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Prohibition.

Hard to imagine then, what Indiana's beer industry would be today.

34,000 jobs.

Annual economic contribution, $2 billion.

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People sometimes wonder when beer came into this community there is a reference to an 1834 advertisement for a Comparet & Coquillard brewing, perhaps the first brewery.

The ad was a little bitty ad in the newspaper and it said Good, strong beer for sale at the Fort Wayne Brewery.

And it stated that you could buy the beer by the gallon or by the barrel, whichever way you wanted it.

But it made one emphasis.

It was right there in italic, cheap.

By the beginning of the 1870s there said to be at least a dozen breweries within they said within sight.

So it was within probably a day's ride to to pick it up.

And that's that's quite a lot.

Fort Wayne was a very German place.

It was a working class place and it was a place with two major breweries, plus, you know, there had been other distilleries and breweries during its whole history.

So Prohibition was met with a real mixed emotion here in Fort Wayne.

Anybody that wanted alcohol could get it.

And the Germans were roughly two thirds of the population in Fort Wayne at the turn of the century World War One era, just before Prohibition, German Americans were in control of all the major industries, of political offices, of state elective offices.

Germans live a beer garden lifestyle.

Beer was central to their lives.

Wine was central to their lives.

Having a party on a Saturday and Sunday at park on the north side of Fort Wayne was part and parcel of their lives.

German singing clubs all had bars.

All of the German clubs had bars in them.

So it was fundamental.

And the Anglos didn't like that.

For my own family, you know, my my great grandfather, when he came here with his parents, they came from having run a guesthouse, basically an inn with alcohol, with rooms, the whole thing in Germany for generations.

So so this was their entire livelihood.

And suddenly, bam, in 1920, to be told, you couldn't do it.

You know, it's that's it was very difficult.

If you think back, water has not always been safe to drink.

And throughout history, the Germans and other ethnic groups would brew or create wine as a means of providing themselves with liquid nourishment that was safe to drink and wouldn't kill you.

Two days later.

It's a food beverage and the Germans regard it that way.

It was part of their medical remedies.

It was used as a milk substitute.

It was used as an energy booster.

It was just commonplace to have whiskey available.

My grandma came over from Germany and and stopped in Toledo, where her uncle had a glue business.

It took her 60 days to cross on the sailing vessel and she was really run down from the type of food they got on the vessel.

And so her uncle said to her, You take this bucket and go to the saloon and you tell them to fill it with beer.

And we drink beer all we can, right?

In a very short time.

She had gained weight and got strength back.

So in Germany, brewing beer was the norm.

Everybody drank beer down to little bitty baby.

It was watered down substantially, but that was the way to drink liquids safely.

So consequently, the Germans saw nothing wrong in that.

You want a beer?

No, thanks.

If you bring back the bar, you will have the saloon, the same old institution lined with the boys and bombs, spending their money, debauching their character, robbing their bodies, and jeopardizing their immortal soul.

In towns large and small all across the country, the issue of alcohol and its uses initiated passionate debates.

Forces united to create powerful, influential, sometimes radical, determined leaders on both sides of the debate.

Allen County was no exception.

It's not a problem that goes away very easy.

You know, even with Prohibition, you will not go away very easy.

But one of the telling stories I once heard was that Mayor Hosey, Mayor William Hosey, five times a mayor, never consecutive terms because the city had a law that that you couldn't be reelected as mayor.

But for five terms, he was probably the most influential, important mayor of the early 20th century.

His major objection was that it couldn't control what came along with the saloons.

He was willing to let men have their drink when he wanted to.

No more gambling.

You want to no more of these floating crap grant games that they had.

And he wanted to get rid of the red light district.

After the Civil War, the Women's Christian Temperance Union began.

Oh, we primarily think of Francis Willard from Evanston, Illinois, the national leader that became so prominent here in Fort Wayne.

The leader was Julia Avaline, her husband, and had operated one of the largest hotels She lost a son in the Civil War.

In the 1870s, she lost another son to alcoholism and she became part of the movement to educate people on the threat, the danger of alcohol abuse and it's so easy to think today that women were overreacting.

And certainly some of their their tactics were taken to the extreme when they burst into saloons and destroy the whiskey barrels.

We kind of associate that with the WCTU.

But there their general strategy strategy was much like the civil rights movement.

They would conduct prayer services.

