And a Bottle of Rum, Revised and Updated

by Wayne Curtis

  At the former home of Captain Isaac Hall, where all traces of his residency had long since been hidden under the beige carpets and acoustic tile ceilings of funeral homes everywhere, I heard footsteps treading lightly upstairs. Convery pointed toward the ceiling with his half-eaten Danish. I walked to the top of the stairway. An elderly man stood by the window, wearing a white dressing gown and a white nightcap. From my perch on the landing, I could see his brown trousers and business shoes sticking out from underneath. He was peering out the window, awaiting his cue. This was Captain Isaac Hall. Like us, he was waiting for Paul Revere.

  Revere’s original visit, late on the night of April 18, 1775, was wholly by accident. Revere never intended to pass through Medford. On that much everyone agrees. He was one of two messengers on that fateful night dispatched from Boston to Lexington to warn of British regulars amassing outside the city, with the intention of confiscating colonial militia arms and seizing rebel troublemakers Sam Adams and John Hancock. The British soldiers were hoping for a surprise attack, so they planned to cross the Charles River by boat, then approach the town along a more lightly traveled route. This was the famous “two if by sea” route, with a signal sent by posting two lanterns high in Boston’s North Church. Another messenger, William Dawes, was sent overland via the more heavily traveled main road. As a backup in the event Dawes was captured, Revere was dispatched across the Charles River, his oarlocks muffled with a petticoat so as not to attract the attention of sentries. Once across the river, Revere set off on a borrowed horse, galloping along a direct route from Charlestown toward Lexington.

  Revere later recalled it was a “very pleasant” night, with a bright moon lighting the way. Not far outside of Charlestown, however, he stumbled upon a pair of redcoats on horseback. He quickly reversed course, the patrollers in pursuit. He outrode one; the other mired down in a muddy swale as he sought to cut off Revere’s retreat. Revere then struck out on an alternate route, beating a northward arc through the village of Medford. When he arrived, accounts concur, he rapped on the door of Captain Hall, the head of the Medford minutemen. As soon as he left, Hall sent instructions to set off the calls to muster. Supporters fired guns, beat drums, and rang bells.

  Did Revere really down a dram of rum while at Isaac Hall’s to stiffen his resolve for the long ride? “Yes, he had a bit of the grog,” Convery told me with conviction. The evidence? Convery thought for a moment, then noted that he himself had played Captain Isaac Hall some years back, and had personally served Revere a shot of rum. “It was like paint thinner,” he said. “It made you ride to the nearest toilet.” A shot of rum had always been a local tradition for the reenactment—sometimes more than a shot. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I remember Paul getting a leg up, then going right over the top of the horse. But it’s usually softer stuff today.”

  How about historical evidence? Convery eyed me askance, as if I were more than a little simpleminded. “It was the only drink they had!” he said, throwing up his hands. “If you’re going to stop by the house of the distiller, you’re going to get rum. They’re not going to give you a Pepsi-Cola.”

  The sound of sirens filled the front hall of the funeral home. Police on motorcycles arrived first, followed by a green pickup truck pulling a horse trailer. Then Paul Revere came into view, his tricornered hat bobbing up and down above the crowd. Revere, played by a reenactor named Matthew Johnson, had left Boston earlier that morning, and he had a loud, clarion call that carried over the sirens and the rising applause and hoots of the crowd. “The regulars are out! Captain, the regulars are out!” he hollered up to the second-floor window as he reined to a halt in front of Isaac Hall’s house. Captain Hall hit his cue precisely, and stuck his head out the window. “Come on in,” he hollered, then thudded down the steps.

  Revere walked in, huffing and a bit flushed. “A little warm out there,” he said. He was followed by several city councilmen, the mayor, and a U.S. congressman. The group stood awkwardly in a semicircle around the pile of doughnuts and pastries on a folding table, nobody saying or eating much. “Doughnut for the ride, Paul?” someone asked. Paul eyed the pile, then demurred.

