S7:14 - Four Roses Story Pt. 2: The Rocky Rise of a Brand (1895-1943)

Transcript

Those Northerners Ain’t So Bad
Shhhh! Be quiet, don’t let them hear you!

It was the hushed voice of 8 year old Warren, struggling to make his warning loud enough so his younger brothers Lawrence and Saunders could hear, but so they wouldn’t give away their presence to the invaders. A sound of boots on hardwood echoed from the rooms below—there were a number of strange men searching the house for something. But for what? 

At 4 ½ little Lawrence was too young to know there was a war going on outside his door. But he’d heard his pa talking about Yankees and they sounded as dangerous as the ghosts he thought lived in his closet at night.

Suddenly the door flung open, startling the three boys. Seeming to have a mind of their own, Lawrence's legs flew up, hitting the wooden supports under the bed. The three boys held their breath. The footsteps paused and Lawrence could see the shadow of two legs slowly moving across the bed skirt to the side of the bed. He felt a burning in his arms and legs and his heart felt like it was going to pump out of his chest. 

Just then an arm clutched his leg, dragging him out from his hiding place. As he tried to jerk away, he saw the huge body dressed in blue, standing over him. Shaking uncontrollably, he looked at the man’s face, a smile beginning to appear on the burly man’s face. “It’s okay, son. Don’t be afraid. We mean you no harm.”

Years later, Lawrence’s granddaughter Katherine Jones Smith, recalled how her grandfather would tell her that story. Reminding her not to judge too quickly. After all, to him Yankees were monsters, until he met the kindly soldier dressed in blue, who for a moment soothed a young boy’s fears.

Still, what he’d later hear his friends call the war of northern aggression would leave a scar on the young man, as he’d soon learn the news that his father Warner had been killed during the fierce battle for the city of Atlanta. 

The Jones boys only saving grace was their Uncle Paul, who had survived the war, and his offer to let them live with him, their Grandpa Jones and their 5 year old cousin, Lizzie.

Nephews Come of Age 
It was an item rarely seen in newspapers at the time. In the October 30, 1895 edition of the Houston Post appeared the image of a short, squat bottle of whisky with a familiar name prominently displayed: Paul Jones Pure Rye, adorned with four stars on the label. 

Printed on the bottle were the words:

"The highest grade of old-fashioned handmade sour mash whiskey produced on this continent,"

followed by the signature of the late Paul Jones Jr.

A unique feature of the bottle was its wire mesh cage and sealed cork. At a time when the Bottled-in-Bond Act was just starting to take shape in Congress, it showed the next generation of Paul Jones & Co, cognitively aware of the changes happening in the industry.

It also showed the progression of Lawrence and Saunders from scared little children under a bed, to a sales team devoted to supporting their uncle Paul’s vision, to young business leaders ready to carve their own path.

But the sudden and unexpected death of their uncle, mentor, and leader Paul Jones Jr at age 55 must have come as quite a shock. And the path ahead wouldn’t be easy. Beyond managing the wholesale business and a distillery, they had to navigate the tough waters of an industry that was succumbing to overproduction.

Initially, the brothers appeared interested in maintaining the status quo, adding a railroad spur to the J.G. Mattingly Distillery, while selling and promoting both Paul Jones Rye and Four Roses. But with an oversaturation of Bourbon in the market and with a branch of Paul Jr’s old nemesis, the Whiskey Trust, buying up every Kentucky distillery they could get their hands on—the decision was made to let go of the Bourbon distillery and stick to the sourced product that had served their wholesale business well for so many years—rye whiskey, first from Pennsylvania and now more and more from Maryland. As the 19th century came to a close, Four Roses was about to take a backseat to Paul Jones’ Four Star Rye.

The Inconvenient Years
Does it surprise you that it was so easy for the Jones brothers to step away from the Four Roses brand?

