JESSE MOORE

Jesse Moore, my great grandfather, was a Connecticut Yankee, a swashbuckler, a romantic and the maker of some of the finest bourbon whiskey ever to come out of Kentucky. The bottles in which he sold his whiskey have long been cherished by collectors, both the more familiar bottles produced in San Francisco and the rarer ones filled at his distilleries in Louisville between 1853 and 1918.

But just who was Jesse Moore and how did he become one of the legendary bourbon kings of Kentucky?

Louisville Directory advertisement for George J. Moore's bank. When he loaned to an Indian distillery he began the Moore family's interest in Bourbon Whiskey.

The original Moores in America, John and Mercy, came to Newport, Rhode Island, from England before 1704, when they bought a tract of land in what was then part of Westerly, Rhode Island, now known as Richmond. John farmed the land, and also was a cooper, producing barrels and kegs for the strong apple cider and frontier whiskey of those days. The Moore family lived in Richmond for three generations, and were farmers, local government officials and seamen until President Thomas Jefferson's 1807 Embargo shut down New England's sea trade and caused a severe depression in the area.

A third generation Moore, John, took his new wife, Catherine Reynolds, 30 miles west into Connecticut where newly-developed water-powered spinning and weaving mills produced thread and cloth. John was both a farmer and a part-owner of a thread mill in the small town of Ashford, about 35 miles south of the manufacturing city of Worcester, in central Massachusetts.

The Moores had a daughter, Waity, in 1808, a son, George James Moore, in 1810, and a second son, Jesse, in 1812, during the war with England. The war and the Embargo forced Americans to rely upon their own manufactures as they were unable to import their needs. Uninterested in farming, George went as a young man to the brighter lights of Worcester, where he apprenticed to a banker and accumulated a small savings. When Jesse was old enough to work off the family farm, he followed George to Massachusetts and worked in a wire mill in Worcester.

In the early part of the 19th century, the Northwest territories of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois began to open up, attracting the adventurous with un-tilled land, broad rivers and unlimited opportunities. New York built the Erie Canal, connecting the Hudson River with Buffalo and the Great Lakes, and Maryland and Pennsylvania built the National Road, extending that wagon trail until it reached from Philadelphia to Wheeling, Virginia, on the Ohio River. In about 1830, George took his small savings and headed west, stopping in Kentucky at the falls of the Ohio River where a new town, Louisville, had been chartered in 1828.


Maps of Jesse Moore's distillery and wholesale whiskey offices in Louisville. After Jesse retired in 1892 his nephew and partner, George H. Moore took Max Seliger in as a partner in the distilleries. At the Breckinridge Street location there had at the time been three distilleries, "Belmont", "Aster" and "Nutwood", but the Nutwood distillery was shut down by the mid 1890s.

Back in Worcester, Jesse met Hannah Clapp, then 13, the daughter of a proud family that had come to New England in 1620 with the Mayflower Pilgrims. Hannah and Jesse fell in love, but her father, Seth, told Jesse that Hannah was too young to marry and that Jesse's prospects were too meager for his daughter. In 1833 Jesse set out for the west, following his brother's trail by wagon to Wheeling where he bought passage on one of the steamboats, the 156-ton Jefferson, that carried freight and passengers the 450 miles down the Ohio River to Louisville.

On the way down the river they stopped at the town of Limestone, soon to be better known as Maysville, a steamboat port that served the large Kentucky county known as Bourbon where enterprising farmers were producing corn liquor for the trade to St. Louis and New Orleans. Bourbon County had good limestone water without iron in it, perfect for distilling fine whiskey. The whiskey from Maysville, with the legend "Bourbon" burned into the heads of the barrels it was shipped in, was becoming famous throughout the states that bordered the Mississippi River as the best drinking whiskey in the young nation.


The Moore distillery at 17th & Breckinridge in Louisville. It is now owned by Heaven Hill.

