Comparet & Kiser's canal distillery — and a quarrel between the histories

Canal era, after 1835

The fur traders turn distillers: Francis Comparet, a French-Canadian trader who reached Fort Wayne in 1820 and kept his trading house on the south side of Columbia Street between Clinton and Calhoun, was for years the local agent of the North American Fur Company. He took Henry Colerick as a partner in 1832–33, and afterward Peter Kiser, under the firm name Comparet & Kiser. The standard county history of 1880 states what the partners built beside their trade: "This firm were agents for the North American Fur Company; they also built the only distillery ever built here; it was located on the south bank of the canal, immediately east of Comparet's residence." The 1889 history corroborates the building in its own words: "The latter firm built a distillery on the south bank of the canal, east of Comparet's residence, and Mr. Comparet built a flouring mill which was very important at that day." Neither history gives a year; the partnership belongs to the years after 1833 and the site to the canal bank, which puts the distillery in the canal era, after 1835. John Dawson's street-by-street sketch of the town as it stood in March 1838 counts its trades — a dozen grog-shops, one brewer, and no distiller — a cross-check consistent with the canal distillery coming after his census of the town.

The conflict, printed whole: The 1880 history's claim that Comparet & Kiser built "the only distillery ever built here" cannot be squared with the reminiscence printed nine years later in the 1889 history, which puts Rockhill's still a decade earlier and calls it the first. Both statements stand in the county's standard authorities, and this entry prints both rather than choose. The charitable reading — that the 1880 writer meant the only purpose-built commercial distillery within the town, as against a settler's farm still — is a reading, not a fact, and is offered as nothing more. What the two accounts agree on is the shape of the early record: whiskey-making at Fort Wayne was a sideline of the fur trade and the first farms, never in these years a industry of its own, and after Comparet & Kiser no second canal-era distillery appears in any source reached.

Sources:

1. History of Allen County, Indiana (Kingman Brothers, 1880), Wayne Township chapter — Comparet's arrival in 1820, the Colerick partnership of 1832–33, the succeeding firm of Comparet & Kiser as agents for the North American Fur Company, and the sentence "they also built the only distillery ever built here," with its site on the south bank of the canal east of Comparet's residence, quoted verbatim.
2. Valley of the Upper Maumee (1889), Vol. I — the corroborating sentence on "the latter firm" building "a distillery on the south bank of the canal, east of Comparet's residence," with Comparet's flouring mill.
3. John W. Dawson, Charcoal Sketches of Old Times in Fort Wayne — the town's trades as of March 1838: "one brewer," a dozen grog-shops, and no distiller in the count.