They they were really doing nonviolent civil demonstrations to make people aware of the dangers of the evils of alcohol.

According to their side, they argue that one out of five young men would end up in a drunkard's grave.

There is always the joke in the German culture that on Sunday the women went to church and the men went right around the corner to the club, which was, you know, had a bar and would sing songs and they'd wait for church to get on and then accompany their wives back home.

In the in the late 1800s, Fort Wayne was also known as Indiana's most lawless city.

I don't know if there's a correlation between the joviality of a glass of beer and that fact, but it may have been what prompted some of the women in Fort Wayne to rise up against drunken men.

We're talking about single wage earner culture frowned upon working women that General Electric made it illegal for a married woman to continue in the workforce.

So if you have a working class family with one wage earner, maybe some of the girls that are sent off to work, if they're before them, they're married.

But if you have a husband spending much of his income at the saloon, I think women were were in entitled to having a voice there.

And, you know, you just feel that it's okay to hang out and have your beer.

But I felt that the cost of of the well-being of your family after the Civil War, both Republicans and Democrats were not committing to the urgency of controlling alcohol consumption.

The Prohibition Party was founded in Chicago in 1869 but was slow to gain support.

The Woman's Crusade marched into Indiana from Ohio in the early 1870s, attempting to influence public opinions with prayer meetings.

They were dismissed with mockery by most of the Hoosiers, but the women did begin to rally around their cause.

As women were finding a voice, they were also realizing the importance of their vote.

In Fort Wayne, the idea of women voting was not well supported.

With such a large German population, the Germans had a very well-defined role for women in the home, which did not include fighting for a cause.

Certainly the churches, the Methodist associations, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, all of these entities have become coming together and to try to fight the what they see as an epidemic of alcoholism in America.

The anti-saloon laws that they passed in 1854 in Indiana were thought to be in the early stages, a way of limiting the growth of the disease as they saw of alcoholism.

But it turned out not to be because there was no real enforcement element within it.

You either are going to be anti-saloon law for the entire state.

You didn't have the police to do it or you had entire county options in which you had no money to do it, or you had township options, options where the law enforcement officials would not willingly go against their neighbors and turn them in and shut down the saloons.

Hostility toward temperance flared up in Fort Wayne after the passage of Indiana's Baxter Bill, authored by William Baxter in 1873 and signed by Governor Thomas Hendricks.

One of the items in this bill intended to close down unlicensed saloons and make saloon keepers liable for damages caused by their drunken patrons.

It was so unpopular that it was repealed in 1875.

One of the leaders was John Sarnighausen, who was an editor of the local newspaper and a state senator.

John Sarnighausen opposed this and he was hailed as a leader by the German-American community when he returned to Fort Wayne almost simultaneously, the Women's Christian Temperance Union was holding an institute for Northeast Indiana, and one of the supporters was a methodist minister of Wayne Street.

It was called Berry Street Methodist Church.

Then Reverend Marine.

Reverend Marine got into a huge amount of trouble by giving a talk in Defiance, Ohio, commenting on the opposition of a certain group of Germans to the Baxter bill.

While the German group in Fort Wayne got wind of this and summoned Marine to a meeting, there was a petition with 500 signatures calling for Reverend Marine to explain his position.

He was charged as a vilifier in a slander law.

So this horrible confrontation between the interests of the German Americans to protect their interests and the brewery industry and their social habits versus the women that we're trying to promote temperance and broader rights for women was well under way in the 1870s.

The Constitution, the sacred charter of We the People, the blood and Sweat and We the People, the life, liberty and happiness of We the People.

The people were to rule, not some of the people, not the best people are the worst, not the rich people or the poor.

But we the people, all the people in Indiana, both political parties were now clearly defining their platforms on the subject of alcohol restriction, Republicans suggested that it was time to invite the federal government to the party, saying it was the duty of the state and national authorities to foster and secure the highest moral and intellectual development of the people.

The Democrats opinion was that any attempt to regulate the moral ideas, appetites or innocent amusement of the people by legislation is unwise and tyrannical.

It is not an easy road.

I mean, as late as 1908, personages like Thomas Marshall, whose governor of Indiana counsels William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic presidential candidate for a third time, to lay off lay off this whole issue of alcoholism.

I mean, you know, it's not something that you're going to carry.