  “Do you want something to drink?” Convery asked. Paul nodded, and said, “I might take a water.” He went to the cooler, uncapped a bottle of Poland Spring, and guzzled it down. “Do you want anything else?” Convery asked, expectantly.

  “No, thanks,” Revere said. Then he unfastened his cape and went off to find a toilet.

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  —

  Questions persist about Revere’s ride, but this is known for sure: Isaac Hall made rum—a lot of it. He was one of dozens of distillers who thrived in the northern colonies and produced millions of gallons in the seven decades prior to the American Revolution.

  Rum didn’t just fill the holds of merchant ships returning from the West Indies. It was also one of the first mass-market products manufactured in America. By the time of the Revolution, more than half the rum consumed in the northern colonies was produced by local distillers. Indeed, rum distilling was the second most important manufacturing industry at the time, trailing only shipbuilding.

  Like every grammar school student, I learned that the American Revolution was the story of thirteen aggrieved colonies rising up as one against an oppressive throne. But the rebellion was more interesting and complex than that. England actually had twenty-six colonies in the New World. Only half rose up in rebellion. To understand why, one needs to start with molasses.

  The first distillery producing of any kind of liquor in the northern colonies dates to about 1640—roughly the same time rum was first produced in the West Indies. It was on Staten Island and was operated by William Kieft, a director of the Dutch colony of New Netherland. Kieft restricted the sale of wines and liquor to those sold at his tavern, the first such establishment in Manhattan. It’s likely Kieft distilled brandy, and probably a coarse whiskey made of the dregs from beer making—a not uncommon way to wring extra profits from a brewery. But grain was scarce, and colonists lived in the shadow of hunger. In 1676, twelve years after the British assumed control of the colony, the governor sharply limited grain available for brewing and distilling.

  What to use to make spirits? Molasses—a trash product—remained astoundingly cheap in the West Indies. This was especially true in newly settled British island colonies like Jamaica, where a rum industry hadn’t been established. But island planters—who had dedicated virtually every acre of arable land to sugar cultivation—needed to import all manner of food and provisions to feed themselves and their slaves. So timber, rope, livestock, dried cod, and fresh produce sailed south. Molasses, in turn, sailed north.

  Reports of rum distilling surface in Providence, Rhode Island, as early as 1684. But not until the first years of the eighteenth century did colonial rum hit its stride. Growth in rum distilling was aided by the immigration of experienced distillers to the colonies, both from England, where competition and high taxation made liquor profits hard to come by, and from Barbados and other British West Indian islands, where freed indentured servants found themselves displaced from the scarce land and the demand for their labor greatly lessened by the new reliance on African slaves. Of those servants who sailed north, many were well versed in the craft of rum making.

  Distilleries were built wherever molasses could be unloaded and stored, often by merchants who comprehended that a still or two, while an expensive investment, had a very agreeable effect on the value of imported molasses. It was modern-day alchemy—through distillation, the dull, treacly dross of molasses was converted into the gold of rum.

  A colonist referring to rum prior to 1700 was likely talking about imported rum; by the first decade of the eighteenth century, he would just as likely be referring to the domestically distilled stuff. With its great trading fleet, Boston quickly moved to the forefront of the continental rum industry. Records show that in just six months of 1
688, Massachusetts imported 156,000 gallons of molasses from the British West Indies, of which about half was converted into rum and the other half used for flavoring such staples as baked beans and brown bread. By 1717, a customs officer in Boston reported that the colony was producing 200,000 gallons of rum annually, which is almost certainly an underestimate. Boston had at least twenty-five distilleries operating within the city by 1750; at least another ten distilleries were producing rum in other settlements of the Massachusetts Bay colony.

