Distilling - Almiran Cole and Ownership

13. Wendell remembers the man who pioneered whiskey distilling in Peoria, starting the trend that would create "The Whiskey Capital of the World" in the late 1800s. Wendell also discusses a painful creative split.

"Middle America" is a podcast using history, storytelling, and music to talk about all of the issues and feelings brought on by the world around us. "Middle America" is an access point to everything under the sun.

Music in this episode:
CHISongwriter “I Own It”
Tina Sparkle “Business Ruins Friendships (Middle America Remix)” 
Scouts Honor “Pillar of Faith”
Jared Grabb “Lay Down Your Arms (Instrumental)”
Jared Grabb “We Drink Whiskey (Acoustic – Instrumental)”
Jared Grabb Among Thieves “We Drink Whiskey”
Scouts Honor “Vultures”
Jared Grabb “3030 Origins (Demo)”
Jared Grabb “Prison Bars (Middle America Version)”
Jared Grabb “Middle America Ad Music”

The featured music for this episode was “I Own It” by CHISongwriter. The episode also utilized a storytelling remix of “Business Ruins Friendships” by Tina Sparkle. Everything else was created by Jared Grabb along with help from Thomas Satterfield and David Dobbs on drums, Chris Mackey, Chris Anderson, and Ernesto Castillo on bass, and Brett Conlin on lead guitar. 

All of Jared Grabb's music is published by Roots In Gasoline (ASCAP).

Editing assistance was provided by Becca Taylor.

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Transcript

I’m Wendell Bauer and you are listening to Middle America.

CHISongwriter “I Own It” (Ending)

13A

Tina Sparkle “Business Ruins Friendships (Middle America Remix)”

The room was energized and friendly as the song played back. Loose pounding drums filled the room with excitement. Then, a guitar tore in with just enough dissonance to give the song some added grit until the whole thing erupted with drums and bass.

“I see you abandoned your plan to keep me on as a good friend.”

Dominic and I had toured out west to meet my former bandmate, Amber, at a remote studio. It felt like things were finally starting to even out with her and me. Having traveled to the studio, Dominic and I were the first ones to hear this unmastered track for Amber’s new album.

“I had good reasons to get out, but now you've turned me into just a face in the crowd.”

My eyes were lighting up and my jaw was dropping. Amber had done it. This material was much better than our previous output together. Somehow, even after the rest of the band and I had split, forcing her to build a completely new act from the ground up, she had made something even stronger and more enduring.

“It started in high school. You made me look like a damn fool. In the hallways, you would bully me. But then you took me to get in the scene.”

While we had attended high school together, it wasn’t until college that Amber had invited me to take up lead guitar in a band she was starting. I had been performing my own songs around town on an acoustic guitar, and she had taken notice. Her earlier musical attempts hadn’t impressed me much, other than the seemingly massive attendance at their performances, but the demo for this act had intrigued me. So, I gave the band a go.

“I'm just waiting for your move to judge this nothing town in your Skynyrd boots. It's people like you that prove we don't always return to our roots.”

Sure, I had given Amber a hard time when we were younger, but as bandmates, Amber and I had become fast friends. We each had a hunger to do this music thing for real. We would work. We would fail. We would suffer. But, we would always get back up and do it all again the next day. I had never collaborated with someone as willing to take the hits of this lifestyle as I was.

“I see you abandoned your plan to keep me on as a good friend.”

I had already done some traveling by the time I teamed up with Amber, so it was only natural that I show her the ropes of DIY touring. We emailed and called and emailed and called. We would get a string of low-paying gigs in houses and community spaces cobbled together around the East Coast and the Midwest and then get to it.

“You treated me like a sister in song, but now you're counting money and I'm doing it wrong. I'm just waiting for your move to judge this nothing town in your Skynyrd boots. It's people like you that prove we don't always return to our roots.”

It was around this point in the playback when I realized who Amber was talking about in her lyrics and who had done her wrong. Maybe things between us weren’t evening out as much as I had thought.

You see, I’m the one who had left Amber’s band. I’m the one who started the avalanche that took the rest of our bandmates with me. I’m the one who had wanted to get a straight job.

I had fallen in love with a girl back home, so I cut short my commitment with Amber. Originally, I just sought out a guitarist to cover for me on a tour while I got my finances in order. However, the process of training another excited and talented guitarist to join the band made me realize that my heart wasn’t in it. I gave my notice, got an apartment with my new lady, and started jamming out my own songs with my pal Dominic.