It’s no surprise modern marketing wants you to believe that the Four Roses brand was the star of the show in these early days—after all, touting the legacy of the now defunct Paul Jones Four Star rye doesn’t exactly sell bottles of Four Roses Bourbon. But this early decision in Lawrence and Saunders leadership shows that Four Roses wasn’t yet the name that was carrying the company. Paul Jones had a legacy and that legacy was rye, so Four Star was seen by the brothers as a way to weather the storm.

The first decade of the 20th century would also show signs that under Lawrence’s leadership, Maryland rye was clearly a passion, not Kentucky Bourbon, as some have touted. This fact came clear thanks to an incident at the Seelbach Hotel in 1906. It seems the editor of the Lexington Herald had questioned the Paul Jones Co’s touting of their product as Kentucky whiskey, when it was really rectified whiskey from Maryland. Jones approached the editor, made his displeasure known, and then threw a suckerpunch at the man. The dust up was soon forgotten, but this is strong evidence that Lawrence was committed to sourcing quality Maryland rye, as he would be for the rest of his life.

Another inconvenient narrative beyond the focus on rye and the stepping away from the Four Roses name, are some of the artifacts used for promoting Paul Jones at the turn of the century. Back then, it was standard fare for whiskey and beer companies to supply saloons with shot glasses, advertising tins, serving trays, mirrors, playing cards, calendars, and artwork designed to keep their brands front of mind with their customers. But sometimes, these images that were common in that era, create questions for modern viewers.

In the case of Paul Jones & Co, one of the more concerning pieces was artwork, commissioned in 1901 from F. Tuchfarber Co. of Cincinnati, Ohio, for an advertising tin. Titled The Temptation of St. Anthony, it depicts three Black figures in front of a cabin: One stands holding a bottle of Paul Jones whiskey with a knowing smile, another stands with a massive slice of watermelon, while in-between a figure is on their knees appears lost in temptation, not knowing which way to turn. It is a play off of the religious tale of St. Anthony fighting off the temptations of the world. To modern eyes, the imagery is jarring, particularly because of its use of the watermelon trope and the cartoonish caricature of the people depicted.

It is easy to draw conclusions about the intentions of the company from this artwork.

Obviously the company was willing to use racial caricatures to promote their product. What it misses is that this was a time in American popular culture where these types of caricatures of Black people were common not only in advertisements, but also in sheet music, stage productions (including on Broadway and in minstrel shows), and newspapers. 

This comfort level with bigoted imagery is one of those hard lessons worth learning. What it shows is how easily harmful ideas can be normalized by newspapers and advertisers that they gain acceptance and become mainstream. The lingering effects of the ignorance of this era became so ingrained in the culture that by 1927 audiences had no issue with a white performer Al Jolson, singing in Blackface in the first talking motion picture The Jazz Singer. 

That Four Roses has let this advertisement disappear from their story makes sense—this is a hard conversation for a marketing firm to have. Still, I include a mention of it here, because as a researcher, I think its important for us to look through the historical lens dispassionately, not with a goal of casting blame, but instead to see if there are any greater lessons to be learned or element of whiskey history we’ve been ignoring. The uncovering of the Uncle Nearest story, while uncomfortable at first, has opened our eyes to a wider story of American whiskey. Perhaps this lesson can show us how societies can lose their way, simply by following the popular trends in marketing and media.

Survivalists in a Rising Storm
While Lawrence’s fist throwing episode showed a man passionate about his whiskey and its integrity, it may also punctuate the growing tensions building around the business. The first half of the 1900s centered around expansion with the company adding another floor to its Main Street location. Then the brothers enlisted the services of architect H. Probst, the man who designed the Seelbach Hotel, to construct the Paul Jones Building, a 12-story Richardsonian Romanasque style office building that would diversify their holdings. 

But the world around them seemed to not want to play along. As soon as they signed the contracts for the building, the Kentucky legislature threatened to impose a 1 ¼ cent per gallon tax on rectified spirits. Lawrence and three other firms purchased land across the Ohio River in case they needed to leave the state. He and Saunders even discussed packing up the whole operation and moving to Baltimore. Then a hurricane that had been building over the subject of food and spirits adulteration became headlines with Congress stepping in to create the Pure Food and Drug Act. Whereas bottles of Paul Jones Four Star Rye once touted “Handmade Sour Mash” now the language had to defend the company’s reputation with the words, “a blend Guaranteed under the pure food Act of Congress, approved June 30, 1906.” 

