The first distillery: Squire Rockhill's still

1820s

Whiskey before the town: The earliest making of liquor at the head of the Maumee that any county history records belongs to the village years, before the canal and before the town plat had filled in. An old settler's reminiscence, printed in the 1889 Valley of the Upper Maumee, walks the reader past the homesteads of the first settlement and pauses at one building in particular: "Near John Orff's homestead was a one-story building, which was the first distillery; it was owned by Squire Rockhill and brother." It is the only production figure the reminiscence gives, and it gives a scene instead. "The first batch of liquor made by them attracted the Indians, forty or fifty in number, who began drinking with tin cups while it was still hot and finally got so hilarious that the proprietors had to send to town for Col. Tipton and James Peltier, who worked a night and day before they could leave the riotous crew."

Reading the scene: The names date it. John Tipton was the federal Indian agent at Fort Wayne through the 1820s, and James Peltier was a trader of the same years, which places the Rockhill brothers' still in the settlement's first decade, when corn was the one crop a farmer could always sell and whiskey was the form in which it traveled. Nothing in the record reached gives the still's size, its years, or its end. What it establishes is the baseline of this whole section: distilling at Fort Wayne begins as a farm-and-trade adjunct of the 1820s, small enough to be run by two brothers in a one-story building, and important enough to its first customers that its opening batch became a story the county was still telling sixty years later.

Sources:

1. Valley of the Upper Maumee River, with Historical Account of Allen County and the City of Fort Wayne (Brant & Fuller, 1889), Vol. I, settler-reminiscence chapter — the one-story building near John Orff's homestead as "the first distillery," owned by "Squire Rockhill and brother," and the first-batch scene with Colonel Tipton and James Peltier, quoted verbatim.