A very temperate people, and six distilleries

There were at least six distilleries in LaGrange County, and the 1882 county history names them without embarrassment. It also says this.

The people of La Grange County, from its earliest settlement, have, in the main, been a very temperate people.

Both statements are in the same book. They are sixty-four pages apart, and neither one knows the other is there.

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The trade begins in the record in 1829, in a cabin at Lima where Ica Rice sold whisky to the Potawatomi, and where a pledged blanket and a watered barrel make up the first transaction in it anybody wrote down.

What followed was an industry, and the books file it as one.

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Albert Powell built a distillery on the bank of a lake in Lima Township around 1836. Both county histories call it Still Lake, and say the still is where the name came from. Neither county's summary sheet carries the name, but the 1874 atlas letters STILL LAKE on its Lima Township plat, in section 24. Four men mashed the grain by hand. No very large quantity was made, the 1882 history says, though what was made was of excellent quality, and it offers as proof the rapidity with which it disappeared.

The Martins ran one in Van Buren from 1836. John Fowler had one on Buck Creek in Bloomfield. Somebody, Weston or Wolcott or both, ran a small one at Wolcottville, and whatever it made went as fast as it was distilled. James Knight began a brewery at Mud Corners in Milford and never finished it. Settlers in the north of Greenfield got their whisky from a distillery just over the Michigan line.

Six is the floor rather than the count. Two coopers at Mongo, Staley and Payne, made whisky kegs and barrels and sold every one they could make, and when Mongo could not take them all they went to the other distilleries in the surrounding townships. The 1882 volume says there were several. It does not name them.

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At Mongo the mill and the still were one business.

A farmer brought his corn to Brownell's grist mill, had it ground, and carried it next door, where he could take whisky for it outright or have it brewed on shares.

The distillery and the mill together furnished a market for grain that the settlers appreciated.

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Then in about 1845 William Marten built the one that mattered.

Twelve workmen. Fifteen to twenty thousand bushels of grain a year, turned into what were called high wines. One set of forty-four-inch buhrs to grind it. Four or five coopers making barrels. Two teams hauling wood, several more hauling the liquor out to market. Between thirty and sixty cattle, and about two hundred hogs, fed largely on the refuse.

The county history's verdict on it is a single sentence.

This was, in many respects, the most extensive industry ever in Lima.

It ran about twelve years, passed through two more sets of hands, and was abandoned. A man put a turning lathe in the building and gave that up after a year.

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Two of the six closed for the same reason. The Martins ran theirs in Van Buren until after 1840, when, the 1882 volume says, the removal of the Indians terminated the greater demand for a distillery. The 1920 volume repeats it with an exclamation mark. Both are market reports, and the removal they are reporting on is a piece of its own.

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Now the other half of the book.

The temperate sentence is on page 79, in the chapter on roads, churches, schools and societies. It goes on to say that total prohibition of strong drink had strong advocates at all times, and then this.

So strong has this sentiment been that for many years, as long as the issue of license to retail was left to discretion of the County Commissioners, no licenses were issued at all.

No licences at all, for years, in a county whose largest industry was a distillery.

The distillery is on page 143, in the chapter on Lima Township. Temperance is in the chapter on societies. Distilling is in the chapters on industries. The shelf between them is never crossed.

The discretion did not quietly lapse.

In March of 1876 the commissioners granted licences to saloon keepers, which both county chronologies record and one of them copied from the other. Eight years later they refused. The 1893 atlas puts it in March of 1884: the commissioners refuse a liquor licence at LaGrange, and there is prohibition for less quantities than a quart, until September. In April the county held a temperance convention.

In May the liquor licence trials reversed the decision of the commissioners.

Nobody has read the order books that would say how often that happened. What the record shows is one refusal, one appeal, and the appeal winning.

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At Mongo they fought about it, and it is the only fight either history describes.

The whisky traffic in the village had become strong enough, the 1882 volume says, that so many young men were drawn through its influence into dissipation and even crime that the sober citizens at last determined it must stop.

Dr. Spaulding, William S. Prentiss, Minot Goodsell and T. C. Dille were four of the ten or twelve men who organised a lodge of Good Templars in 1857. It grew to more than a hundred members. Young and old men were reclaimed to lives of sobriety, and for ten months the sale in the village stopped entirely.

Then the war came, and the lodge surrendered its charter in about 1861.

Afterwards a keg came back into the village, and three of its most prominent citizens paid a young man three dollars to take an auger to the bottom of it. The whole of it ran out on the ground.

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By 1881 LaGrange had three saloons.

The county histories give them as a number in a list of the county seat's businesses, between three hotels and three livery stables, and the 1920 history reprints the same list thirty-eight years later without changing it. Neither book gives one of them a proprietor, a street or a name. The same 1882 volume prints tables for Noble County with ruled lines for breweries and for liquor saloons. For LaGrange it prints a tally of three.

The 1893 county atlas dates their arrival. Saloons opened in LaGrange and Lima in April of 1875, and in the same entry a lodge of Good Templars was organised at Wolcottville.

And in October of 1883 a surveyor for the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company walked Detroit Street and drew them.

Two stand side by side on the west side of the street, one storey and two, lettered Sal. at 116 and Sal at 115, with a druggist and grocer above them and a grocery below. The third is across the road at 142, one storey, under a barber and a harness shop, with the alley behind it. Three, on one street, two years after the county history counted three.

He was not writing history. He was pricing the risk of fire, and to do that he had to say what was in every building on the block and how many storeys it stood.

The saloon is a count in the books the county wrote about itself, and a located building in the document written by somebody who did not care.

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Prohibition arrived, and Ford's history of this county does not mention it.

His volumes were published in 1920 and are current to the autumn of 1919. There is no state law in them, no amendment, and no closing of the three saloons. His chronology of the county stops in 1891 and never resumes.

The only place in his two volumes where national prohibition is acknowledged at all is in a biography of a man from Steuben County, who is described as rejoicing in the present nation-wide victory of temperance.

A book printed in 1920 records the arrival of prohibition in a sketch of somebody from the next county over, and nowhere in its account of this one.