But, bands can be like a marriage. The van had become our home, and Amber had been my closest friend. It’s possible that these early tours were the happiest days of my life. Against the urgings of everyone back home, we had gone all in. We had given it all to the life that we wanted to live and the future that we wanted to see. The shows were terrible. The pay was nearly non-existent. But, the life was ours.

And, now Amber was putting me on notice.

Scouts Honor “Pillar of Faith”

13B

I doubt that it had felt fair. Almiran (like Al My Ran) Cole was a pioneer, an innovator. The rest were merely mimics. He had owned that land for more than a decade, and he had been in the business of distilling in this town even before the city had been incorporated.[1]

It hadn’t been easy either.

When he built his first distillery, it had been the only one in the area.

Despite what residents might think of this city’s whiskey history now, the 1840s found its residents largely in opposition to the creation of spirits due to messages brought by public lectures and temperance societies.

Money was scarce and banking options were limited. Cole had taken on enormous debt to begin his whiskey producing venture, and his credit was quickly ruined. Creditors lined up, fighting for legal settlements to recoup their investments before what they saw to be an inevitable bankruptcy.

The town’s people took him for a fool.

When he did get his first distillery up and running, it was a great struggle due to the lack of experience of all involved.

But, Cole had one thing right. He knew that the difference between the price one could charge for whiskey greatly outweighed the price of the local corn and water needed to produce it, especially as corn was suffering from low demand due to a poor labor market. He also had a plan for reusing the mash leftover from distilling as feed for livestock.

To everyone’s surprise, Cole quickly paid off his debts, filled his cellar with whiskey, and made his way toward becoming a rich man.[2]

And when someone finds a formula for making a buck, the world gets in line to try and get a cut.

It was only two years before Sylvanus Thompson, a man possessing considerably more money and means, took notice of Cole’s jackpot and quickly moved to buy him out, along with the help of Richard Gregg and Charles Carroll.[3]

That was fine with Cole, though, as he then drew up plans to build a distillery three times the size of his original venture.[4]Money was once again scarce, so the construction drug out over the course of two years while he gathered partners, completing much of the construction himself.[5]When he did find his new distillery in operation, the partners that had been gathered included the boat captain William Moss and Moss’ newly arrived brother-in-law Tobias Bradley. The quartet was rounded out by Cole’s previously Chicago-based business partner Benjamin Bourland.[6]Bradley and Bourland would both find themselves quite successful through works in banking and real estate.

The facility that Cole had constructed was one of the largest buildings in the entire region, and his venture had gone from processing 200 bushels per day[7]to 1000 bushels per day.[8]Business was thriving, and the riverside property was an impressively balanced system with the distillery, a mill, and livestock all contained within one piece of land.

But now, these copycats wanted a piece. They had built their distilleries along the river to the south with little thought about the routes of transportation that would connect them with their community. Upon realizing that their only paths into town were via railroad, river, or by the less convenient Adams Street running around the large Cole Distillery property, these southern distilleries instead complained to the city. A commission was created, and they began discussing extending Washington Street and splitting Cole’s property, to his detriment.[9]

Jared Grabb Among Thieves “We Drink Whiskey”

13C

I was in a rut and acting out. I was a jerk.

I embarrassingly got drunk at Amber’s house during a party one night only to see for myself that she was the local rockstar in the room. I was jealous. I drank more. I exposed myself. I smashed a beer can on my forehead. I deserved to be the center of attention.

But, instead I was the fool.

We were all drinking so much, but I was the elder in the room. And, I was the drunkest in the room.

Amber felt no sympathy. I was the one who had betrayed her.

I woke in the middle of the night trailing vomit from the dog bed that I had apparently found as a suitable sleeping spot in my previously blacked-out state. Others were asleep on couches and chairs around me. After roughly cleaning myself up, I gathered my wits and stumbled out the door. I’d sleep the rest of the night in the back of my car.

After that night, I stopped trying to hang out with Amber. I felt a large group of my friends leave me behind in favor of Amber and her new bandmates. Maybe I’m the one who left everyone behind, but all social events now revolved around Amber. It just wasn’t the same.

Dominic and I did a few tour dates with Amber’s new band, but this was a mistake. Amber held all of the power in the dynamic, and I couldn’t stand it. A couple of her new bandmates treated me like a petulant child.

Then, Amber and her new band secured a record deal that put my previous work with her to shame. After that, they couldn’t be bothered to travel the road with a scrappy, young band like I had with Dominic.

With the break from my association with Amber, Dominic and I were forced to make our own way. I was starting all over from scratch. I don’t think I had counted on that when I left Amber’s band. And, Dominic was a great pal and musician, but he wasn’t sharing the booking and promotional duties like Amber had been.