  Massachusetts didn’t have a monopoly on the rum industry. Rhode Island was home to 20 rum distilleries, New York to 17, and Philadelphia to 14. (A merchant with the splendid name of Peacock Bigger built successful distilleries in both Philadelphia and Charlestown, Maryland.) The smell of fermenting molasses could also be detected in New Hampshire (3 distilleries), Connecticut (5), and Maryland (4). The southern colonies, with their tobacco plantation economy, didn’t have as active a merchant class. But even there 4 rum distilleries were built (in the Carolinas and Virginia). In 1763, by some estimates, New England alone had a total of 159 distilleries producing rum. (A more conservative tally finds maybe half that number in New England, but around 140 distilleries on the continent as a whole.) In any event, by 1770, the North American colonists were importing some 6.5 million gallons of molasses from the islands, which were distilled into about 5 million gallons of rum.

  The New England merchants who took up distilling were not rum connoisseurs. They bought molasses cheap and sold the rum equally cheaply. “New England rum” was widely regarded as a low-priced, low-quality version of the better-regarded West Indian product. (Domestic rum typically cost one-half to two-thirds the price of rum imported from the West Indies.) One Baltimore merchant, William Lux, noted that “people seem to be more inclin’d to encourage the [local] country rum as it is so much cheaper,” so he sensibly changed his trade from rum importer to rum distiller.

  The quality of the rum was determined by the whims of the market. Rising demand for molasses to make rum led to periodic shortages. Distillers could make do by using less in the fermentation process, but this resulted in a harsher rum. (Connecticut banned such hurried distillation, noting that “by said practice molasses is made scarce and dear, and the spirits drawn off…are usually very unwholesome, and of little value.”) In flush times, the price of rum would drop and likewise create an incentive to reduce costs by cutting back on the molasses.

  Such economy was not uncommon. One visitor wrote that New England distillers were “more famous for the quantity and cheapness than for the excellency of their rum.” There were even efforts to doctor domestic rum to make it pass for imported. One eighteenth-century advertisement promised to teach “the invaluable secret of changing the quality of Philadelphia and New-England rum to that of West India…at the trifling expense of only your honour and veracity…” Philadelphia merchant Isaac Norris wrote to a companion in 1702 that the local rum “only wants to age to taste well,” but lamented that his customers could not be persuaded to pay more for it, as it lacked “the right rum stink.”

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  As Boston grew and became more costly, industries migrated to communities with large tracts of cheap land: shipbuilding to Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Newburyport, Massachusetts; and elsewhere; butchers and tanners to Lynn, Massachusetts. Newport absorbed much of Boston’s rum business, the profits from which it used in part to finance slave-trading voyages to Africa. A distillery was built on the island of Nantucket, whose experienced ship captains were well positioned to benefit from the Newfoundland trade. A former Bostonian moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and there erected a “large distillery works,” putting it in good position to divert much of the rum trade in the Maritimes.

  Boston also lost business closer to home. Watertown, Haverhill, Salem, and Charlestown soon were home to thriving distilleries. But only one town rose to uncommon prominence in the rum world: the riverside village of Medford, the fourth oldest in Massachusetts, founded in 1630.

  You could go hunting for traces of Medford’s once-bustling distillery industry today—as I recently did—but you would find little. A couple of copper kettles gather dust atop a tall shelf at the local historical society. And what’s quaintly called Distiller’s Row in downtown Medford—where a half-dozen distilleries once filled the air with the aroma of casked rum and fermenting molasses—you’ll now find a parking garage and a charmless strip of shops that includes the Wound Healing Center, a CVS drugstore, and a Korean restaurant. The city’s Web site notes, with commendable candor, that today “Medford is probably the most untalked about city in the United States.”

  Yet at its peak in the mid-eighteenth century, Medford was very much talked about. The rum industry first took root sometime between 1715 and 1720, when John Hall constructed a still near the village spring, which bubbled up with sweet, abundant water. Other distilleries followed, often on higher ground less subject to flooding from the river, but still near enough to the wharves for carting the imported molasses. Enough came out of Medford’s stills that fishermen complained that the waste dumped in the river wiped out the oyster beds. If true, it was an early instance of industrial pollution destroying a natural resource.