It was a heady time in America. A frontiersman, Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, was in the White House. Jackson was a man who mistrusted the old Eastern banks and particularly the Bank of the United States in which the government kept its money. He famously vetoed the renewal of the bank's charter in 1832 and deposited federal funds in state banks run by his cronies, thus providing money that those banks rushed to invest, sometimes unwisely, in canals, turnpikes, land and industrial facilities until the new western states, including Kentucky, were awash in currency.

By the time Jesse reached Louisville his brother had established a bank at the corner of Wall and Water streets, known as the Savings Bank of Louisville, with George James Moore as its president and cashier. He advertised "will buy and sell checks and drafts on all the principal cities of the United States." George loaned money — often much more than he had on deposit — by issuing, as was legal then, his own currency, known colloquially as "Shinplasters." He also traded in the notes of other banks, liberally discounting the paper money issued by out-of-town institutions.

The remains of the Phoenix distillery in Mount Vernon, Indiana, where Jesse Moore got his start with whiskey. The distillery burned to the ground several times over the last 170 years and was rebuilt.

Louisville was a rapidly-growing town, making much of its location where a series of low falls on the Ohio River forced the steam-powered riverboats to off-load their goods and portage them around the rapids. Jesse found work with another recent immigrant from the East, John Fonda of Troy, New York, who had set up shop as a wholesale grocer. Shortly after Jesse arrived, George fell in love with and married Fonda's daughter, Catherine. In 1835 they had their first child, George Henry Moore, born in his parents' rooms in Louisville's National Hotel.

One of the men to which George J. Moore's bank loaned money was Darius North, another Yankee from Connecticut. North used George's funds to invest with Virgil Soaper, a local lawyer, and farmer Andrew McFidan, in building a steam-powered mill and distillery at Mount Vernon, Indiana, 100 miles down the Ohio River.

In 1837, President Jackson, who did not believe in either banks nor the flimsy currency they printed, directed that all public lands must be paid for in specie — gold or silver. There was not enough gold in the new nation to cover the debts accumulated for the public lands that speculators had bought, the market collapsed, and the panic of 1837 laid waste the economy, especially in the west. People to whom George J. Moore had made loans could not pay their debts and John Fonda's customers had no money to buy his goods. The McFidan distillery mysteriously burned to the ground early in 1838.

Commerce in Louisville came nearly to a halt, and the positions of a banker who could not repay his depositors and a grocer who could not pay his bills became distinctly uncomfortable. George, Jesse and John packed up their belongings and took a boat down the Ohio River to Mount Vernon, claimed their share of the smouldering mill and distillery, and set about rebuilding it. Before the end of 1838 the distillery, re-named the "Phoenix," was again producing 225 barrels of flour and 1,300 gallons of sweet mash corn liquor a day. In those days, blown bottles were still an expensive rarity so frontier whiskey was usually sold in 40-gallon barrels to saloons and country stores which would in turn fill the customer's own glass bottle or earthenware jug from the barrel.

Mount Vernon, in Posey County, Indiana, was distinctly backwoods compared to Louisville, and Catherine, with a three-year-old son and another child on the way, preferred the larger Kentucky city, as did the Fondas. As the panic subsided and economy began to recover, they went back up the river, John and George joined forces in the grocery business in Louisville, leaving younger brother Jesse in charge of the distillery.

Jesse meanwhile had continued to correspond with Hannah, a blossoming beauty back in Massachusetts. The warmth of their young love ripened despite the distance that separated them.


Jesse's daughter, Mabel, in a photograph taken in San Francisco when she was nine. My grandmother, Mabel, accompanied her father to California on one of his business trips.	George H. Moore's monument at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville. Jesse's Nephew and partner, he died in 1896.

Catherine and George Moore had a daughter, Kate, in 1839. George was too preoccupied with his family and his and John Fonda's grocery business to worry much about the distillery, which, under Jesse's management, did well. Encouraged by his new-found success, Jesse wrote Seth Clapp and asked for Hannah's hand, was accepted and returned to Worcester to claim his bride.