Markets were slipping away as well as the Anti-Saloon League and Women’s Christian Temperance Union were drying up their old markets, as between 1907 and 1909, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, and then Tennessee all went into some form of statewide prohibition. To top it all off, Saunders was now unable to carry on his day to day duties after being struck with paralysis.

It’s easy to see how Lawrence could be overwhelmed by all that was going on around him. It might have been time to consider shutting down the business. But he had a secret weapon in his midst, the creative mind of one of his executives, Samuel C. Miller.

A native of New Albany, Indiana, just across the river, Miller began his career in the grocery business, founding the Quaker Maid grocery chain, a firm Sauders later invested in. In 1893, Miller joined the Paul Jones Company as an executive and in 1900, invented a mechanized bottle filler that replaced the old method of filling bottles by funnel. 

With the rise of temperance and the closing of southern markets to direct sales, Miller noticed that Tennessee distilleries like George Dickel and Jack Daniel’s were moving their plants into Hopkinsville, KY, taking advantage of interstate commerce rules that allowed them to take orders from their old customers in Tennessee and ship them whiskey through mail order. With old stocks of 14 year old Four Roses whiskey on hand, Miller established the Small Grain Distilling Company and began shipping whiskey to their old customers in the south who knew the Four Roses name. 

It was a scheme that worked well until Congress shut down the loophole in 1913 with the Webb-Kenyon Act, which made it illegal to sell whiskey across state lines into a dry area. Still, the Small-Grain Distilling Company remained open, servicing what states it could, it remained a lifeline, during a time of uncertainty. 

Meanwhile, Saunders' health continued to decline. For 8 long years he suffered as a shut-in. And unlike the death of Paul Sr. no one was surprised when Saunders passed away quietly at his home in March 1916. He left his wife LaBolda Barnett of Columbus, GA, 3 sons and a daughter. He was 59.

Samuel Miller’s War
It was a tune that was hard to escape in the summer of 1917, “Over there, over there…” Four days after President Wilson addressed Congress, requesting a declaration of war on Germany, George M. Cohen penned the tune that would come to define America’s entrance into what was then known as the European War.

Patriotic fever was everywhere, with men giving up the comforts of home for the trenches in Europe and women staying home to provide strength to their families. Distilleries did their part as well, producing industrial alcohol for the cause. But then, talk turned to conserving grain for the war effort. Congress turned its attention to writing a bill that would effectively shut down production of fruit and grain alcohol for beverage use. The industry lobbied against it, but their words fell on deaf ears as on August 10, 1917, the Lever Food and Fuel Act found its way to the president's desk. A particular cutting blow to distillers was that beer and wine manufacturing was still allowed at the President’s discretion—this and the resolution for a state-by-state referendum on a prohibition amendment that was being shelved til December, confirmed this was all just a backdoor to National Prohibition. On September 5, 1917, distilleries across America went silent.

A few distillers and wholesalers held out hope, including Lawrence Jones and Samuel Miller. With Saunders gone, the Paul Jones & Co reincorporated in 1918, with Miller as president, declaring their intention to manufacture, rectify, blend, buy and sell spirituous, vineous and malt liquors as a wholesaler. They brought on a third partner, William Veeneman, a man who shared Lawrence’s passion for horses. They planned to use the Small Grain Distillery Company as their distilling arm and began planning for a distillery in Louisville, using a little known loophole in the Volstead Act to continue distillation of medicinal whiskey in 1920—a loophole being used by  a couple of distillers in Pennsylvania and Maryland.