  Medford rum became known for its superior quality compared to most New England rums (an advantage that could have been had with the barest attention to quality control), becoming one of the first brand names to emerge from the northern colonies, along with the United Company of Spermaceti Chandler’s candles and some milled grains branded with the “best marks.” Published recipes in the nineteenth century often call specifically for “Medford Rum.”

  Medford rum’s superior quality was rumored to stem from the excellence of the water—but if that was the secret, it was not one the distillers would have been eager to promote. The spring that gave rise to Medford’s first rum distillery couldn’t accommodate the expanding industry, and water had to be piped in from Pasture Hill, north of the village, and might well have been infused with cow dung. As the West Indians proved, however, that extra ingredient might actually have aided fermentation and imbued a certain zest.

  Whatever its secret, word of Medford rum spread far, some of it less than truthful. Boosters said that it never left the bonded warehouse “until it had passed a severe test, and was shipped across the Atlantic and back again, in wood, to age it.” The most noted was Old Medford Rum, produced well into the nineteenth century by the Lawrence family. Local fans claimed, rather grandly, that it “carried the name and fame of the early town to the snowcapped region of the Rockies and to India’s coral strand,” and improbable accounts have been published of barrels turning up atop mountains in Switzerland.

  It was during the peak of Medford’s rum boom that Paul Revere rode through on that fateful night. It was an era of ubiquitous social drinking: a dollop of rum, downed with little ceremony or palaver, was an everyday way of enhancing the bonds of friendship and cementing common purpose in the Republic of Rum. Revere was a typical colonial, fond of playing cards and backgammon at public houses, and his regular lairs in Boston included two taverns, the Green Dragon and The Salutation. His famous midnight ride wasn’t novel; the flowery poems and high-blown legends exalting his ride were to come much later. The year earlier he had ridden to Philadelphia to inform Pennsylvanians about the Boston Port Bill, and twice in the two weeks prior to his famous ride he had galloped off with messages—to Concord with word that the redcoats were coming (they weren’t), and to Lexington to report that the British grenadiers and light infantry were shifting duties and were evidently up to something. (They were, as the march on Lexington two nights later would prove.) So this particular late-night ride might not have struck Revere as particularly momentous. He might have figured he had time to share a dram with Captain Hall.

  Only this much remains certain, as Thomas Convery assured me: Paul Revere did not have a Pepsi-Cola.

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* *

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  Distillers in the early eighteenth century could acquire molasses from any number of West Indian plantations—British, Spanish, and Dutch islands all had excess to export, as did Portuguese and Dutch colonies along the mainland of South America. (New England merchants had been fond of Dutch molasses from Surinam since at least the late 1600s.) But when New England traders set off in search of West Indian molasses, they increasingly headed for the French islands.

  The reason was simple: French molasses was astoundingly cheap. The French were slower than the British to develop great sugar estates, but they hastily made up for their late start, and production was bountiful on their vast acreages of virgin soils. By the 1720s, the French sugar industry was expanding at an impressive clip; at the time of the American Revolution, Haiti alone could produce more sugar than all of the British islands combined. At the same time, the French sugar islands—which also included Guadeloupe, Grenada, and Martinique—had a limited home market for their molasses, since French winemakers and brandy distillers had blocked exports of molasses and rum, fearful that cheap liquor would undermine their monopoly on drink. As a result, molasses was practically free for the taking if you but troubled to stop by one of the French islands

  The New England traders and the French sugar estates thus developed a nicely symbiotic relationship. The New Englanders had barrel staves, horses, and dried trash fish, the last of which was impossible to sell in Europe. The French had molasses. While figures on French imports are hard to come by, it’s known that Boston in 1688 imported 156,000 gallons of British island molasses. By 1716, with the North American rum industry growing rapidly, imports from the British islands had dropped by more than half, to 72,000 gallons. That gap was undoubtedly made up by the French. It was a similar story elsewhere; one New Yorker reported that the city’s distilleries appeared to be “wholly supplied with molasses from Martinique.”