The marriage records in Holden, Massachusetts, note that on Aug. 15, 1839, Hannah B. Clapp of Paxton, Massachusetts, was married to Jesse Moore of Louisville. The newlyweds returned to Mount Vernon, traveling more than a thousand arduous miles along the National Road to Wheeling and down the Ohio River to their new home. The following year, 1840, they had a daughter they named Emily Clapp Moore. Three years later a cholera epidemic swept through Mount Vernon, and Hannah died.

How Jesse managed to raise Emily over the next seven years we do not know. Perhaps his sister-in-law, Catherine, helped care for the girl. We do know that in 1843, Daniel McMullen of Louisville, bought a 20 percent interest in the Phoenix distillery and that Jesse bought a 40 percent share from his brother that same year, giving him and McMullen control of the enterprise. By 1848, five years later, however, McMullen and Jesse sold their interests in the Mount Vernon distillery and returned to Louisville.

George J. Moore disposed of his remaining 40 percent interest in the Phoenix distillery in July of 1850. During that same summer Jesse, who badly needed a mother for his daughter, retraced his steps to Massachusetts and wooed and on Aug. 21, 1850, married Hannah's sister, Lucy Ann Clapp, in the same Congregational Church in Holden, Massachusetts, where he and Hannah had taken their vows 11 years earlier. By Sept. 25, 1850, Jesse, Lucy Ann and Emily were back in Louisville, living in rooms at the American Exchange Hotel.

The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in California finally ended the long period of stagnation as specie began to flood into the American economy. Jesse and his partner Daniel McMullen set themselves up at 503 South Main St. in Louisville as confectioners, purveyors of sugar, candy, cakes, wines and liquors. Gradually, their advertising shows that they shifted their emphasis toward liquid refreshment until by 1859 the business was entirely "fine bourbon whiskey," and McMullen left the firm to become a partner in the Louisville Sawmill Co.

Several authorities relate that in 1853, Jesse and Daniel Grigsby bought a small distillery with a three-pot wooden still near Lebanon, Kentucky, about 60 miles south of Louisville, to supply their customers. Jesse brought his whiskey, and others to be blended with it, to quarters near the riverfront on Louisville's "Whiskey Row," where he rectified it, reducing its proof from 160 to a drinkable 100. He marketed it first to local saloons and hotels in Louisville, but soon extended his reach to towns up and down the Ohio River. He had become a good judge of fine whiskey and was adept at selling his wares as premium aged bourbon, a far smoother drink than the red-eye, rot-gut that was the common drink in most American saloons at the time.

In 1852, Jesse's second cousin, B.P. Moore, left Connecticut to make his fortune in the California Gold Rush. B.P. turned out to be a poor miner, but he settled in San Francisco and became a successful salesman. He could not help but notice that the per capita consumption of whiskey in the gold fields of the Sierra and the fleshpots of San Francisco was prodigious, several times that of drinkers in New England and even Kentucky. We believe that B.P. Moore persuaded Jesse to market his whiskey in California. Jesse began to ship barrels of his liquor to San Francisco by sea from New Orleans around Cape Horn, a long, arduous and expensive route.

A typhoid epidemic hit Louisville in 1856, and Lucy Ann fell ill and died, leaving Jesse once more with a daughter to care for, but this time a blooming 16 year old. We believe that he took Emily back to Worcester and left her in the care of her grandfather, Seth, (her grandmother, Betsy Clapp having died in 1845).

By the late 1850s, Jesse was making good money and he traveled East several times to keep an eye on Emily. On one of those trips he met a refined young woman, Frances Paine Melcher, who was in Worcester with her architect brother, Richard T.D. Melcher. She was the 28-year-old daughter of Samuel Melcher III, a noted architect and housewright of Brunswick, Maine, the builder of most of the early buildings of Bowdoin College and of numerous sea captains' homes now on the National Register of Historic Places. Jesse and Frances were married in 1858 and returned to Louisville to live.

Despite his attempts to keep an eye on Emily, she married Henry Stowe, a clerk, on July 23, 1857, a marriage Jesse apparently did not approve of. Emily and Henry moved into rented rooms with his widowed mother. It was not the marriage the successful distiller would have wished for his daughter.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, Jesse's business flourished, but the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861 unsettled his world. Within a few weeks the Confederates closed the Mississippi to Northern trade, shutting off the route to his lucrative California market, which was not to re-open until the summer of 1863. Even then, Southern raiders continued to prey upon the ships that carried his bourbon to San Francisco.

