The drink’s the thing

As the city that gave birth to Prohibition, Portland has had a long and storied relationship with booze

By Jess Kilby

PAPA'S GOT A BRAND NEW LAW: Neal Dow, the father of Prohibition, is responsible for America's first abstinence legislation: the Maine Law.

Walking the rowdy length of Fore Street on a typical Friday night, one would never guess that Portland was the first dry city in America, or that the father of Prohibition called Maine home. A state with 25 thriving microbreweries, an annual beer festival that’s eight years strong, and a population that consumes more than 90,000 cases of Allen’s coffee brandy a year hardly seems like a fitting birthplace for a nationwide anti-alcohol movement.

But if you take a few wobbly steps backward and look at the big picture, it makes perfect sense. From Portland’s earliest days, this — like most colonial outposts — was a hard-drinking town. Beer was a safer bet than the untreated water supply, and besides that, most settlers were eager to take the edge off an existence that was fraught with uncertainty.

The alcohol culture was pervasive: Children drank with their parents; ministers drank before giving sermons; workers took grog breaks twice a day, swilling rum in much the same manner that modern workers knock back a cup of coffee.

Out of this culture of excess came, eventually, a longing for moderation. Fueled largely by women, religious leaders, and physicians, the early temperance movement argued that alcohol was not always a medicine. Moreover, temperance advocates fought to prove that drunken excess often led to domestic violence, and that tipsy workers were not good workers.

In Maine, this fledgling movement grew in fits and starts: “temperance unions” (lobbying organizations) were formed, politicians like Prohibition-founder Neal Dow came into power, and in 1851 the country’s first law outlawing the manufacture or sale of alcohol was

passed right here in Maine. With as much opposition as there was support, Maine had become the first dry state. (Though, even at the height of enforcement, we were still a bit soggy around the edges.)

By the second decade of the twentieth century, 27 states had followed Maine’s lead in passing Prohibition laws. But the momentum was growing for some thing much more drastic, and in 1920, national Prohibition went into effect. The rest of the country quickly became acquainted with a vocabulary that Mainers were already fluent in: rum running, bootlegging, speakeasies. For 13 years, not a single drop of legal booze flowed in the United States — unless it was prescribed by a doctor.

But when national Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the state that led the country into forced abstinence wasted little time in repealing its own anti-alcohol laws. Bars and taverns flung open their rusty-hinged doors, and though the temperance movement bemoaned what it saw as a most unfortunate regression, Mainers — for the first time in 82 years — proceeded to get legally sauced. And we haven’t stopped since.

THE RUM ROOM: Portland's illicit-booze lock-up.

Water, water, everywhere

On December 26, 1620, the 102 passengers of the Mayflower came ashore at Plymouth, Massachusetts. The party, which was bound for Virginia, cut their journey short for several reasons. One was the weather — the other was a shortage of their most vital supply.

In a famous and oft-quoted journal entry, Mayflower passenger William Bradford explains: “We could not take time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our beer.”

As historians have noted, the colonists had no more faith in the purity of drinking water in the New World than they did in the Old. Beer was a safer substitute, chiefly because brewing beer required boiling water, which killed most dangerous water-borne microbes. (The colonists likely never made the connection, other than noting that water made them sick and beer didn’t — at least not if you drank it in moderation.)

High-calorie beer was also an important dietary supplement, especially in a time and place where food was often scarce. (Ponder that the next time you open your fridge and there’s nothing in there but beer and mustard.) So it’s not surprising to learn that women were usually the brew masters of the family, and that operating a tavern was one of the few socially acceptable professions for a woman in early America.