At the same time, there are there are people like Charles Eckhart in Auburn, Indiana, the maker of the Auburn Carriage Company, and then the Auburn automobile devout Prohibitionist who would campaign in 1908 through up and down the state of Indiana.

Note Marshall and and Eckhart are practically neighbors.

Columbia City and Auburn.

They do know each other.

They have great respect for each other.

But Eckhart is doing everything they can to quash the production and the sale and the consumption of alcohol.

And it is that sort of energy and commitment that starts to win out and overcome the alcoholism.

And the temperance women were concerned about the young girls that had been drawn into prostitution.

And as they talked to them and tried to help them, one of the factors that they became aware of was the number of the young girls who were led to to this life at the Allen County Fairgrounds.

The county fairgrounds had a beer garden and it was unlicensed.

And so the WCTU women began to become more politically aggressive with this issue of trying to shut down the beer garden at the state fairgrounds.

They first went into the county commissioners with a petition signed by thousands of women, and the reaction of the county commissioners was that you women are wasting your time.

You need to go home and take care of your own kids so that they don't end up in this this little life.

Well, the reaction of the temperance women was we're going to take this to every level that we can and we're going to see this through.

So 1911.

WCTU took the fight to close down the beer garden.

The women won a minor victory here.

Building upon this minor victory, women were beginning to look beyond social opportunities.

They were taking a real interest in helping their community.

They were an integral part of the workforce, and they were paying taxes.

The Force of the Liquor Alliance and the breweries were insurmountable.

However, public opinion was shifting.

More support for suffrage was beginning to grow, and World War One was on the horizon.

The voice of the Women's Christian Temperance Union was growing louder.

It's a fact that the Indiana Legislature cleared temperance and suffrage was due to a combination of issues that the liquor lobby was was beginning to to have kind of a evil or less than positive kind of reputation that the entrance of the United States into World War One, or at least the the allies fighting the Germans before Woodrow Wilson entered the war was making people pull away from the German-American alliance.

The German-American alliance had taken a position of pretty, pretty rigid position supporting Germany, wanting the U.S. to remain neutral.

In 1903, the Hoosier branch of the anti-saloon League was established by Reverend Edward Shoemaker.

The league did not seek members only contributors.

It influenced the careers of congressmen, governors and legislators.

It forgave any wrongdoing except a wet vote by adopting an attitude of strict neutrality on all questions of public policy, not directly and immediately concerned with the traffic and strong drink.

By 1907, two unsuccessful attempts were made to use the courts to shut down Indiana's saloons.

The Supreme Court ruled that the citizen may have the right to convince the legislature to absolutely prohibit the liquor traffic, but they could be of no avail before a court, which can neither make nor unmake laws.

This was merely an invitation to play politics for the anti-saloon supporters.

Within a year, Indiana had a county local option law which dried up three fourths of the state.

The back and forth between the wet and the dry forces in Indiana did not end until the 1950s, so the dries and wets come to some point that they're going to have a showdown and it starts beginning to work its way through the Senate.

In 1917 and passes Congress.

And now it's up to the states to ratify.

Some states are very quick somewhere in the South are very quick to ratify it.

Some in the South never reject it.

But Indiana is the 27th state in the union to ratify the 18th Amendment.

And January 14, 1919, upon the ratification of the Volstead Act, the Reverend Billy Sunday of Wynona Lake preached The reign of tears is over.

The slums will soon be only a memory.

We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corn cribs.

Men will walk upright now, women will smile and children will laugh.

Hell will be forever for rent.

But there's no army, there is no military, there's no police.

There is just an amendment with no laws written out and no applications in the state.

And what are you going to do with people who who violate these laws?

And so the nation and in Fort Wayne and definitely Indiana go through this paroxysm of, well, is it really enforceable or do we need to do it?

And of course, the dries push and the wets resist.

It really wasn't a Republican versus Democrat thing.

It was, which is the dry versus the wet.

So what it was what it was my my father got caught it as prosecutor.

And and then after he finished his term as prosecutor, he ran for Congress in the primary as a wet supported by the publisher of the Journal Sentinel.

Got beat because the dries outnumbered the wits Back in the thirties with the 19th Amendment, women were now seated as delegates for the first time, and the political conventions of 1920.

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats said a word about Prohibition.

The Republicans swept the state electing Warren T. McCray as governor with its power increased by WCTU ballots.

The anti-saloon league took full charge of the General Assembly.

The mere possession of alcohol was made an offence during the first seven years after Prohibition in Indiana.

