by Mark Meyer
Of the twenty men marched to Philadelphia, twelve were tried for high treason. The first ten were acquitted because the evidence was nonexistent or there were insufficient corroborating witnesses. Pressure grew upon the United States attorney and judiciary to justify the invasion of the West. Supreme Court Justice William Patterson presided over the jury trials of Philip Wigle, who was in the dock for attacking Wells, and John Mitchell, who had stolen the mail that led to the muster at Braddock’s Field.
Patterson, an ardent Federalist who had participated in the Constitutional Convention, made sure these indictments would end in convictions. He instructed the jury that the “current runs one way” regarding the incriminating evidence against Wigle. To ensure that they did not linger too long over the concept of reasonable doubt, he proclaimed that “there is not, unhappily, the slightest possibility of doubt” of Wigle’s intent to overthrow the government. Wigle, a simple man of limited education, may have been surprised to know that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton feared he might overthrow the US government. Both he and Mitchell were convicted of treason and sentenced to hang by death.
Petitions and letters flowed to Washington to show mercy to Wigle and Mitchell, widely regarded as victims of government overreach. Gallatin, once a prime target of Hamilton, filed a petition signed by the jury members who had convicted Wigle. Washington, having made his point, eventually pardoned both men.
And the Beat Goes On
Fifteen hundred militiamen were left in western Pennsylvania to keep the peace. There were reports that the soldiers killed animals, raised havoc in the taverns, looted houses, and attacked civilians. Some civil suits were filed, but the westerners had learned their lesson and kept a low profile.
After serving his second term as president, George Washington retired to Mount Vernon. The lands he had previously accumulated in the West increased in value by 50 percent once the Whiskey Rebellion had been suppressed. He hired new land agents to handle his vast holdings—Senator James Ross and Presley Neville. Always cash strapped, he listened to the advice of one of his workers and turned his rye into white rye whiskey and became one of the country’s largest distillers. His Maryland rye used less rye grain in the recipe, so was a bit lighter than Old Monongahela, the standard-bearer of rye at the time. Presumably, he always paid his whiskey tax.
Alexander Hamilton resigned from the administration in the next year and returned to law practice. He died before his fiftieth birthday in a duel with Aaron Burr.
Hugh Henry Brackenridge represented westerners in civil suits against the occupying soldiers, and eventually accepted Neville’s offer to help prosecute western distillers for failing to pay the whiskey tax. He became a Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice and spent time trying to clear his reputation as a whiskey rebel who had talked his way out of prosecution. He was reputed to be a hard drinker in his later years.
Albert Gallatin became Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of the treasury. During his tenure, the whiskey tax was repealed. It was reinstated in 1861 and funded approximately 40 percent of the federal government until 1913, when the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment allowed for an income tax. Without that amendment, it is highly unlikely that Prohibition could have gained significant political traction, since it would have eliminated one of the primary sources of government revenue. Whiskey distillers still pay the tax today—$2.13 on each fifth of eighty-proof spirits produced.
David Bradford, the militant who had escaped into Spanish country down the Mississippi River, found refuge in the New Orleans area, where he became a plantation owner. He was pardoned by President Adams in 1799. He returned north once to sell his house, which still sits on Main Street in Washington, Pennsylvania.
General John Neville never rebuilt his mansion on Bower Hill. He moved to Montour Island on the Ohio River in Pittsburgh. The island was later renamed Neville Island and became home to industries including shipbuilding, steelmaking, and chemical production. The home General Neville gave to his son, Presley, remains as an historical landmark at the bottom of Bower Hill.
Philip Wigle lived in Westmoreland County for eight more years before moving to West Virginia, where he died a natural death. His estate papers do not list a whiskey still as part of his property. Today, Mr. Wigle’s direct descendants have made the journey to visit Wigle Whiskey, the distillery named for a common man who, like many others, got caught up in frontier excitement and almost paid for it with his life.
Hamilton and Jefferson’s clash over taxation and the proper role and scope of the federal government still drives our modern political debate. The current conflicts between America’s rural areas and urban centers mirror the same distrust that existed when our Founding Fathers walked the woods of western Pennsylvania. Folks on the frontier then viewed the financial power centers of Philadelphia and New York with disdain and distrust, a suspicion that eventually hardened into armed conflict when the larger urban distillers lined up in support of the whiskey tax.
The Whiskey Rebellion was also very much about class differences. The rebels saw people like the Nevilles controlling the economy, and they were tired of their voices not being heard in Philadelphia or Washington. They responded in the only way they knew how. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few elites was very much on their minds just as it is in the United States of the twenty-first century.
Seventy years after the rebellion, Abraham Lincoln could look back at Washington and Hamilton’s uncompromising resolve to keep the country united and find the determination to outlast General “Light-Horse Harry” Lee’s son, Robert E. Lee, in the Civil War. Lincoln dismissed those who complained that his general, Ulysses S. Grant, was too fond of whiskey, suggesting instead that if he knew which brand Grant favored, he would send the same to all of his other generals.
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 cle
ar 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 businesse
s. 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.