But then, Samuel Miller heard it through the grapevine that the government was about to remove the ability of wholesalers to get permits to withdraw spirits unless they were a distillery or a drug firm. He thought he was being clever by reincorporating as the Small Grain Distilling and Drug Company—but the Internal Revenue wasn’t buying it. Miller and Jones went on with business, selling 6,000 cases of whiskey to Friedman and Richards of Cincinnati for $15,000. To their shock and dismay, when they leaned on their permit to withdraw the whiskey from bond they were denied by Collector Elwood Hamilton and Prohibition Director Paul Williams. The Cincinnati firm, which had sent payment, sued Small Grain. Miller then launched a suit against the Federal government saying there was no provision in the Volstead Act which denied the right of a wholesaler to obtain a permit to tax pay, withdraw, and sell liquor. 

Miller wasn’t just fighting for Paul Jones and Small Grain, this testing of the law, if successful, would benefit wholesalers nationwide. But while a federal judge saw the suit as reasonable, he still dismissed the case. 

Sam Miller wasn’t one to take things lying down. If the feds were going to punish him as a wholesaler and deny his status as a drug company, well, the purchase of a distillery was the next step.

By purchasing capital stock in the Mattingly & Moore Distillery in Bardstown, Paul Jones & Co was now officially a manufacturer, securing the proper permits, while adding $100,000 worth of liquor to their stocks.

It was the perfect solution, for about 9 months. And then came the distillery owner’s greatest nightmare. A fire swept through Mattingly & Moore’s four whiskey warehouses, boiler room, and bottling plant. Luckily only one warehouse held whiskey—and while all 800 barrels were lost, the firm was covered by insurance. But investigators soon questioned whether there was actually any liquor in those barrels, as observers noted the blaze at the warehouse containing the whiskey barrels didn’t burn much hotter than the blaze at the three empty warehouses. Everyone knew it was a common trick of whiskey thieves to siphon off whiskey from barrels, refilling them with water to cover their tracks. Nothing was ever proven and since the warehouses themselves weren’t covered with insurance, the distillery was abandoned. 

While the 9 month experiment cleared up Small Grain and Paul Jones’ legal issues, again they were without a distillery. But it wouldn’t be long before Samuel Miller had another creative brainstorm. 

The Great Consolidation
It’s at this point in the story one of the most pervasive pieces of Kentucky Bourbon lore enters the picture—the idea that there were only six distilleries able to sell medicinal whiskey throughout prohibition and all six were in Kentucky. It’s on the back of this myth that Four Roses claims they purchased the Frankfort Distillery in 1922 to become one of those precious few providers of medicinal spirits.

What’s interesting is that, in an attempt to grab ahold of this six-medicinal license fairy tale, Four Roses might be missing an even more impactful moment in American whiskey history, provided courtesy of the President of their company.

It all centers around the rampant theft of liquor that was going on within the industry. By 1922, there were 304 warehouses scattered across the country storing liquor. For the feds, this was a logistical nightmare. Many of these distilleries were out of business. Many of the security forces left to guard these stores of whiskey were easily bribed by men like George Remus, the so-called King of the Bootleggers. Trucks arrived in the dead of the night, taking on hoses that were run into the warehouse, where liquor was siphoned off while water was used to level out the liquid weight of the barrel. It’s a problem Small Grains president Samuel Miller might have been aware of, as the Mattingly & Moore fire had not occurred yet.

A solution needed to be found. And, although contemporary records haven’t proven it as of you, Samuel Miller’s obituary claims, he was the man with the brilliant idea to solve this rampant theft—by having the government designate a small number of warehouses to serve as consolidation centers for all of the nation's whiskey.

The plan was for distilleries to transport their whiskey to one of 25 specified facilities. The law went into effect on February 17, 1922, after passing through a Treasury appropriations bill. Suddenly, the government was able to reduce their storekeeper workforce from 1,000 to eventually just one hundred. While it was a great system for the government, distillery owners who had paid bond on the liquor for years and who were being forced to pay transportation costs, wanted no part of it. They sued and took the case to the Supreme Court, but it was all in vain as the court sided with the government. 

Then, two months later, the great fire came to Mattingly & Moore. And that is when Lawrence Jones and Samuel Miller looked to Frankfort—not for medicinal licenses, but because he thought Frankfort Distillery had the best opportunity to be designated as one of the 25 coveted concentration warehouses.

