The saloon era: the named houses, the tied trade, and the keepers' own brewery

1865 — 1918

The named saloons of the court record: The saloon era's surviving names come disproportionately from the court record, because that is where saloons entered print. From the Crime section's first-hand reading of the county histories, four houses stand named with their keepers and streets: the saloon kept by Stage at Main and Washington — "where the opera house now stands," in Chapman's 1880 phrasing — outside which Sanford Larue was shot dead in June 1870, the killer found drinking at Tibbetts' saloon nearby; Hughes' saloon, outside which the saloon keeper Thomas Krick shot Anthony Rodgers in the spring of 1866 — Krick's own wife kept a saloon of her own, a wife-and-husband pair of keepers in the record's plain words; the South Street saloon opposite the Lake Shore railroad depot, outside which John Sullivan was shot in November 1876; and Seltzer's saloon at 117 Michigan Street, where the farmhand Martin Dice had been "loafing and drinking" on the August 1880 day he was killed on the Michigan Street bridge. These are the era's documented rooms, printed at the size the record gives them: addresses and keepers where the record names them, and no invented color.

The keepers' brewery: The saloon trade's economic frame was the tied house — the brewery-owned or brewery-supplied saloon — and South Bend's keepers answered it with an institution of their own. In June 1903, in the History Museum's words, "a group of South Bend saloonkeepers of German, Polish and Hungarian descent organized the South Bend Brewing Association to manufacture and sell beer" — the keepers brewing collectively against the national brands, in the Businesses section's summary, "against the national brands' price war." Their castellated plant went up in the 1600 block of Lincolnway West (completed 1905; the complex stands on the National Register, listed 16 September 2001). The association's later course belongs to the brewing record: renamed the South Bend Beverage and Ice Association for Prohibition, it returned to beer after Repeal at some 50,000 barrels a year and closed in 1950. What belongs here is the fact of 1903 itself: this city's saloon keepers were numerous and organized enough to capitalize a brewery of their own, and the nationalities the museum names — German, Polish, Hungarian — are the west-side and downtown saloon map in miniature.

The count that does not survive: How many saloons the city held at the era's peak, no source reached by this section states. The Fort Wayne record can print its own figure from the directories; South Bend's directories survive at the St. Joseph County Public Library, and the county's license dockets with them, but neither has been digitized into the reachable record, and the temperance-era press that might quote a count sits in the same undigitized run. The settling records are named here so the gap is a work order, not a shrug: the city directories' classified saloon listings, year by year, and the county commissioners' license minutes. What can be said from the record reached is structural only — saloons stood on Michigan Street and the west side in numbers sufficient to sustain a keepers' brewery from 1903, local houses poured the national brands beside it, and the trade was large enough that its Prohibition collapse fills a chapter of the Crime record.

The dry side of the street: The saloon era had a standing opponent in the temperance movement, whose national Indiana frame was the county-option law of 1908, under which counties voted themselves wet or dry. Whether St. Joseph County ever held such a vote, and with what result, the record reached by this section does not contain — the county histories and the library's newspaper files are the settling sources, and the question is carried as an open one. The era ended by national law instead: Indiana's own dry statute and then the Eighteenth Amendment closed the legal saloon everywhere at once, and what replaced it is the next entry's subject.

Sources:

1. Crime section of this history — Chapman's "Dark Deeds" chapter (1880) read first-hand: Stage's and Tibbetts' saloons (1870), Hughes' saloon and Thomas Krick (1866), the South Street saloon opposite the Lake Shore depot (1876), and Seltzer's saloon, 117 Michigan Street (1880); cross-referenced here at the size the record gives them.
2. The History Museum, "South Bend Brewing Association" (historymuseumsb.org) — the June 1903 organization by saloon keepers of German, Polish and Hungarian descent, the plant completed 1905, the Prohibition rename to South Bend Beverage and Ice Association, George Voedisch's presidency from 1922, post-Repeal production of some 50,000 barrels a year, and the 1950 closing; Businesses and Architecture sections of this history — the price-war frame and the National Register listing of 16 September 2001 at 1636 West Lincolnway.