The distillers: a searched negative, 1852–2011

1852 — 2011

The test, stated plainly: This section looked for a South Bend distillery — a maker of spirits, or a rectifier compounding them — in every record it reached, and found none before the twenty-first century. The strongest single test is the 1883 Farr's city directory, read first-hand for this section in its full digitized text: the word "distill" and the word "rectif" appear nowhere in the volume; its classified business directory carries no distillers' heading; and its drink trade is brewers and dealers — the one brewery of the Muessel entry, and on the wholesale side men styled liquor agent, among them Frank Lederer, listed in 1883 as "liquor agent" on South Michigan Street. The county histories and the register nominations this section rests on name no distiller. The whiskey record this city does have is a merchant's and a runner's record: the wholesale liquor houses of Michigan Street, carried in the Businesses and Wealth sections; the bonded-whiskey cargo of the Szabo ring in the dry years, made elsewhere and moved through here, carried in the Crime section; and the one household still-room the Bars section prints, a Clay Township speakeasy making its wine in a basement. None of that is distilling as an industry, and this section prints the negative at the size the search reached: on the record consulted, no commercial distillery or rectifier operated in South Bend before 2011.

The named limits of the negative: A negative is only as strong as its search, and its limits are printed with it. The federal revenue record — the Internal Revenue registers of distilleries, rectifiers and wholesale liquor dealers that survive for Indiana in the National Archives — would settle the question year by year and plant by plant, and it has not been digitized into the record; the undigitized city directories after 1883 and the county license dockets stand in the same posture, as the Bars section names them for the saloons. If a small rectifier or a short-lived distillery worked in this city in the years those records cover, it is in them and not in the digitized record, and this entry's negative is written to be corrected by them. What can be said without them is the shape of the city's trade as every reached source draws it: South Bend drank whiskey from the beginning — its first settler generation traded at posts where whiskey was merchandise — bought it from wholesalers for a century, and ran it when running was the trade; it did not, on this record, make it. The next entry is the man who ended that.

Sources:

1. Farr's South Bend City Directory, 1883, full digitized text read and word-searched first-hand for this section (Internet Archive, southbendindiana10unse) — no occurrence of "distill" or "rectif" in the volume; no distillers' classified heading; the single brewery (Muessel); Frank Lederer, "liquor agent," 125 South Michigan Street.
2. Cross-references within this history: Businesses and Wealth sections — the wholesale liquor trade of Michigan Street; Crime section — the Szabo ring's whiskey-running and the dry-era enforcement record; Bars & Nightclubs section — the Clay Township speakeasy's basement wine-making, at household scale.
3. The settling record named and not reached: the U.S. Internal Revenue registers of distilleries, rectifiers and wholesale liquor dealers for Indiana (National Archives), and the post-1883 city directories and county license dockets held undigitized at the St. Joseph County Public Library.