This history of Frankfort Distillery has become a footnote in the story of Four Roses, but it had quite an interesting history on its own. 

Built on a horse farm at the Forks of Elkhorn Creek, 4 miles east of Frankfort, the Frankfort Distillery, also called the Mill Brook Distillery and sometimes the Baker Bros Distillery was established by Richard Baker and John D. Hinde, two horsemen with an interest in selling Kentucky Bourbon in Chicago. The distillery was a great success in its early years, making and selling 75,000 gallons of whiskey annually. The distillery’s two main brands were Old Capital and a Sour Mash copper-distilled Bourbon, said to be made of rye and barley (remember, there were no rules for Bourbon until 1936), the brand was Swastika.

Now, before you have a coronary, when the brand was established, there was no Adolph Hitler, nor was there a National Socialist party in Germany. It was the resulting treaties from World War I on that brought on conditions that fostered the growth of the NAZI party. Few Americans, even in 1922, would have had a negative view of Swatika’s trademark. In fact, back then it was seen as a symbol of good health and good fortune. 

In 1906, at the age of 80, John Hinde passed away, leaving his interest in the distillery to his 49 year old son Thomas. The distiller was George Baker, who died in a Pullman accident in 1913, replaced by D.M. Coffey. It appears the loss of George Baker, the heart and the soul of the distillery was too much and as wartime prohibition took hold Thomas Hinde and Richard Baker sold the plant, land, and equipment, valued at near $200,000 and liquidated it on January 4, 1918, receiving only $19,000 in return. The new owners sold the equipment for scrap. 

Thomas Hinde knew the real value in the distillery wasn’t the scrap metal, it was the remaining barrels of whiskey and the four 100,000 barrel capacity warehouses on site. When the government confirmed that Frankfort had won a position as one of the 25 concentration warehouses, Hinde’s gamble paid off. When Sam Miller’s Small-Grain came calling, Hinde proposed that Small Grain and Paul Jones merge with Frankfort, keeping him as president. Jones and Miller agreed and established the business office in their Louisville office on Main Street, while integrating themselves into the businesses of storing whisky for the government.

Now, Four Roses stepped forward in the lineups of medicinal whiskies leaving the warehouse. But it wasn’t the Four Roses of old. Now, the government controlled what went into each bottle. So bottles of medicinal Four Roses show a variety of distillery sources, with the old Bourbon County’ Chicken Cock Distillery of G.G. White being one of its sources. The whiskey had been distilled in 1914, most likely at the E.J. Curly distillery where Chicken Cock’s stills had been moved after the Bourbon County distillery was shut down for scrap in 1911. Prohibition was a tough time for fans of any particular distillery’s spirit.

It turns out, Paul Jones & Co’s now doing business as Frankfort Distillery Company, didn’t own the distillery warehouses for long. And not because of a huge fire that sent bottles of whiskey flying skyhigh in 1924. The company’s home was in Louisville and that is where they wanted to be. And there was a change coming in the industry that Miller and Jones wanted to be ready for. Thomas Hinde sold off the distillery grounds to a local John C. Noel in 1926, while Miller and Jones took the brands, including Four Roses, Antique, Paul Jones, Old Capital, Swastika, Mattingly & Moore, and Old Oscar Pepper among others, to their new offices at 324 Main Street, now known as Whiskey Row. They also acquired the A. Ph. Stitzel distillery at 1033 Story Avenue in Louisville.

To modern minds, it seems strange to think Paul Jones, now known as Frankfort Distilling Company, would buy a distillery in the middle of Prohibition. The distilling laws hadn’t changed and even if the distillery’s warehouses were part of the new consolidation act, the whiskey inside them would be owned by the government.

The real reason for buying the distillery was thanks to a new battle going on in Congress. This one was over the replenishment of medicinal whiskey stocks, which were getting low. The government knew it would take at least 4 years of aging to meet the Bottled-in-Bond standard required by the laws of medicinal whiskey, so it appeared a select number of distilleries would be approved to restart operations. As it turned out, A. Ph. Stitzel was one of the few that had held onto its equipment.

