia, then the Catholics and some Methodists and Baptists sprinkled in to make things interesting. By 1840, Lebanon had three churches (Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian), one coed school, six doctors, eight lawyers, three hotels, fourteen stores, a sawmill, fifteen mechanic shops and about 750 inhabitants in town and 11,032 in the county, including Benedict Spalding.
Benedict Spalding came to Kentucky as a boy in the last wave of Catholic emigration from Maryland. He became sheriff of Marion County at twenty-five, married at twenty-nine, and sold dry goods that he hauled from Louisville, selling $15,000 worth in his first year in the first store ever opened in Lebanon. From then on, Ben Spalding dedicated his life to building his town into something important and after years of public service earned the nickname Uncle Ben. Midway through his life, he accomplished his greatest goal: bringing the L&N Railroadnamed for its Louisville-to-Nashville line-to Lebanon. On the maiden voyage of the Lebanon spur of the L&N Railroad, the train hit a cow. But even nine hours behind schedule, a mob of people waited in trees and on rooftops to greet the train as it chugged into Lebanon, shouting, "Hurrah for the L&N and Uncle Ben!"
With the railroad, business in Lebanon boomed: Livestock could go as far as Chicago, and farmers from all over central Kentucky had to bring their goods to Lebanon to get them to market. The distilleries that had dotted the countryside grew bigger and closer to the railroad through the little communities of St. Mary's, Loretto, Dant Station and Chicago.
When the Civil War came to Kentucky, both sides battled over Lebanon's train depot, causing the Union to camp more than eight thousand men just outside of town. Although the war tore families apart-brothers against brothers and such-nothing stopped the distilling, and none of the Union officers ever went thirsty, nor did the dashing Kentuckian Confederate raider, John Hunt Morgan, who caused mayhem all along the western front of the war, including sacking the Lebanon depot and burning Lebanon-twice.
Morgan's raids caused panic in the Union leadership in Kentucky, particularly with General Boyle, who called for martial law in Lexington and implored Cincinnati to send artillery by special train. News of the commotion reached Washington.
"They are having a stampede in Kentucky," President Lincoln wrote to General Henry Halleck, then stationed in Mississippi. "Please look to it."
The day after Morgan left Lebanon, the Union retook the town. Among the Yankee occupiers was an Englishman lawyer named William H. Bradbury, who worked as a secretary for the Union generals of the 129th Illinois Infantry. Nursing an injured leg, Bradbury wrote to his wife from a private upstairs room in a Lebanon hotel in the summer of 1863:
Lebanon, Kentucky
August 16, 1863
My dearest wife,
lam writing this before breakfast at the hotel called the Campbell House in a bedroom in which are two beds. Last night was the first really cool night we have had & good sleeping was the consequence. My leg is still troublesome [...J
There is no restraint on the liquor saloons here. The quantity of whisky consumed (by officers chiefly) is enormous. The soldiers are encamped out of town about 5 miles distant where there is water. The number of shoulder straps staying at this & the other Hotel is very large. Colonels, Lieutenant Colonels, Majors, Capts, & Lieutenants swarm around, and the bar often is thronged from morning to night. Their officers ought to be with their commands & not loafing about town. [...J
I shall ride in a wagon or ambulance & my baggage will be carried-I must now conclude as there are papers to be made out.[..]
With best love to you & the children. I am your affect. husband.
WmHBradbury
Union-held Lebanon also provided refuge for the former slaves of central Kentucky. Slaves who escaped from their masters knew they would be safe there and could take the train north to freedom-the aboveground railroad, as it were.' President Lincoln ordered the railroad extended from Lebanon to Knoxville, and Congress appropriated funds to employ freed slaves working a thousand men per mile of track. Lebanon became the work camp, and the black population exploded in a shantytown built along the tracks on the backside of the depot, a neighborhood later to be known as Black Bottom, the neighborhood that would produce Club Cherry and other track-side entertainment that drew major Chitlin' Circuit musicians a hundred years later.
With the Civil War over, the train through Lebanon carried fewer soldiers and army supplies and began hauling wh
at Uncle Ben had envisioned for it-Lebanon's imports and exports. In 1866, Lebanon shipped 16,105 bushels of grain, 2,081 hogsheads of tobacco, 202 barrels of flour, 1,067 carloads of stock, 158,087 pounds of government freight and 1,535,277 pounds of general freight to Louisville. Coming back from Louisville, Lebanon received 119 carloads of company freight, 457,853 pounds of government freight and 5,636,173 pounds of general merchandise. That year 17,435 people departed Lebanon as passengers on the train, and the exact same number returned.