Whiskey was still much in demand in the East — it is even possible that Gen. U.S. Grant's usual drink was Jesse Moore Bourbon. Grant was headquartered for a time at Louisville's Galt House Hotel, and the story goes that when people complained to President Abraham Lincoln that Grant drank too much, he replied, "Well, find me the brand Grant drinks. He fights. I want to serve it to my other generals."

Kentucky was a border state, and Louisville was dangerously near the front lines. Gov. Beriah Magoffin, a Southern sympathizer, tried to keep the state neutral, but the legislature voted to join the Union. William T. Sherman moved a Union army into Louisville to hold it for the North. Two Confederate armies attempted to take the city and were repulsed, but Confederate Col. John Hunt Morgan of Morgan's Raiders made four forays through Kentucky, burning the courthouse in Lebanon and possibly Jesse's distillery there. Louisville became such an uncomfortable place for Fannie Moore and her young sons, Edward and George, that in 1864 she and Jesse packed up their belongings and "refugeed" back east to Worcester. There, for the huge price of $8,000, they bought the most expensive home in town, the Draper Ruggles House, a Greek Revival mansion.

Jesse's brother, George J. Moore, stayed in Kentucky; in fact his son, George Henry Moore, had been working in Jackson, Mississippi, as a bookkeeper before the war and became an enthusiastic Confederate. He joined the 39th Mississippi Infantry and wrote his mother in 1861 that "any rebel can whip 50 Yankees."

There had been no Federal excise tax on liquor since the War of 1812, but one was imposed in 1862 to help pay the costs of the Civil War. During the war, Jesse's employees kept an eye on his whiskey business, for despite his absence it stayed in operation. In 1865, George Henry Moore returned from the Union prison camp at Johnson's Island, Ohio, where he had been interned after being captured at the battle of Alatoona, Georgia, and worked for a time for his father, who was then a hat dealer. In 1866, George Henry Moore joined Jesse in his whiskey operation.

That year, George Henry Moore married Catherine Deweese, and they eventually had five children including a daughter, Jessie, and a son, Sherley.

In 1865, the Mercantile Bureau, R.G. Dun & Co., listed Jesse for the first time, giving him an excellent credit rating as a wholesale grocer. A year later, Dun listed him as a "dealer in fine whiskies." By 1870, Dun would give Jesse its highest credit rating and estimate his net worth at more than $100,000.

Jesse bought or built at least two other distilleries nearer Louisville between 1859 and 1875. In that latter year, he disposed of his interest in the Grigsby distillery in Marion County to J.W. Dant, who became one of his suppliers. With his nephew, George, Jesse built a new distillery, the "Belmont," followed by the "Astor" and the "Nutwood," at 17th and Lexington (now Breckinridge Street) in Louisville, to help supply the growing West Coast demand that followed the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869.

B.P. Moore may have put Jesse in touch with an immigrant bartender from Serbia, Elia Chielovich, who became the Moore representative in San Francisco to handle the demand the railroad generated.

Chielovich ordered Jesse Moore's Kentucky Bourbon in standard 40-gallon barrels and filtered, rectified it, cut its proof and bottled it in his own bottles, made at the Pacific Glass Works on Mariposa Street in San Francisco. Those bottles carried both the Moore and Chielovich names.

The chief competition in San Francisco for the Kentucky bourbon trade was John H. Cutter's fine Bourbon whiskey, shipped to his agent, Anson P. Hotaling, in distinctive 50-gallon barrels. Walter Hoge, Chielovich's manager, decided it would be cheaper to ship the Moore whiskey in the same style of high-class 50-gallon cooperage and asked the Louisville office to have barrels made that resembled Cutter's.