If distilling contracts became available, Four Roses could be one of the first to make its way through a still. 

Positioning to Dominate
On October 11, 1929, two weeks before the great stock market crash on Wall Street, the Louisville Courier Journal broke the happy news. “Distilling firms here to start operation—2 Louisville Concerns Chosen to Make Medicinal Bourbon.” For a country that would soon be desperate for a drink, a medicinal solution was on the way.

After several battles in Congress, attempting to get new whiskey distilled to replace depleting stocks of pre-Prohibition medicinal spirits, the Internal Revenue used a loophole in the law to announce the issuing of six federal permits to produce a total of 2 million gallons of whiskey.

When you hear stories about six medicinal licenses along the modern Kentucky Bourbon Trail, it’s most likely, it wasn’t medicinal sales, but instead these six federal permits for distilling. However, what throws that story for a loop is that not all 6 were meant for Kentucky. The Bluegrass State was only to be given 3 permits to distill Bourbon, while Pennsylvania and Maryland split the other 3 for rye production. 

However, as soon as the 3 Kentucky distilleries were named, accusations of creating a monopoly were raised due to American Medicinal Spirits not only getting more than a third of the Bourbon distilling capabilities, AMS also owned a large number of concentration warehouses. The original 6 would be amended and to keep things fair, distilleries traded off from year to year.

Of all of the distilleries American Medicinal Spirits company’s Bernheim Distillery, and Frankfort’s A. Ph. Distillery were the most ready to go. VP Samuel Miller said the distillery was virtually ready to go when they received the government notice. As soon as word got out that Frankfort had a permit, 30 master distillers immediately applied for the head distiller job—with D.M. Coffey, the old distiller of Swastika appearing to get the nod. Bernheim’s McBrayer label was the first to be distilled for, but Four Roses and Antique from Frankfort followed soon after.

Of course, any of the whiskey made at the facility would have to wait 4 years before it could be released as medicinal whiskey, which at that point required the Bottled-in-Bond designation.

That would change in 1933, when the 21st Amendment was ratified, repealing National Prohibition. And Samuel Miller, always the inventive sort, wanted to get the jump on selling new stocks of aged whiskey. With medicinal mandates off the board, Miller patented a process of running whiskey, right from the still, through wood shavings, where headache causing fusel oils would be stripped, and essences of wood and wood coloring would be added to the spirit. It was Frankfort Distilling’s answer to the lowering of standards to allow caramel coloring in Bourbon to mimic age. Was it ever used? It doesn’t appear so, at least not for Four Roses, Paul Jones or the Antique brand. Those would be sold as blends of straight Bourbon, which by 1936 would be required to be aged 4 years or as little as 2 years as long as the age of the youngest whiskey was stated on the bottle.

On the distilling front, Frankfort Distillers, Inc went right to work building a distillery and bottling hall in Baltimore along Boston Street and broke ground on a new distillery on Dixie Highway in Louisville—total cost nearly $1 million dollars. The original plan was to distill 250 barrels of whiskey a week in Kentucky, with blended barrels shipped to Maryland for bottling under the brands Antique, Four Roses, Paul Jones, Mattingly & Moore, Old Baker, and others.

All of these new distilleries and brands were consolidated under a new name: Frankfort Distilleries, Inc with William Veeneman the new president and Lawrence Jones, Jr on the executive committee and Samuel C. Miller as the Chairman of the Board. How did Frankfort Distilling do out of the gate? It was reported that in 1935, the two largest salaries in the state of Kentucky, with Lawrence Jones, Sr, the executive director making $144,999 in C.A. Look, a company salesman making the second most in the state at $52,710. With a staggering output of 30,000 gallons of whiskey a day, from four distilleries, the company had quickly grown into the largest independent distillery in the country. By 1937 plans were put in place to build a new bottling facility in Louisville to save on transportation costs. 