While the federal government continued to keep soldiers stationed in Lebanon throughout Reconstruction, the town otherwise returned to its antebellum self St. Augustine School, founded by the Sisters of Loretto during the war, now began to grow while churches became houses of worship again instead of hospitals. The country merchants who had fled to town for protection from raiders during the war were able to return to the hills. Former slaves departed either on the train or with the army. In 1867, Lebanon had 2,905 residents: 1,967 white folks and 938 black folks. By 1870, the US Census counted 1,102 white and 823 black, or 1,925 totala loss of nearly one thousand people in three years, a postwar population realignment as the countryside became safe again.
Though the whisky stills never stopped for the war, the end of fighting allowed the distilling industry to really cook. By the end of the nineteenth century, Marion County produced bourbon with labels like "Cumberland," "Rolling Fork," "Grand Springs," "Maple Grove," "Old Happy Hollow," "Falcon," "Fern Hill," "Burks Spring," "Colonel Blair," "Nick Blair," "Blair's Old Club," "Mattingly and Moore," "Callaghan," "R. Cummins," "Cummins Sour Mash," "Ballard and Lancaster," "Smith and Smith,""Wm. Birkle,""J. G. Mattingly and Sons," "J.C.W.," "Marion County," "Marion," "Belle of Marion," "Belle of Loretto," and "Faymus," a bourbon whose brand seemed to encourage both egotism and bad spelling; it would be popular today.
Of course, given this output of world-renowned whisky, the retail consumption of the local product must have been, as William Bradbury noted in his letter, "enormous" and with "no restraint." So enormous that a substantial antidrinking movement began to brew-and not just in morally upright places but in Kentucky, too.
On June 8, 1872, on the grounds of St. Mary's College, the St. Charles Total Abstinence Society held a public rally. At two o'clock that afternoon, the college brass band, in uniform, struck up a bouncy yet sober tune and marched through the college gates to the campus, followed by hundreds of citizens of both sexes, to an opening on the campus where a stage had been erected for the speakers and benches placed on the lawn for the audience.
To combat this rising dry tide, distillery leaders banded together into a national association to protect their interests in Washington, forming the Wholesale Liquor Dealers' and Distillers' Association of the United States in 1893 and electing John B. Wathen, of Lebanon, as its first president.
"It looks as if the distillers and reform extremists will have to get together on a compromise middle ground," Wathen told the Washington Post from the lobby of the Raleigh Hotel in D.C. on April 1, 1901. "And it is probable that ultimately the anti-saloon people will assent to a more strict regulation of the saloons.... It is impossible to enforce prohibition in cities, and attempts to do so only result in multiplying boot-leggers. In Kentucky the distillers now sell in some of the best cities in prohibition districts great quantities of whisky."
Despite the organized opposition from the distillers, the temperance movement called a local option election in Lebanon in March 1907. Certainly Wathen and his fellow distillers felt confident that the wet votes would beat out the dries, especially in Lebanon-but they weren't taking any chances, either, which got them into trouble. News of the election made it to the New York Times:
LEBANON, KY., GOES DRY Several Prominent Men Arrested on Bribery Charges
LEBANON, Ky., March 25-A local option election was held here to-day, and the city went "dry" by 63 votes. A procession of 2,000 women and children paraded the principal streets, shouting and cheering for the abolishment ofsaloons.
Warrants were sworn out for S. N. Wathen, president of the Kentucky Distillers Association, and Col. Wallace Cardwell of the governor's staff, and about twelve other citizens, charging them with bribery.
fill gave bonds except for Wathen and Cardwell, who insisted on going to jail, but were allowed to go free. Ex-Chief of Police Yowell was arrested for carrying concealed weapons. Lebanon is in one of the largest distilling counties in the State.
Of course, the Wathens didn't give up the fight.Three years later the local option appeared on the ballot in Lebanon again. On August 11, 1910, Lebanon burst at the seams, with ten thousand people downtown, according to the Lebanon Enterprise, but they hadn't all come just to vote on whether liquor should be sold there; the circus was in town at the same time.' atmosphere in the crowds appeared as pleasant as the weather, nothing like the nastiness that had characterized the election three years before. Both sides were well organized, but this time the wets managed to get more honest votes than they had before, and the drys lost sixty-four votes.' That night the wets celebrated by getting drunk at the circus.