The history of booze in Maine December, 1620: FIRST BEER RUN IN THE NEW WORLD The Mayflower pulls into port in Plymouth instead of Virginia, because supplies on board are running low — especially the beer. In the days before refrigeration, beer was used as a substitute for drinking water, as well as a nutritional supplement to ward off scurvy and beriberi.   1639: FIRST KNOWN TOAST IN MAINE “Richmond Island settler John Josselyn writes admiringly of Captain Thomas Wannerton, ‘who drank to me a pint of kill-devil Rhum at a draught.’” (Courtesy Maine Historical Society)   1650s: THE EARLY DAYS OF HOME BREWING Maine women are, by and large, the family brew masters.   1685: STILL FEELING GUILTY ABOUT THAT WHOLE SMALL-POX THING Maine taverns are prohibited from selling alcohol to Native Americans.   1700: ITêS OFFICIAL Yankees are drinking more rum than beer. “New England Rum” is distilled in Boston, and later Falmouth.   1775: GIRLS KICK ASS The widow Alice Greele saves her famous Congress St. tavern from the flames of British bombardment.   1804: THE ORIGIN OF MIGHTY THINGS Neal Dow, the father of Prohibition, is born in Portland.   1820: AND THEY STILL DONêT SELL BOOZE ON SUNDAYS Maine separates from Massachusetts but retains the Bay State’s liquor laws, which require sellers of alcoholic beverages to be licensed.   1830: ANIMAL HOUSE According to modern studies, annual per capita alcohol consumption in America reaches an all-time high: more than five gallons of hard liquor per person.   1834: HE DRANK WINE, THOUGH The State Temperance Society is formed in Maine; Governor Samuel Smith presides.   1851: THE TURNING POINT With much opposition, Neal Dow pushes the “Maine Law” through the state Legislature, which outlaws the production, transport and selling of liquor. Maine becomes the first dry state in the country.   June 2, 1855: PóG MO THóIN Pro-liquor opponents of Neal Dow, many of them Irish, converge upon City Hall and incite a riot, claiming that the mayor violated his own law by purchasing booze. One man is killed and several others injured in the Portland Rum Riot.   1874: A DIFFERENT SORT OF FEMINISM The Women’s Christian Temperance Union is founded in Ohio. Legendary activist Lillian Stevens, of Stroudwater, will be the second national president of the WCTU.   1905: CRACKING DOWN The state legislature creates a Liquor Enforcement Commission with extraordinary powers of search and seizure, no warrant needed – giving Maine’s Prohibition laws serious muscle. Rum running and the illicit booze trade picks up speed.   January 16, 1920: AND THEN THERE WAS NEAR BEER National Prohibition, in the form of the Volstead Act, goes into effect. The rest of the country becomes as “dry” as Maine.   1920-1933: “PROHIBITION IS BETTER THAN NO LIQUOR AT ALL” (Will Rogers) Bootlegging, rum running, and speakeasy enter the national vocabulary. Famous rum-running boats like the Grey Ghost, modified for speed and silence, become a familiar sight off the coast of Maine.   December 5, 1933: HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN National Prohibition repealed with the ratification of the Twenty-First Amendment. To this day, the Eighteenth Amendment, which made Prohibition possible, remains the only constitutional amendment ever to be repealed.   1985: AND THEN THERE WAS REAL BEER The state legislature passes “An Act Concerning the Licensing of Small Maine Breweries,” making it legal for microbrewers to set up shop. The next year, Maine's first modern brewer, David Geary, launches D.L. Geary Brewing Company.   2002: A BALANCE OF SORTS Maine has 25 thriving microbreweries, 76 dry towns, a WCTU chapter with 26 members, a beer festival that’s been eight years running, and at least 65 damn good happy hour specials.

In Portland, in fact, the most famous tavern of the Revolutionary era (when Portland was still called Falmouth Neck) was owned by Mrs. Alice Greele. Featured as stop #19 on the Portland Women’s History Trail’s Munjoy Hill Walk, the tavern’s modern-day location would be at the corner of Congress and Hampshire streets. As Trail historians note, the tavern — and its owner — hold a proud place in Portland’s history.

“A plaque commemorates Widow Alice Greele’s Tavern, a popular gathering place in Portland from 1735 to 1775,” the Trail description explains. “ . . . As tensions grew between the colonists and England, the tavern became a location for heated discussions. Greele gained heroic status when she defended her tavern against the flames of a British attack in 1776.