The Rebirth of Four Roses
So what kind of promotion led to this success? After all, you can produce all the liquor you want to, but if the public isn’t interested, the stocks won’t move.

Well, the company wasted no time in prepping the country for new whiskey. They rolled out a 1933 ad campaign announcing the 

“answer to the question that is in millions of minds today.” It is inevitable that the first few months of Repeal will be months of confusion. In millions of minds, the question has already arisen - How can I be sure of getting good whiskey?” For that reason, we have taken this space to give you a frank, cards-on-the-table account of the Frankfort Distilleries, Inc and of the liquors they can furnish you after December 5th. Brands were listed, retailers were given notice how they could acquire the spirit, photos of bottles included Antique Rye, Four Roses Rye, Broad Ripple Whiskey, and Paul Jones Rye (still featuring the Four Stars) in Northeastern newspapers, while all stated as Whiskey in other areas of the country. There was also notice that the whiskey would be sold in patented “Frankfort Packs,” carrying on a Four Roses tradition of sealing bottles.” 

These packs, likely another ingenious device devised by Sam Miller, was suggested by the ad to be “the most important invention in the history of whiskey packaging.” The whiskey bottle is held in a carton that is destroyed if you try to remove the bottle. 

When Paul Jones and Four Roses hit the shelves, the company amped up the legend of limestone filtered water suggesting only Kentucky and Maryland had it. They claimed they lost over 4 million quarts of whiskey a year making whiskey the old-fashioned way, through longer natural fermentation. And described the whiskies as being richer and more fragrant than other American whiskies. And they touted the Frankfort Distilleries' birth as producers of fine whiskeys since 1865. But most importantly, whether it was the Bourbon or rye, Four Roses was sold as a blend of straight whiskies at 94 proof. They also produced Four Roses and Four Star Gin for a time.

These were the golden years of Four Roses. With a high reputation quickly established, Frankfort could have leaned in on the quality, but the narratives of what made a quality whiskey appeared to have changed with the public. Straight whiskey didn’t seem to have the allure it once had. Perhaps the drinking public had grown accustomed to watering down their precious medicinal whiskey to stretch supplies, or perhaps lighter Canadian whisky was winning them over. Whatever the reason, Four Roses seemed to be testing the waters. Four Roses lost the rye moniker in the northeast and all Four Roses dropped to 90 proof. And rather than touting longer fermentation, the product was sold as mild and light, aged 4 years. Then to feed the straight Bourbon crowd, they released a Bottled-in-Bond version. But where other distilleries were producing lighter whiskies diluted with grain neutral spirits, Lawrence Jones' dedication to straight whiskey blends seemed to buck the trend. 

The coming war and shifting of tastes to Canadian and Scotch whisky blends would only further entice executives to lighten up the flavor of Four Roses, but Lawrence wouldn’t play a part in it. He passed away on October 21, 1941 due to complications from pneumonia. Jones would leave quite the legacy, not only as a whiskey man, but as a long time stockholder in Churchill Downs and director of the American Turf Association, he and his partner William Veeneman played a big part in supporting the growth of the track.

Amazingly, neither the Jones family, nor his business partners had any interest in staying in the whiskey business. Veeneman went off to become the chairman and CEO of Churchill Downs. Miller retired and split time between his home at the Louisville Country Club and his home on Nantucket in Massachusetts. And the Jones family declined to carry the business under the family name. 

It was the end of an era. But the three men who fostered the company through some of the hardest time in whiskey history had left their mark—especially the forgotten man Samuel Miller, who not only brought a sophisticated bottling solution to the industry, he also pushed for the legislation that helped consolidate the industry in a time of rampant bootlegging—legislation that went a long way toward shaping the next 90 years of distilling in America—for better or worse, under Four Big Distillery groups, Hiram Walker, Seagrams, Schenley, and the former American Medicinal Spirits, now known as National Distillers. Frankfort would buck the trend of consolidation that Miller set in motion, but when he decided to step down—one of those big players came in and swooped them up. 

What would be the future for Four Roses under their new corporate masters?

Find out in the next episode of Whiskey Lore. 

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