But the drys were far from finished fighting. As the wets enjoyed their victory, the drys were distilling a campaign of enforced temperance nationally. To accomplish their goal, they would require a US constitutional amendment. The temperance movement saw its crusade as a logical extension to the end of the forced imprisonment of slavery; only this time, the movement wanted to rid the world of its voluntary imprisonment to alcoholic beverages. The drys believed that once America sobered up, it would realize what shackles liquor had been.
By the summer of 1917, forty-five years after the Total Abstinence Society rally at St. Mary's College, the temperance movement in Lebanon received a huge shot in the arm: its third visit from William Jennings Bryan, who spoke to a gathered crowd of one thousand or more about the need to support the outlawing of liquor for the cause of the Great War brewing in Europe.
"The war is proving a substantial factor in hastening the day of Nationwide and world-wide-prohibition," Bryan said, predicting a global end of liquor in less than twenty years. "No doubt, you can pass prohibition by 100,000 majority in Kentucky if ever the people get a chance to vote on the question."
In July 1917, the Department of Justice began enforcing the "Reed bone-dry law," which banned the import of liquor into dry states, "even though those States may not prohibit such importation, and even though the States by law specifically permit such importation."
At 11:00 p.m. on September 8, 1917, a Saturday, the manufacture of all whisky in the United States ceased when the prohibition clause of the Food Control Act took effect. Millions of bushels of grain that would have been ground up for whisky would now be released for food to feed the growing Allied armies in Europe.
The closing of the distilleries, at least at first, did not spell doom for men like Charles Kobert, Hans Mueller, Charles Burks, John B. Wathen and other Marion County men likewise engaged (although Kobert and Mueller would later sell their interest to John B. Wathen's son, John A.). Economic forecasts claimed that the losses from the distilling halt during the war would be more than offset by the greater prices the distillers would obtain for their products already manufactured. In the hills of Marion and Nelson Counties, the five-story warehouses containing thousands of handmade fifty-gallon barrels were filled with whisky that matured in price as well as age. Some officials speculated that whisky would sell for $15 a gallon within a year, affording distillers enormous profits that would more than compensate for the loss of capital invested in plants.
But the predictions of great wealth didn't pan out. By January 1919, the three major distilleries in Marion County, then the largest distilling county in the commonwealth, had been sold-and at pennies on the dollar of what they were once worth. According to the Lebanon Enterprise:
The Mueller, Wathen & Kobert distillery, perhaps one of the best known in Kentucky, was sold at public auction to the highest bidder last Saturday. The plan
t, which was built at an original cost of thing like $52, 000 and which at one time was valued by its owners at $150, 000, was purchased by R. N. Wathen, one of the members of the firm, for $18,650.
The Wathens had built the Rolling Fork and Cumberland distillery in 1875 just outside of Lebanon's corporate limits. Recognized as one of the best-equipped distilleries in the state, the Rolling Fork sweet mash house had a capacity of four hundred bushels a day, and the Cumberland sour mash house had a one-hundred-bushel capacity. The grounds had four warehouses with room for forty thousand barrels, its own cooperage plant and stock pens to slop seven hundred cattle.
Three days after R. N. Wathen bought his own family's distillery for nothing, the superintendent of the R. Cummins & Co. distillery in Loretto bought his workplace for $6,205-less than one-third of what Wathen had paid for his. The buildings of the Cummins distillery cost $55,000 alone. One warehouse, erected just a few years before the forced closure, cost $7,000 itself. The deed to Burks Spring, the distillery that would one day produce Maker's Mark, had already exchanged hands.
That February the Lebanon City Council met on its regular Tuesday night, but "very little business of interest was transacted"-except for saloons and quart houses renewing their liquor licenses but renewing them for six months instead of a year because liquor sales would expire nationwide on July 1.
On the last day of June 1919, the legal sale of alcoholic liquors ceased in the United States, not yet because of the constitutional amendment but rather because further wartime prohibition measures went into effect on Monday night at midnight.
"In many cities," the Enterprise reported, "it was a night of revelry, but in Lebanon no celebration marked the passing of the `product that made Kentucky famous.'There were, however, many `last go rounds,' and dealers were taxed to take care of the trade."