Seventeen years later, I can see that both Amber and I felt robbed by the split. We were each trying to protect what we saw as ours. Where Amber just saw me as ditching her and what we had made, I saw our band together as something that I had built up through the knowledge that I had brought. I had felt it was only right to follow my muse elsewhere, but I wanted the privileges of what we had built together as well.

I don’t think the betrayal that we each felt will honestly ever fully heal. We can claim each other as friends now. We text on occasion, but that marriage-like bond that forms from traveling companions in song will never again exist.

My departure was a question of ownership. Amber’s band wasn’t mine, and I need my life to be dedicated to something that I could hold as my own.

Scouts Honor “Vultures” 0:00-1:24

13D

The city and county of Peoria heard the complaints from manufacturers and distillers to the south of Cole’s large distillery grounds. The proposed extension of Washington street would cut Cole’s property in half, and damages had to be assessed. In response the Peoria County Court appointed a team of commissioners to calculate the related numbers in damages and benefits for parties involved.

Cole was disgusted to find that the commissioners believed that the road would actually end up benefitting Cole’s distillery to an amount of twenty-two dollars and sixty-five cents.

These benefits were purely speculative and in Cole’s opinion imaginary. He immediately filed his objections in writing. He also filed affidavits and an agreement to provide the legal testimony of witnesses to support his objections.

Before the last meeting of the commission, however, one of the commissioners told Almiran Cole that witnesses would be a waste of time and that the commission’s decision had already been made.

Discouraged, Cole failed to produce witnesses or to attend this final meeting of the commission. Cole’s counsel, G. H. Stone, did attend the meeting, and seeing his client as a no show requested that the decision be postponed for one more day within which the witnesses might be brought. The commission dismissed Stone’s request and a member confirmed what Cole had been told earlier, that a decision had already been determined for the case. The commission held to their assessment that Cole’s distillery would benefit from the extension of Washington Street and the dividing of Cole’s property.

But, Cole wasn’t about to give up. He filed an appeal with the Illinois Supreme Court and in April of 1857, the case was presented.

Multiple witnesses held that the land that would be taken from Cole’s distillery for the road construction held a value of two thousand dollars per acre. They also backed Cole’s claim that it would take one hundred dollars to construct new fencing to enclose the properties once they were split into two.

On top of this, the distillery’s functionality was based upon multiple levels of work within the land. Grain was processed at a mill on the property and then passed along to the distillery. After distilling, the spent mash was used to feed cattle on the property, while waste was let out into the Illinois River. The proposed Washington Street extension would divide the cattle property and thus increase labor spent in keeping the operation functioning.

It was the belief of Almiran Cole and his witnesses that the Washington Street extension would primarily benefit those properties to the south of Cole Distillery, and those businesses should pay the damages done to Cole’s business.

Cole’s fighting spirit paid off. Finding that Peoria County Court had rejected the proof provided by Cole along with his presented affidavits and witnesses, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed Peoria County’s judgement, stating that, “The county court undoubtedly erred in refusing to admit the testimony offered… Statements coming from one of the judges, whose duty it was to decide the matter in controversy, may well have deterred the party from producing his proofs before that tribunal… We think the court erred in its decision, and the judgement must be reversed and the cause remanded.” Almiran Cole had won the day.[10]

Cole would run his distillery for another five years, amassing great wealth, before selling it off in 1862 at the age of fifty-seven. He then retired to his farm in East Peoria where he owned large swaths of land stretching all the way to Pekin, Illinois.

By the late 1800s, Peoria would become the “Whiskey Capital of the World.” In the year of 1885 alone, eighteen million gallons of whiskey were produced within the city limits. After the American Civil War, no city in America paid more taxes to diminish the war debts. All of this is because Almiran Cole did it first.[11]

CHISongwriter “I Own It”

13OUT

Thank you for listening to Middle America.

The featured music for this episode was “I Own It” by CHISongwriter. The episode also utilized a storytelling remix of “Business Ruins Friendships” by Tina Sparkle. Everything else was created by Jared Grabb along with help from Thomas Satterfield and David Dobbs on drums, Chris Mackey, Chris Anderson, and Ernesto Castillo on bass, and Brett Conlin on lead guitar. You can see a full listing of the music used in today’s episode on the episode’s webpage at midamericapod.buzzsprout.com.

Editing assistance was provided by Becca Taylor.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support it, 5-star reviews on Apple Podcasts and subscriptions over at patreon.com/midamericapod are the best ways to do that. We also have transcripts over at the Patreon.

Again, thank you for lending your ears.

Until next time…