Prohibition's production side: crocks, barns and the Booze Room

1918 — 1933

The making goes indoors: Indiana's own prohibition law closed the legal trade on April 2, 1918, nearly two years before the nation followed; how that law was enforced here is the Crime section's story, told there and not repeated. What belongs here is what Fort Wayne made. The News-Sentinel's retrospective on the decade, built from the paper's files and the recollections of residents who lived it, describes a production economy at household scale: "Locally, stills boiled away in Fort Wayne basements as well as in Allen County farmhouses and barns. Beer fermented in crocks and vats." The makers had names in the period's vocabulary — "moonshiner" for the distiller, "bootlegger" for the hauler, "rum runner" for the driver — and the product was corn whiskey, home-brewed beer and the mixed drinks the speakeasies served as gin.

Production as memory: The retrospective's fullest production witness is Dale Schoch, who grew up west of the city where his family ran a service station on U.S. 30. He remembered his father and a neighbor bottling beer they had fermented at home — and the night the neighbor sliced his hand open at the work and the men told the emergency room they had been bottling ketchup, for fear of being reported. He remembered, too, tagging along when his father stopped at a roadhouse, drank two small glasses of what looked like water in the back room, and came home to a wife who did not drink and a son who had innocently reported the moonshine. The scale evidence is the police's: the city's officers confiscated so many stills, crocks and other liquor-making implements that the room where the evidence was stored became known, in the department's own usage, as "the Booze Room." No production figure for the county survives in the sources reached — no gallons, no stills counted — and none is printed here. The record supports the shape, not the size: for fifteen years, the only distilling and brewing done in Fort Wayne was done in houses and barns, by amateurs, against the law.

Sources:

1. Kevin Kilbane, "Dry and Dangerous," The News-Sentinel (the paper's "1920–1929: The Roaring 20s" retrospective) — stills in Fort Wayne basements and Allen County farmhouses and barns; beer fermenting in crocks and vats; the Dale Schoch recollections of home bottling and roadhouse moonshine; and the city police evidence room known as "the Booze Room" for its pile of confiscated stills and crocks.
2. Crime section of this history — Indiana's state prohibition law of February 1917, effective April 2, 1918, and the enforcement record, cross-referenced and not retold here.