“Because her building was one of the few public buildings to survive, it was used for the county court sessions until 1787, when a new courthouse was built. The building was a landmark for more than one hundred years.”

Heroes and landmarks aside, alcohol consumption in Maine skyrocketed during the 17th, 18th, and early-19th centuries. W.J. Rorabaugh, author of The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1998), contends that per capita consumption of distilled spirits (the hard stuff: rum, whisky, gin, and brandy) hit its peak in 1830, with the average American quaffing more than five gallons a year. (Which, for the sake of perspective, is less than two 1.5-ounce shots per day.)

Historians note that children drank with their parents at daily meals, and there’s no question that the grog break was an intrinsic part of the work day. Portland minister and state Senate chaplain Reverend Elijah Kellogg (1813-1901) attests to this: “At 11 o’clock on each day the bell would ring, the masons come down from the ladders, the joiners drop their tools, and all would partake of rum, salt-fish, and crackers,” he says.

Neal Dow, the Portland-born firebrand who ultimately became the father of Prohibition, notes in his memoirs that the shopkeepers of his youth would put open bins of booze out on the dusty streets, dipper attached, so passers-by could quench their thirst.

“Children too,” marvels local historian Herb Adams. “Horses drank out of those tubs.”

As preferences in Maine shifted from beer to rum, a new trade industry with the West Indies was born: lumber for molasses. Adams notes that this trade in “shook” — the slats, supports, and staves used for making crates and barrels — was a profitable, circular exchange.

“[It was called] shook, because I think you had to shook them up like you do a deck of cards — square it off to pack them all in the hold,” he explains. “And of course we had the timber, and so you made shook. And the disassembled barrels and boxes would be shipped to the Indies, where they would be used to load up rum, or molasses for rum. And the distilleries were very busy here.”

So busy, in fact, that Maine Historical Society researchers say we were drinking more rum than beer by 1700. “New England Rum” was distilled in Boston, they note, and later in Falmouth. In addition, apple orchards that had matured a decade after settlement were now yielding a potent by-product: cider.

This switch to harder booze, coupled with the persistent notion that alcohol was both a medicine and a nutritional supplement, was tempered only slightly by the realization that outright drunkenness was detrimental to society. By 1685, it was illegal for Maine taverns to serve intoxicants to Native Americans, a people historically troubled by alcohol addiction. But it would be another 100 years before the concept of temperance gained enough support in Maine to truly be called a movement.

GOT MOXIE? These Green River whiskey bottles, masquerading as cases of Maine's most famous soda, were seized at the Yarmouth Inn in 1927.

Laws and riots

In late December of 1908, the Portland Evening Express ran a series of articles chronicling “Maine’s fight against the liquor traffic” during the early 1800s.

“In 1830,” a December 28 article states, “there were 13 distilleries in Maine, which produced one million gallons yearly. In 1833 there were 500 licensed dealers, and nearly as many licensed taverns, besides great number unlicensed.”

The article notes that the state population was “then about 400,000, yet ‘there were 10,000 persons accustomed to become beastly drunk, 7000 of them heads of family and 500 of them women, 100 convicts in the State prison, 200 in jails, 69 in 100 towns dying of delirium tremens, and 1500 paupers made so by drink.’ ”

Though the article identifies its sources only as “reports, written by men contemporary with the times,” it concludes that the claims “were not probably exaggerated.”

By 1908, the temperance movement was an organized and respected force in Maine, and Prohibitionist sentiments had clearly leaked into Portland’s daily newspaper, as well: “Even in those early days,” the December 28 article says of the previous century, “it was recognized that the selling of liquor was a sin and a crime, and the question was asked, ‘This being so, what right has the legislature to license the traffic?’ ”

Towards answering that very question, the State Temperance Society was founded in 1834, with Governor Samuel E. Smith presiding. Fourteen years later, the Temperance Watchmen of Durham were organized. And in 1851, when Neal Dow was narrowly elected as mayor of Portland, he answered the crucial question of license.

