The industrial city that did not distill

1862 — 1918

A searched negative: From the Civil War onward, legal distilling in the United States ran on federal permits, bonded premises and gaugers, and it concentrated in a handful of whiskey towns — in Indiana, places like Lawrenceburg, Terre Haute and Indianapolis. Fort Wayne, for all its breweries, its wholesale houses and its hundreds of saloons, was not one of them. The classified business pages of the city directories reached for this section — the volumes of 1903, 1905, 1912 and 1913 among them — sort the liquor trade under wines-and-liquors dealers, bottlers and brewers; no "Distillers" heading appears, and no distillery. The federal revenue lists that would settle the question town by town were not reached, and this entry is written as what it is: the strongest statement the directories support. On that record, between Comparet & Kiser's canal-side still and the coming of Prohibition, no commercial distillery operated at Fort Wayne at all.

What the gap means: It explains a peculiarity of the city's dry years that the next entry takes up. Cities that had distilled legally entered Prohibition with bonded warehouses, gauged stock and a trade that knew production. Fort Wayne entered it with a wholesaler's knowledge instead — sourcing, blending, bottling, distributing — and its illegal production, when it came, would be built at household scale out of exactly that distribution craft, while its drinkers were supplied in good part from stills and breweries beyond the county line. The making had left the city's economy two generations before the law made making a crime.

Sources:

1. R. L. Polk & Co., Fort Wayne city and Allen County directories, 1903, 1905, 1912 and 1913 — the classified business headings for the liquor trade (wines and liquors; bottlers; brewers), in which no distillers' heading and no distillery listing appears in the volumes reached.
2. Fort Wayne city directories of 1861–62, 1864–65, 1875–76, 1878 and the business directory of 1880, as cited in the preceding entry — the trade's composition across the same decades: one rectifier, wholesale dealers, bottlers.