Total jail admissions for felonies and misdemeanors nearly doubled.

Charges of intoxication and vagrancy rose from 8441 in 1918 to 13893 in 1925.

It was clear that the law was not banishing liquor as promised and General lawlessness was on the increase.

The jazz age had arrived.

My father had just recently graduated from South Side High School and was working at the local YMCA in 1931.

He was a friend of a photographer for one of the local newspapers and one particular evening the photographer said to my father, I've been tipped off that there is going to be a federal Prohibition raid on South Anthony Boulevard.

Would you like to go with me?

And my father accompanied the photographer and they went in right after the federal agents had raided what was masquerading as a candy store on South Anthony Boulevard and Wayne Trace.

I was probably in junior high at the time and we had discussed the so-called Prohibition law and what a failure it was and how difficult it was to enforce.

There was a constant war going on with regard to those who believed that alcohol beverages were the devil's handmaiden and those who said it was not government's obligation to tell people how to conduct their lives by drinking or not drinking.

But Dad and my father inherited the problems of Prohibition and was kept very busy prosecuting those who were operating illegal stills.

There had been no violence, really until 1931, and the case that became well known throughout the country was when two revenue agents from the Internal Revenue Service, that's really agents were from who had the obligation of enforcing them all were in Fort Wayne to conduct an investigation into an illegal still operated by a man named George Adams on Stone Road near the Saint Mary's River.

But the agents heard about it.

George Adams, the person that was operating a still, heard about the agents coming and lay and wait for them to come near his still when they came here.

Still, he rose up out of where he was laying and with a double barreled shotgun shot and killed both agents.

So I was only 4 when this double murder occurred in 1931.

All I remember really is the police cars around our residence because they had received threats against his life from a lot of the people who were bootleggers.

There were just so many bootleggers all around town.

The Sheriff who sent a man named George Gilley was constantly raiding these stills, illegal stills.

Every place, apparently from from some of the newspaper accounts that caused people to come from Miles because they could hear the sirens and they wanted to know what was going on.

So suddenly there's like hundreds of people driving all over because it's the depression.

There's not a whole lot going on.

You can't go out and drink.

And there's something very exciting happening on the bridge.

And so it was the big news.

My father as a prosecutor took the case to the Allen County grand jury, got indictments for two counts of first degree murder.

One of the prospective jurors was a gentleman that my father knew named Hagerman, William Hagerman and Mr. Hagerman looked at my father when he was questioning him and said, Walter, he still spoke in a German accent.

Walter, if you say that this man did what he did, then he deserves a medal for what he did.

So immediately my father turned the judge and the judge got him blanched.

Then my father said Id like exercise what we call a peremptory decision to throw him off the jury.

So what you did.

But that was the feeling of many of the jurors.

But after about a week of trial and days of deliberation, the jury came back not with two words virtually murder or second degree, but voluntary manslaughter.

I guess Mr. Adams and George Adams are then sentenced to 2 to 21 years Indiana state prison.

Within three years, he was out of jail back in the streets of Fort Wayne.

And my father said couple of years later, I think about 1937 or 38, he was back and making alcoholic beverages someplace without a license.

The federal authorities who had the responsibility of enforcing the Prohibition law since it was a constitutional amendment and thus a federal law, always had trouble with the local officials.

And this was true in Fort Wayne, just as it was in most cities across the country, because there was always a kind of a disparity between the federal authorities who were trying to enforce this and the local authorities who had to live with the people who didn't like the law.

Their thing ans my father said is the sheriff and the state of Indiana receives so much dollars, I forget how much, maybe a couple hundred dollars, every time they raided the still and the money went to them personally.

And some sheriff became very, very wealthy during Prohibition by their constant raiding of stills and breaking up speakeasies.

So this is his money was paid to them out of federal funds.

Fred Lunz was at one time sheriff of Allen County toward the toward the end of Prohibition.

And he was, of course, actively involved, as were the other Allen County sheriffs, in trying to enforce the Prohibition law.

And ironically Fred Lunz himself got in some difficulty and was indicted by a grand jury for illegally transporting alcohol and was tried to a jury in Fort Wayne and was found not guilty, as were some of the other people who supposedly violated the Prohibition laws.

And so you have this cat and mouse game going.

If you're a wet town, you sort of turn it turn the other I look the other way.

If you're in a dry town, it's shut its shut.