That year, Dow used his political leverage, his intimidating personality, and a cartload of petition signatures to ramrod the country’s first Prohibition law through the state legislature.

“He was a remarkable, fire-eating orator,” Adams says. “He could ignite a crowd.” (And much coercion was likely needed. Not everybody shared Dow’s absolutist call for abstinence — even the good governor was a known wine drinker.)

Dow’s legacy, the Maine Law, was formally named “An Act for the Suppression of Tippling Shops.” The law, which made the production, sale, and transport of alcohol illegal (except for medical or “mechanical” purposes), was a significant change in tactic for the temperance camp. Rather than begging the sodden public to change their ways, anti-alcohol advocates had made their own morals the law. Prohibition was born.

Neal Dow was “neutral about very few things,” Adams says, “and very few men were neutral about him.”

The bare-knuckle prize fighter — a non-practicing Quaker who’d been asked to leave the order because of his temper — had plenty of enemies in Portland. He felt a particular animosity towards the city’s Irish immigrants, whom he saw as the most intemperate of foreigners — and the Irish returned the animosity in kind. They weren’t alone in their dislike for Dow or his politics.

On the evening of June 2, 1855, a mob of the mayor’s detractors converged upon City Hall. They gathered under the pretense that Dow had violated his own liquor law by storing an illegal cache of booze in the building’s basement. In reality, the liquor had been purchased by the city for sale to authorized agents such as pharmacists, and the protestors knew this. They were arguing a technicality — that the purchase hadn’t gone through the Aldermen, as required by city ordinances — but they were really there to “liberate” the alcohol and humiliate Dow.

Tensions grew over the course of the evening, as is wont to happen when angry mobs converge on government buildings. Records of the event indicate that some 3000 people turned out for the show, though it’s unclear how many of them actually participated in the shouting, stone-throwing, and shoving that lasted more than six hours. Ultimately, Dow ordered both the police and the Rifle Guard to fire, and at least one person (“an Irishman,” the June 4, 1855 Portland Advertiser simply notes) was killed. Several others were badly wounded.

MEGA-MICRO: Shipyard Brewing Company, founded in 1994, is Maine's largest brewery.

Good books and fast boats

Dow’s opponents met some success with their rum riot; during the ensuing trial, Dow was tried not for murder, but for violating the Maine Law. The embarrassing, high-profile trial dealt a considerable blow to Dow’s political career, and in 1858 he served his last year as mayor of Portland.

By then, however, the damage (in the eyes of anti-Prohibitionists) was done. The same year Dow stepped down from office, a state-wide referendum to repeal the Maine Law failed. In 1885, the state constitution was amended, and brewing, drinking and selling booze became even more illegal. And in 1905, the Liquor Enforcement Commission was created, giving Maine’s anti-alcohol laws some serious muscle.

As Adams recalls, liquor deputies were empowered by law to enter a house without a warrant, seize all property without a warrant, arrest anybody without a charge, and hold anybody without a charge.

“It had real teeth,” he says, “and the public at large didn’t like the bite.” Maine’s stringent liquor laws, now that they were being enforced, gave Maine “all the trappings of the Roaring Twenties in the Stumbling Seventies,” Adams notes.

Indeed, Dow’s cousin, Portland lawyer John Neal, wrote in a contemptuous 1869 essay that the Maine Law was an utter failure at improving social ills. He taunts Dow for having said that “the watchhouse is now used to keep seized liquors in, instead of drunkards.” Neal replies, “And yet, at this very time, September, 1851, there were no less than 48 persons confined in the watchhouse — three for larceny and 45 for drunkenness!”

John Neal tartly describes the many ways Portlanders got around the liquor laws: “Grog shops and Irish boarding houses and Negro shanties where liquors were kept in oil cans and pickle jars, under beds and in outhouses, were multiplied to a frightful extent.