Hotaling fumed, but lived with the new Jesse Moore barrels for two years, by which time John Cutter's Kentucky partner, C.P. Moorman, had bought out the old man and began to run the business himself. Hotaling persuaded Moorman to sue, and his attorneys, William Paterson and Alexander Campbell, took Hoge to Federal District Court in San Francisco. (Case # 9,783). They argued that the distinctive Cutter barrel was a part of their registered trademark.

Federal Judge Lorenzo Sawyer disagreed, finding that a trademark is a distinctive mark, that the Moore and Cutter marks were not alike and the container the whiskey was shipped in was not part of the trademark. He dismissed the complaint, with costs, on Oct. 21, 1871.

The Moores, however, became unhappy with Chielovich's sales efforts. Another easterner, Henry B. Hunt, worked in the San Francisco office, and when George H. Moore traveled to California to check on the business he decided Hunt was the better salesman and sacked Chielovich, who went to Reno, where he built and operated a famous saloon.

George sent his brother-in-law, Cornelius Deweese Jr., to California in 1875 to watch over the agency there. Deweese, his wife, Jennie and son, Arthur, lived in San Francisco through 1887 and Jesse and George visited annually to be sure things were being run well. In 1876, they took Hunt in as a partner in the West Coast operation, and it became known as Jesse Moore-Hunt Co. Jesse took his nine-year-old daughter, Mabel, along with him on his 1881 trip and she had her picture taken by a photographer at 124 1/2 Front Street in San Francisco.

In 1890, English emigrant Thomas Kirkpatrick became the manager of the San Francisco office, then at 404 Front Street, later at 517 Devisadero. The most familiar of the Jesse Moore bottles are, in fact, impressed with the name "Jesse Moore-Hunt." Credit bureau R.G. Dun first rated Jesse Moore-Hunt Co. in 1878, giving it its highest credit rating and estimating its capital as nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

George J. Moore died in 1875. He had tried a variety of businesses including groceries, hats and management of a lottery, none of which were as successful as Jesse's bourbon. When it came time to bury his brother, Jesse had to buy a cemetery lot at Louisville's fancy Cave Hill Cemetery. At the same time he moved Lucy Ann to Cave Hill from her resting place in a little burial ground on the outskirts of the city.

In addition to the California and Nevada trade, Jesse, George and Hunt built up a thriving export business out of San Francisco, with considerable "case goods" being shipped to the Sandwich Islands, later to be known as Hawaii. After Hawaii became a U.S. territory in 1900, the import duties on whiskey were eliminated and Lovejoy & Co., at 19 Nuuann Street in Honolulu, became their Hawaiian wholesaler.

Jesse Moore & Co. became the largest seller of aged Bourbon and rye whiskey in the United States in the later years of the 19th century, with their "AA" blend their most popular product. Jesse Moore Bourbon was advertised from coast to coast. Both Jesse and his nephew became wealthy.

By 1885 R.G. Dun calculated Jesse Moore & Co. as worth well over $1 million and gave that company an "unlimited" credit rating. By then, George and Jesse had taken in Max Selliger, an ambitious young salesmen, as a partner to help run the distilleries and Moore - Selliger & Co. was rated separately by R.G. Dun (today's Dun & Bradstreet Co.) as worth nearly $1 million, also with "unlimited" credit. George and Max took another young man, Nathan Hofheimer , into the firm in 1879, but in 1884 Hofheimer left Louisville to seek his fortune in New York.

George H. Moore built a fine new mansion at Fourth and Breckinridge in Louisville and bought a summer home in Chautauqua, New York, where in the summer he and his family took in the famous lectures from politicians and philosophers. Their sons, Sherley and James, took the Grand Tour to Europe and George himself assembled an expensive collection of art by famous painters. In Worcester, Massachusetts, Jesse bought a 10-acre tract near his own mansion on Catharine Street and there built homes for the five children he had with Frances. He bought an office building in downtown Worcester and a rental "three-decker" on the west side of the city.