And at one point there was 70 counties dry in Indiana - out of 92.

70 are dry and about 1500 saloons are closed forever.

In some cases.

They wanted to do it in a very special way.

I read a story about a woman a little further south who took her oxen out and tied into the pillars of the tavern and slapped the oxen in the back.

The pillars came out in the tavern, went into the creek.

From the laboratory to the tanks, where the finest of American malted grains are fermented.

The beer of today is brewed unde Modern scientific instruments control the entire brewing process.

No other food products get more careful attention and manufacture than American beer and ale.

In addition, the brewing of this fine beer and ale today is one of America's great industries, contributing much to our economy.

Some 400 modern breweries in operation today represent an investment of more than $2 billion in buildings and equipment, just as these breweries require is nearly 100,000 employees earning $350 million a year.

It was clear to those in the alcohol trade that in order to survive, they had to adapt to the situation of Prohibition.

We're sitting in Columbia Street West, which is one of the very well known bars here on the landing Columbia Street in downtown Fort Wayne.

If you look at the city directory, you know that during the twenties and early thirties, while Prohibition is still going on the street at that point was primarily set up to handle farmers needs.

There were a number of feed stores - The Wayne Feed, the Bass Feed Store and a number of these places that had been saloons that suddenly were restaurants or suddenly were cigar stores, and then suddenly restaurants again.

And I think actually with this particular building, at least during the late 1920s and early thirties, it had gone between being, I think, a tire store briefly.

And then it also was a cigar store by the same owner who then opened a restaurant.

So it's kind of like I've got the building, can't serve beer, which is what I really want to do.

So in the meantime, you know, I'll sell some other product I think was how a lot of folks operated during that time period.

As Prohibition came in, the German clubs, the German restaurants, the Bavaria, the Heidelberg, the all of these other restaurants that carry German names couldn't sell beer, they couldn't sell wine, so they had to restructure their menus.

Many of them just simply went out of business because their business model was based upon profits from beer and wine, not from sandwiches were often sandwiches were often given free with a glass of beer that was part and parcel of the business model at the time.

So a fair number of them went out of business.

And couple that with the fact that World War One had been in Fort Wayne, there had been virulent anti-German ism in this town.

A lot of the old businesses simply disappeared, vanished, changed.

This growing opposition was not growing against a small, weak industry.

It was a very strong industry and it was a very important industry.

I mean, you face the fact that that there were nine brewers unions in Fort Wayne alone, four for Berghoff and Centlivre and a few of the small ones.

But an employee at the at the Centlivre Brewery could make as much as $2.50 a day, which is very good money for their first and second decades of the 20th century.

There were at least ten breweries contributing to the economy in Fort Wayne at one time.

The two greatest were the CL Centlivre Brewing Company established as the French Brewery in 1862 by Charles L and his brother Francis Centlivre and the Berghoff Brewing Company, established as the East End Bottling works.

In 1882, Berghoff was founded by four brothers Herman, Henry, Hubert and Gustav.

It was located on the corner of East Washington and Wabash Street on the east side of Fort Wayne.

It was a modern brewery, had their own deep, deep well underneath, so they'd have the pure water and and they had refrigeration so that the beer could be called.

The youngest brothers soap company was just a little more than a block away.

So they were both East End businesses.

This house right here is CL Centlivres home and it's no longer there.

But if you if you look at this picture today, Nature's Corner would be right about where this building works is this little feeder canal that is now a bunch of overhead wires that they have.

And write abound in here would be Steele Tire and Burger King would be right behind where CLs house is.

And you'd also have a house that's standing right here for the stable is and that house was Charles Francis sent over his house.

Well, the biggest competition was probably Centlivre Brewery, but the Berghoffs never worried about that competition because they had the honest German brew.

And the Centlivre brewery was a French brewery.

So they just figured they had with a large population of Germans in Fort Wayne, a kind of captive audience.

In 1862, the French brewery made 500 barrels of beer.

That was that first year in 1862 and 1940 thereabouts.

They made 130,000 barrels of beer, that grew tremendously.

And in fact, before Prohibition, the brewery actually exported, there was a cellar, export beer that they made that from 1900 to about about 1914.

They actually exported beer to Germany, and it was going on a cruise line that went to Bremen.

So that kind of testifies to the ability of Fort Wayne to make quality beer.