“The most ingenious evasions were resorted to. Liquors were sold in the shape of books, made of tin, painted and lettered with some attractive title, such as ‘Drops of Comfort,’ ‘Consolation for the Afflicted,’ and ‘Hints for the Ungodly.’ ”

Neal describes drams made in the shape of porcelain eggs, and walking sticks designed to hold up to a quart of brandy. He skewers his fellow lawyers as hypocrites for trying temperance cases while visibly hungover. And he cringes to think that, because of his cousin’s politics, Maine will “become a laughing-stock for all generations.”

Neal needn’t have worried about Maine’s reputation. Only a few short years after he penned his frustrated essay, the temperance movement had reached a national scale. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded in Ohio in 1874, with Maine chapters organizing immediately. (Lillian Stevens, of Stroudwater, would become the second national president of the WCTU.) The Anti-Saloon League was formed in 1893. By 1918, thanks mostly to the lobbying efforts of these two powerful groups, 27 more states had hopped on the Prohibition wagon.

By 1919, the required three quarters of all states had ratified the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution, which made the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages illegal. On January 16, 1920, the Volstead Act, also known as the National Prohibition Enforcement Act, went into effect.

The most noticeable effect of national Prohibition in Maine, says Adams, was “a fascinating chapter of pretty speedy traffic between Eastport and Canada.”

“All through the ’20s and early ’30s,” he says, “Maine’s coast was just a hotbed of dark crafts scooting around at night; secret signals with hooded lanterns; motherships just off the coast, offloading illegal beverages that were rowed ashore.”

“Often in very clever disguises,” he adds. “Bottles of liquor hidden in bales of cotton; in boxes labeled ‘Bibles.’ ”

A Portland Evening Express story from July 11, 1922, similar to many others from that summer, confirms the prevalence of the illicit liquor trade in Maine. The front-page headline declares: “Find Liquor Hidden in Patch of Sand,” and the article goes on to detail the discovery by the sheriff’s department of 38 quart-bottles and four gallon-jugs of moonshine whisky, buried in the sand on a farm in Scarborough. The author of the article mentions, without a whiff of irony, that the man arrested was a former member of the local police department.

The wayward ex-cop, one George Chandler, probably got six months. In a 1980 column in the Maine Sunday Telegram, Harold Boyle, recalling his Prohibition-era days as a Portland court reporter, says six months was the standard sentence for liquor violations. Boyle goes on to remember some of the more colorful highlights of the era, such as the Fore Street pharmacist with a trick tap on his soda fountain.

“If he pushed the faucet forward, it gushed out the usual carbonated water for his ice cream sodas,” Boyle writes. “If he pulled it back, out came an alcoholic drink he sold for a dollar a drink.”

Boyle recollects another Portland drug store with a secret door in the men’s room, which led to a drink-in or take-out speakeasy.

“That pharmacist got six months, too,” he wryly recalls.

A DROP OF SWEET BEER: Portland pubs like Three Dollar Deweys and The Great Lost Bear serve an endless array of suds.

Instituting the draught

By the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the repeal of national Prohibition in 1933, graciously calling it a “noble experiment,” Maine was ready to repeal as well.

“Beer Flows In Parched Maine,” cried the July 1, 1933 headline in the Portland Evening Express, when Maine, three months after national repeal, allowed 3.2 percent beer back into the state. (Full repeal for all types of booze didn’t come until December 5, with the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment.)

No less than 23 beer ads appeared in the pages of the July 1 issue of the Evening Express, including some placed by brewers who were still scrambling to catch up with repeal. “Coming! Next week!” proclaimed an ad for Old Stuyvesant.

When beer went on sale at 6 a.m. that morning, the article reports, “the first customers in Portland ordered the new brew before it had even been chilled.