Frances preferred to live in genteel New England, rather than the more frontier-like Louisville, and Jesse never moved back to Kentucky, though he traveled frequently to Louisville and to San Francisco. While the bourbon whiskey trade was an honorable one in Kentucky, back in Massachusetts Temperance was popular and the Anti-Saloon League was a growing power. Jesse never let his whiskey business get into public print at home, and allowed to his neighbors that he had "retired" from the liquor business. Nevertheless, he kept controlling interests in both Jesse Moore & Co. and Jesse Moore-Hunt Co.

In the late 1880s, American distilleries began to produce more whiskey than they could sell, particularly the distillers of immediate-use liquor that was not aged, A group of distillers from north of the Ohio River — Illinois and Nebraska — got together to form a "trust" to limit production and raise prices. The bourbon men of Kentucky and Tennessee never joined that combination, finding that their product was a premium drink that brought a higher price and was not as over-produced as the liquor the northern distilleries were making. Nevertheless, there were attempts to consolidate even the bourbon producers. For Jesse Moore the idea was a mixed blessing. As a marketer, low prices from the distillers who sold him their product was a good thing, and his Louisville distilleries themselves were only a part of his operation.

In 1890, Nathan Hofheimer, who had gone into the international liquor trade in New York, put together a syndicate of English investors who came up with $11 million to try to buy and combine the best Kentucky distilleries.

Two years later, Jesse decided it was time to retire. He was 80 years old and had had a long and profitable career. According to papers he left, Jesse sold his shares in Jesse Moore & Co. to Hofheimer's group for $600,000, though George H. Moore and Max Selliger retained the controlling interest.

George's daughter, Jessie Moore and Jesse's son, George D. Moore fell in love and were married in 1894, in one of the largest weddings in Louisville's social history.

George H. Moore died, suddenly, in 1896 at the age of 61. Selliger bought most of the stock from George's widow, although Sherley Moore retained shares worth $100,000 and remained as vice-president of the firm, which was consolidated with the San Francisco operation as Jesse Moore-Hunt Co. Inc.

Jesse died in Worcester in 1898. Sherley, the last of the Louisville whiskey Moores, left the liquor business in 1901 to head a furniture company in Louisville.

Selliger ran Jesse Moore - Hunt Co. until the Volstead Act brought in Prohibition in 1918. The San Francisco operation was closed after its manager, Edward J. Baker, was indicted in Washington State for participating in a bootlegging operation with Seattle Mayor Hiram C. Gill.

Selliger kept the shuttered distilleries at 17th and Breckinridge in Louisville in good repair, and when Repeal came in in 1933 he sold both the distilleries and the Jesse Moore name to Leo Gerngoss and Emil Schwartzhaupt who renamed the facilities "Bernheim," combining them with several properties they had bought from I.W. Bernheim. They in turn sold all of the distilleries to Schenley, which was acquired by United Distillers in 1987. United rebuilt the facility in 1992, using the old Moore stills.

The former Moore "Belmont" Distillery still exists as the "Bernheim" operation of Heaven Hill, which bought the plant in 1999, following a disastrous fire at its Bardstown, Kentucky, distillery and warehouse. Bourbon whiskey historian, the late Sam Cecil, who once worked as a manager for J.W. Dant, recalled that he last bottled a few cases of whiskey with Jesse Moore labels in 1953, just to keep the trademark alive.

Jesse's three sons and two daughters lived in Worcester until the middle of the 20th century. Son George D. Moore was graduated from Harvard, studied in Europe, became a professor of chemistry and an inventor. Frank A. Moore went to M.I.T., became an architect in New York and designed houses for the Morgans, Vanderbilts and Astors. Jesse's youngest daughter, Mabel Reynolds Moore, married the Rev. Eliot White in 1904 and became my grandmother. Edward Moore, Jesse's oldest child, became part owner of Carson-Pirie-Scott, the Chicago department store, and was the last of Jesse's children to die, in 1952.

The only place that the name of Jesse Moore still appears is on the collectible bottles in which his fine bourbon whiskey was sold.

This much I know about Jesse and his business, but I am certain there is more to be learned. I am most interested in hearing from anyone who has any information about great-grandfather Jesse Moore and his excellent liquor.

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