Everything had been going wonderfully well and they were selling lots of beer to lots of thirsty people.

And there came this feeling or movement in part of the population that kind of disapproved of the German culture.

To be one of Allen County's nearly 40,000 German descendants during the war years of 1914 and 1919 was no easy matter with the growing dislike of anything German.

The Berghoffs, along with prominent German American alliance members, created Germania Park in an attempt to protect their heritage.

So it was a family getaway on the weekends that was owned by a number of investors, as well as some of the German clubs, as well as the Berghoff Brewery, which was a way that they could sell beer, make a profit, participate in the culture, and also skirt some of the increasingly restrictive laws on alcohol sales.

The brewery decided that the park wasn't a good idea anymore.

There was so much social pressure that people and organization bars that had rented the park had come to the park for their affairs and, you know, various fraternal organizations and so forth, decided they weren't didn't want to be associated with it anymore because the drys were just very disapproving.

As a matter of fact, Prohibition was so significant because you didn't want to be necessarily known as a brewer.

You'd want to be known as a beverage company.

And so the Centlivre brewery ceased to be CL Centlivre Brewing Company, and it became on this bill of lading.

You can you might be able to see Centlivre Beverage Company during Prohibition.

In the Centlivre Brewery, they had to padlock the door because that's what the government mandated that all breweries that produced alcohol had to be padlocked or be destroyed and the Centivres still made some near beers which were supposed to taste like beer but didn't have any alcohol.

That was well known.

That's it.

They made a ginger beer.

None of it did very well, but they still tried to employ some of the people that had worked there before.

The poor, thirsty population and now had to be satisfied with near beer, birch beer, root beer, ginger ale under the trade name of Bergo and the name of the brewery was changed to Berghoff Products.

Prohibition had been something that been talked about for numerous years and at the turn of the century I found articles where people were rather belligerent against my great grandfather, who was very much a gentleman.

He never raised his voice.

He was only about five foot six.

But these articles that I have found have just pretty much called them a ruiner families and calling into question his integrity, his honesty.

And people started just lambasting him, going after him and saying these terrible things about him without even knowing him.

His response was, Well, I'm not making any one drink.

I'm merely offering a product that if they choose to drink, they can drink local.

It cost him his home.

He actually had to sell his house.

His house was fairly well known at the time.

He had over 100 windows, which I believe at the time.

You could actually get taxed on the number of windows you had.

And you can also get taxed on the closets in such.

Well, he was known for having over 100 windows in his home.

Well, he had to sell that home and he ended up moving to a house just north of the Hosey Dam on North Anthony, which still exists.

Herman Joseph Berghoff was the first brother to come to the United States when he was 17.

He was the prime mover in opening the brewery after his wife passed away in 1896.

He went on the road as a traveling agent to sell his Berghoff products.

On a trip to Chicago, he tried to apply for a wholesale liquor license.

He was denied.

He then suggested a retail license.

He applied and was accepted.

With that license, he created the Berghoff Restaurant, which is still in Chicago today.

All saloons had a free lunch.

They were either free or maybe $0.05, but they were really cheap, hard boiled eggs, ham sandwiches, manly stuff.

And along comes Prohibition.

Well, he was kind of out of luck in the beer business, but he began to offer really wonderful food, so he easily made it through Prohibition, selling his food, and it became the Berghoff Restaurant, the sideline, his beer.

They'd been making Centivre Ice all along.

It just wasn't quite the size of operation that it was before Prohibition.

Now all of a sudden it became a focal point.

And so you would go and get one of these from the settlers and they would put this in your front window when you needed ice, because they, of course, didn't have refrigeration in those days.

So if you needed ice dropped off at your house and you'd put to the top whatever quantity of ice you needed.

The Centivres I did find other jobs during Prohibition because the brewery was much a family operation.

The cousins all work there, the nieces, nephews, everybody worked there.

We still have some of the Centivre Ice Pick's name.

You can see it.

They even have a phone number on there.

And in fact, the home telephone company in Fort Wayne, one of the Centivres, Charles Centivre.

That's that's what he did during Prohibition.

My great grandfather went and as I mentioned earlier, had become the deputy sheriff.

He had also worked for the Fort Wayne City & Light.

The breweries had to close, but the distilleries could export to wet centers and other states.

Druggists could receive liquor, and with the doctors prescription sell to dentists, and veterinarians, and patrons over 21 that were known not to have a drinking problem.

