Fires, Floods, Explosions & Bloodshed

Yeah, it looks like drinks are in hand. That’s good because we’re going to talk about whiskey here for a couple of minutes. I don’t know if y’all know, we’re in the absolute golden age of Texas made whiskey right now, and it was about not even 20 years ago that Dan Garrison opened up a distillery out in High, Texas, and when he did, he put a sign out front that said, “First legal whiskey distillery in Texas.” Here we are, not that many years later, Texas is actually one of the nation’s leading producers of craft whiskey and making some really phenomenal whiskeys. But my question for y’all is, do we really think, given Texas’ history, that we’ve only been making whiskey here for 20 years? Thank you. Yeah. Well, anyway, I could leave now, but I’m going to take a couple of minutes and try to convince you that, yeah, actually it’s a bit longer.
So to do that, I’m going to go back to the beginning, at least the beginning of modern Texas history. And I should say, just mention that corresponds with the absolute height of drunkenness on the North American continent. And if you were out on that Anglo-Texan frontier, you probably drank all the time because everybody pretty much did drink all the time out there. And the preferred spirit of choice was whiskey. So, what would happen when a new community would come together as the first order of business was let’s get a temperance society together, and temperance, pretty simple idea. You’re going to act under this idea of moral suasion, which is just kind of a fancy way of saying, we’re going to try to convince you that you should drink less, in this case with alcohol, because it’s better for you and it’s better for the community in general.
So that argument probably would’ve gone over a little smoother, I guess, in Texas if so many early famous Texans hadn’t been such legendary drinkers. And so, I’m going to use Sam Houston as my example, he’s kind of the obvious choice, but I don’t care. We’re friends. And so, I think everybody in this room knows Houston, right? First president of the Republic of Texas, among many other things that he did down here. But before he came to Texas, right before, he lived with the Cherokee tribe. This is him in his actual Cherokee outfit, and his adopted tribe gave him the name Big Drunk. And I can tell you, Houston lived up to that name when he lived with the Cherokee, and he absolutely lived a very rambunctious lifestyle when he was down here in Texas. And, I think people know a little bit of that history. So anyway, temperance was a hard sell, right?
And so, by the 1870s, almost every town in Texas of any size or ambition just figured they just better have a designated vice area. The idea was kind of let’s corral these temptations. Proper folk will know how to avoid them. Everybody else will know how to find them, kind of a win-win here. And in that environment, it seemed to me that there must’ve been some entrepreneurial Texans out there that were making whiskey. Right? Now my wife and I are co-founders of Still Austin Whiskey. So this is a conversation that came up for us probably more than most couples in Austin, but we talk about it quite a bit. What is that history? And then in 2019, we read this article in Texas Monthly, and it was mostly about this whiskey boom I was talking about earlier, but it also made the case that there was actually no pre-prohibition history of distilling at all.
So it wasn’t just Dan Garrison who thought no one was distilling back in the day. And I don’t know, I didn’t know a whole lot at that point, but I thought, “Yeah, this can’t be right, so it’s time to do a little research, which I know can be dangerous.” But I started looking into this history here, and one of the first things I found was this really cool advertisement. It was out of Houston in the early 1840s. It’s a metal worker down there selling these stills just as kits. If you know anything about kind of moonshine, and if you know who Popcorn Sutton is maybe, this still probably looks familiar. It’s kind of the classic American still design. This one’s even a little fancier because that vessel over there on the left is a steam boiler. So, this guy who’s a metal worker, like I say, was pulling out all the stops here.
So once I saw this and knew it was being sold in Texas that early, I knew there was definitely more of a history behind what was going on in Texas. So, after a lot more research, I found out, yeah, the short story is there was quite a bit of distilling going on, probably starting in the early 1830s. These red counties, that’s a county map, obviously, up there in that northeast corner, a lot of activity. I found examples of distillers that were operating for probably 40 plus years, and I think they were mostly using those smaller stills, like the one in that example I just showed you. If the Texas folks failed to do anything, it was really to kind of industrialize past these agricultural scale stills. These folks were probably just having people shove the door with a jug and they’d fill up the jug and go.
None of them were big enough to deal with the volume that the saloon culture in the more urban areas needed to address. So of course, the saloons were not going to run out of booze by any stretch. The wholesalers could just bring it in by the train load and they on the Katy by the 1870s. But what’s interesting here is that these guys wouldn’t go… Obviously, you could go to Kentucky and get all the liquor you wanted. They wouldn’t go just to get booze though. They’d go and buy distilleries in Kentucky because the demand for whiskey was so large in Texas that they decided they needed to lock up that supply. So the saloons keep growing throughout the century. By the 1890s, they really are just getting a very competitive business. They’re getting a little crazy. It gets a little hard for an honest barman to make a living.
The reputation of the saloons continues to deteriorate, and at that point, there’s really no sin that won’t be thrown at the doorstep of the saloon. I mean, obviously, I guess drunkenness, but prostitution, gambling, even domestic violence and poverty, it’s like every social ill seemed to emanate from the fact that people were drinking too much. So this new generation of tea tailors kind of comes and looks at this and says, “Boy, the saloon is the perfect villain for us to kind of turn the table on this conversation we’ve been having for a hundred years.” And they switched the focus from the drink habit in that approach that the temperance folks used all those decades, not so successfully. And they start focusing on the drink traffic, which is to say they start focusing on the saloons and then that supply chain back to the distillers. And so the Anti-Saloon League, which forms again there in the 1890s, is very successful in saying, “This is a societal problem that we can fix through easy legislation,” which of course is prohibition, right?
Well, we know how that went unfortunately. But, the important thing in the story is to say we can draw a straight line from the success of the Anti-Saloon League to the disappearance of distilleries in Texas by about 1900 or so. So this interesting thing is that you’ve got about a hundred year gap when no one was distilling whiskey in Texas. And I think what really happened there, at least if anyone was legally distilling whiskey in Texas, I should say, but I think Texans, for the first couple of decades of that period, I think they decided they wanted to really actively forget that distillation history. And then after a while, they just actually did forget it. So by the time we started looking into it, literally no one knew the story. So here we are now again in the middle of this Renaissance, there’s now almost a hundred whiskey distilleries in Texas, but not for the first time, for the first time since the Civil War when there were probably more. And once again, it’s really a good time to be a distiller in Texas. So, cheers.