“Those who have sampled the beer are unanimous in praise of its taste,” the author concludes, “and agree that it is lacking in ‘power.’ ”

Though it would take more than 50 years, Mainers would eventually have their pick of locally brewed beers that were lacking in neither taste nor power. In 1985, the state legislature passed “An Act Concerning the Licensing of Small Maine Breweries,” which made it legal — and feasible — for microbrewers to set up shop. Moreover, the law specified that brewers could produce malt-liquor beverages “containing 25 percent or less alcohol by volume” (most microbrews average between four and six percent), and helpfully suggested that brewers could list on their product labels and in their advertising “the ingredients and the product’s average percentage of the recommended daily allowances of nutritional requirements.” Just one year after the law was passed, Maine’s first modern brewer, David Geary, launched D.L. Geary Brewing Company.

Today, Maine has at least 24 more breweries, including well-known names like Allagash, Casco Bay, Gritty McDuff’s, Sebago, Shipyard, and Stone Coast brewing companies. Portland bars such as Three Dollar Deweys and The Great Lost Bear each have more than 30 beers on tap, including a dizzying selection of local brews.

Meanwhile, the “rum room” in the basement of the County Courthouse on Federal Street, replete with in-floor drains that dumped all that seized booze straight into the sewer (minus the quantities that had an occasional tendency to disappear), now houses old typewriters and lamps. In the grand foyer of the courthouse, where the building directory is engraved in stone, the words “Liquor Deputies” loom ghost-like in their gold-gilt obsolescence. (“They truly thought Prohibition would last forever,” Adams notes.)

And the Women’s Christian Temperance League, in case you were wondering, is still alive and kicking. The Portland chapter boasts a solid 26 members, who advocate for substance-abuse education in schools and communities. They are located, fittingly, at 714 Congress Street — better known as the Neal Dow House.

Bringing Prohibition back home My parents own an old house out in Cape Elizabeth, just a little ways from what’s known as Casino Beach. (Hey, no Cape-kid jokes. I didn’t grow up there.) It’s pretty cool for a number of reasons. It was built in “1920 +/-,” according to Cape Elizabeth town records, by a guy who had just fallen victim to a house fire from which he barely escaped. So he constructed the house by digging right into the hillside, assuring that every window on both floors was a window you could jump right out of if fire were to consume the house. That was pretty unlikely, however, as he’d also built the entire place out of stone. When my folks moved in four years ago, I was pretty darn envious of those low windows. Growing up, I had an intricate route of scaling the roof and shimmying down the chimney for sneaking out at night to rendezvous with my girlfriend. The Cape house would have made my adolescent life a lot less scrape-filled. Anyway, getting to the liquor-related point here, the house has another quirk we didn’t find out about until a woman showed up at my parents’ front door one day. She had grown up in the house and wanted to poke around a bit with her daughters. My younger sister was the only one around, so she didn’t think she might be casing the joint, and let her in. “Hey,” she said (or something like that), “which room is your room?” My sister indicated her room. “Wow, that’s the one with the secret room.” Now, Sis was all by herself, remember, and she didn’t want any part of opening some secret room with a sketchy woman around. And, later, when she told my parents, they didn’t know anything about any secret room. They’d only lived there about a few months, but “Surely,” they thought, “we couldn’t have missed a whole room.” They sort of forgot about the whole thing until, one night about a month later, I was over for dinner. The secret room came up and I was aghast they hadn’t investigated. I made a beeline from my chair to the room in question and started searching around. Soon, right there in the corner, I found a seam in the hardwood flooring. With a screwdriver I pried up a two-foot by two-foot square of floor and peered down. There was a ladder leading down to a dirt floor, walled in by the stone of the house’s foundation. An old, but working, light was affixed to the ceiling, and a rickety saw-horse lay at the bottom of the sloping floor. There was nothing else. Of course, there’s no way of knowing what that room was built or used for without doing some serious research, but the fact that the house is right on the water, near an easily accessible beach, and was built in 1920 makes me think it could have only been for one thing: storing illicit booze. Just think, if I had grown up in that house, I wouldn’t have had to use the hole I’d augured out in my mattress. Sam Pfeifle

Jess Kilby can be reached at jkilby@phx.com.