To purchase sacramental wine, clergymen had to provide the druggist with their name, address, church location, sectarian affiliation, plus state that such purchase is made in good faith to be used for sacramental purposes only.

By 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover declared his intentions to enforce the 18th Amendment efficiently.

He declared that he would do everything in his power to enforce Prohibition.

As the economic downturn began to deepen, the money that could be made from illegal alcohol became more and more enticing for for folks who are looking to make to make dollars as as money was going away.

So, you know, Fort Wayne became dangerous.

Every place became dangerous.

You know, we had gangsters coming in from from Chicago.

We had alcohol coming in from the Detroit River, you know, coming to this location.

There were a number of busts by federal agents of different speakeasies.

In one case, they arrested 24 proprietors, bartenders and musicians who basically all said that they were entertainers and didn't have any knowledge of illegal operations and didn't drink.

My mother was in high school in Detroit for a period of time and she talked about the purple gang who were fighting it out like they fight it out about drugs today over alcohol.

They had rum runners that came across the Detroit River from Canada and brought the booze and that way.

And look what happened to Capone in Chicago.

They'd soon just kill you as look at you.

Fort Wayne citizens supported several saloons that were scattered across the city.

Several were located on Calhoun Street, one in particular, Schnee's Restaurant, became known as a speakeasy during Prohibition.

It is now known as the Oyster Bar.

It became and still is, kind of now kind of a favorite haunt for the attorneys and and and some of the politicians and the business people.

So but they were sitting in the back dining room, which was a very popular place for them back in them.

And two teenagers actually came through the back door, walked right past them.

And they were I don't know, maybe a half a dozen of them back there.

All of them had guns.

And a teenager stood right up here in front of the bar and at gunpoint, tried to rob the bar.

And about that time, one of the prosecutors and and I think there was a police officer back there to realize what was going on.

And they fired a shot at them and a gun battle actually ensued.

And they went back and forth.

Unfortunately, one of the youths were killed right here and the other one bolted out the front door and they never did catch him.

By 1933, the people were worn out with this problem, particularly with the depression coming in the 1930s.

And so as a result, people were ready to say, you know, let's put that in the past.

Let's get on with creating jobs as it did in 1930, as much like we're looking at now.

And then when when the bloodshed continued to run and in the thirties and mobs really take over and mobs don't disappear with them, then I think that people basically just want to start to stop.

They have other things to worry about that we were wrestling with the worst depression in our history.

Some of us were out of jobs.

Some of us stood in breadlines.

Not only were people worn out by the violent crimes and restrictions, the Great Depression took its toll on federal income tax revenues.

Prior to the Depression, income tax supplied about two thirds of the federal government's income.

When income tax revenues plummeted in the early thirties, Congress and the state legislatures agreed on the prospect of raising new tax revenues with an excise tax on beer and spirits, along with licensing fees.

Within three months, the excise director, Paul P. Fry, collected more than $1,013,000 in excise taxes and permit fees, with more than 420,000 going to cities, towns, counties and schools.

For the first time in history, a liquor question was sent directly to the people of Indiana on June 6th, 1933, and by a vote of about 550000 to 300000, they returned a majority.

329 delegates assembled in Indianapolis on June 26 to formally place Indiana on record as the seventh state opposed to Prohibition, voting 246 to 83 in favor of the 21st Amendment.

The decisive vote of the 36 states against Prohibition is happy news for the grain raisers of the United States and for many others throughout the land.

With an eye on December 5th, work is being rushed in distilleries and bottling works.

Thousands are being called back to work in plants of allied industry.

At least 500,000 new jobs are predicted after the result of repeal.

I know that for my grandfather, who was born in 1915, those were his early years.

You know, the family had a bakery in a restaurant in 1933 when when he was 18 years old, Prohibition was repealed.

And so just as he was coming of age, as he turned 18, the family could go back to the original business, which was having a tavern.

So after he and my grandmother both died, my my mom and I were cleaning out their house and they didn't save very many things.

They weren't people who saved lots of mementos.

But one of the things they saved was the newspaper from the first day that they were making beer again.

And there was this big photo on the front cover of the newspaper with a big wagon with beer and horses carrying it.

And that was one of the things that we found in my grandfather's papers.

So it was a really important thing to him.

By this time, the Berghoff brothers moved on to other business ventures, but Herman still had his restaurant in Chicago.

After the repeal, he applied for and received the first alcoholic beverage license in the Windy City.

He was very proud of that and he also was very proud of the fact that on the first day that the beer was back, April 7, 1933, his bar room was overflowing with gentlemen.

It was a man-only bar at that time, of course, and they were having a great time.

Guests have had sons.

He had Edward and Walter and John.

And they came to their father and they said Prohibitions over dad, the Berghoffs need to be back in the beer business.

So they used part of that thousand feet of building over on Dwenger Avenue as the Hof Brau Brewery, although the brewery had been maintained because they were using it for storage for the Centivre Ice Company, they hadn't kept up the boilers because you don't need boilers with ice and as a result they had to get new boilers.

And to make a boiler is not an easy task.

And so they had to have had to reach out to someone to do that.

While that was being done, rather than just waiting, he contacted the Nickel Plate railroad and asked if they had any extra engines sitting around and fortunately they did.

So they pulled that engine along to the brewery and use that to create the beer for the first first couple of months until they could get the boilers installed and prepared.

And when the brewery did open up again after Prohibition, he made sure that all the employees for those 15 years that had been employed before Prohibition were employed after Prohibition, and they would not hire anybody until all those employees that had worked there previously had their job back.

Centlivre merged with Chris-Craft in 1961 and was renamed Old Crown.

This company was then sold to its employees.

Old Crown closed operations in 1973.

Berghoff sold to Falstaff in 1954 and the contents of the building were sold to China.

By 1940, federal, state and local taxes license receipts exceeded $1,000,000,000 yearly.

Alcohol-related problems did not increase significantly, and bootlegging continued, but mostly in a few southern states that preserved anti liquor laws.

In most states, bootleggers could not compete with the legal liquor trade.

Prohibition was gone, but the Anti-Saloon League accomplished one of its goals.

The old type of saloon did not reappear in most American cities.

License regulations prevented, the saloons from gambling and other vices.

After repeal, they were called bars or taverns, and their only function was to offer alcoholic beverages.

Of course, I am delighted, but not surprised by the final repeal of the 18th Amendment.

I felt all along when this matter was properly submitted to the rank and file of our people, they would readily see that it had no place in our Constitution.

It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the benefits that will come to this country from the lessons taught for the coming generations to make it their business, to see that no such matter as it is ever again made the subject of federal constitutional law.

What is the outcome?

What's the bottom line from Prohibition?

And for one thing, it made our made our local breweries weaker.

Certainly Budweiser and Joseph Schlitz and the very large beer barons had enough resilience, resistance to weather the storm for those years.

Centlivre and Berghoff Brewing, being another stepp down and and being a local a local brewery serving a local economy, didn't have those sorts of reserves to to to maintain themselves.

The stake in the heart of the German culture came from the Council of Defense in World War One.

And for when the anti-German feeling and the the indignities of Prohibition were insult to injury, the feeling was so strong.

But that's what happens when you can get the Women's Temperance Christian Union, Anti-Saloon League, and others, pushing the legislators and saying, “You do this or you're not going to get reelected.” We see the same argument now.

It's part of something that women have always been concerned about but the WCTU brought not only the issues and the focus into more focus, but empowered women politically.

And I think that's the legacy that the WCTU helped bring women into the political process, even that was very unpopular and very controversial insofar as my family goes.

I mean, it is devastating.

They lost everything.

They lost.

They lost their their livelihood.

They lost their employees.

They lost friends.

I think it was a terrible mistake.

It let the criminal element proliferate, get hold of businesses and people and corrupt them.

And it continues today.

Too much of our time has been spent on on gunfire and in tommy guns and and people with axes in breaking into beer barrels.

What it is about is living together with two different views on life and still making a successful community.

And I think that perhaps this is what we should take away from all of this The legacy of Prohibition in the United States, in Allen County, is that legislating morals is doesn't always work very chancy, hard to do.

And the people will find a way it and if I want a glass of beer in the evening, I'm going to find it.

I'm going to get it and I'm going to drink it.

Simple as that.

And that's a rather German attitude.

Since 1863, the lawyers at Baker and Daniels have helped governmental and individual clients with their legal and consulting needs.

Today, Baker and Daniels has offices in Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, South Bend, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and China.

Prohibition.

Hard to imagine then, what Indiana's beer industry would be today 34,000 jobs.

Annual economic contribution, $2 billion.

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