Tipp City's forgotten brewer

Tippecanoe detail view of 1858 Miami County map shows "I. Clark" brewery at bottom center.

© 2019 Timothy R. Gaffney

Note: Links to census records go to pages in FamilySearch.org. You will need to create a free account to access them.

Call this Dayton Beer’s first extra chapter.

It’s about the brewing history of Tipp City in Miami County, Ohio—a history that eluded my research when I was writing my book—and a related whiskey scandal that went all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court.

The lack of any clues to a brewery in Tipp City was puzzling and frustrating at the time. Granted, what was originally named Tippecanoe City had only about 1,000 residents in the 1860s and ‘70s. But my research was finding evidence of at least one small brewery in every city and village I studied, no matter how small—even tiny New Madison in Darke county, with about 500 residents in the 1870s and less than 1,000 today. I suspected Tipp City had had one as well, but I had to move on. I had a deadline.

Dayton Beer came out in July 2019. In September, I attended one of Cicerone David Nilsen’s educational tasting sessions at the Tipp City Public Library. While I was there, I explored the library's local history room. I was already familiar with most of the resources I found. On a whim, I took down a large bound volume of local newspapers from the 1860s, wondering I’d come across a brewery advertisement.

I didn’t. But I found something close: an 1869 ad for TenEyck & Green, proprietors of a local malt house. Malt is a cereal grain such as barley that has been made to germinate, developing enzymes that are important to the brewing process. Whenever I found records of a brewery in my research, I usually found a malt house nearby. TenEyck was an unusual name, and I hoped using it as a search term in databases such as Google Books might also turn up references to a brewery.

And that's what happened. I found TenEyck mentioned in A history of Miami County, Ohio, 1807-1953, a book published in 1953 by Miami County’s Sesquicentennial Historical Committee—a book that had escaped my attention earlier. In it, I found this brief passage:

"M. B. Dyche and Walter Norrie established a Malt House on South First Street in 1854. After several successive owners, the business was purchased by William Green and Robert TenEyck, 1868, who operated it for many years. The brewery, south of the malt house was started by Isachaar Clark in 1855, with James Smith as engineer and brew-master. In 1867 the brewery was sold to the Liquor Industry."

In all the databases I’d searched, I’d rarely found anyone named Isachaar.  I figured searching for Isachaar Clark would be as easy as searching for TenEyck. I was wrong. For one thing, “Isachaar” was more often spelled “Issachar” or “Isachar,” apparently just different enough to evade detection. And, as I discovered, the Clark name was ubiquitous in Tippecanoe in the nineteenth century.

So it took a lot of digging, even searching line-by-line through nineteenth century census records, to find the barest facts. Since my book was already published, why even try? Well, I had agreed to speak at the Tipp Library on November 20, and I wasn’t about to show up without at least a scrap of information about its hometown brewing history. So I kept digging. Here’s what I learned.

Issachar Clark, Tippecanoe’s Forgotten Brewer

Unlike numerous other Miami Valley brewers, Issachar Clark (1820-1885) had not come to America penniless from one of the German states. He was the locally born son of a local legend. His father, John Clark, was a Maryland native who had come to Miami County as a pioneer farmer. He had worked hard, prospered and accumulated large tracts of land that included the townsite itself. He laid out Tippecanoe in 1840 and named it, according to the Tippecanoe Historical Society. (It was changed to Tipp City in the 1930s to eliminate confusion with another Ohio town of the same name.)

I couldn’t independently confirm Issachar started his brewery in 1855, but an 1858 map confirmed it was there by that time. It stood just south of Broadway between First Street and the canal. (A Tip Top Canning plant now occupies the site.) The map also showed the Clarks owned large tracts of land.

It isn't clear to me how deeply Issachar involved himself in the brewery. The Miami County history book mentioned a brewmaster and engineer named James Smith. The 1860 census for Tippecanoe listed a James Smith as a “brewer and maltster,” while it listed Issachar as a farmer with real estate valued at $22,000. In 1870 it listed Issachar as a retired merchant, and in 1880 it described him as a retired maltster.

Why Issachar is so obscure today is odd. Local historians lionized his father and his brothers John and Levi with biographical sketches while all but ignoring Issachar. He might not have achieved the success his father and brothers did despite a privileged start in life. Census records showed the value of his real estate holdings declining over the years with no corresponding growth in personal wealth: from $22,000 in 1860, he was down to $12,000 in 1870, and by 1880 he and his wife Sarah were living with their daughter Elizabeth Bauslin and her husband David H., a Lutheran minister. Sometime later they all moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where Issachar died in 1885. He rests there today in Union Cemetery.

But what of the brewery? Issachar apparently sold it as A History of Miami County asserted, but not necessarily of his own will. A deed transfer record in the Miami County Recorder’s Office in Troy shows Sidney L. Chaffee (1819-1898) bought the lots it stood on in 1867 for $13,666 as a result of a court-ordered sale.

What Chaffee did with the brewery is more of a mystery. I found no further mention of it. But census records indicate a brewery was operating in Tippecanoe for at least a few years after Chaffee bought Clark's. The 1870 census listed two men as brewery workers. What brewery they worked for and who owned it, I didn’t learn. Smith, Clark’s apparent former brewmaster, was listed as a maltster. Chaffee was listed as a retired farmer, with an impressive real estate value of $190,000.

Sidney Chaffee and the whiskey scandal

The deed transfer record identified Sidney Chaffee as an individual buyer, but he was also a partner in H. D. Chaffee and Co., which had various business interests including a distillery. And the same year Chaffee bought the brewery, the U. S. district court in Cincinnati won a judgement against Chaffee and Co. for not paying revenue taxes on whiskey it had been shipping up and down the Miami and Erie Canal. I found spotty news coverage of its legal woes in Chronicling America, a free online newspaper database provided by the Library of Congress. 

The government originally sought more than a million dollars, claiming Chaffee and Co. had moved 200,000 gallons of booze on the canal without paying taxes on it between July 1864 and October 1866. Testimony and records convinced a jury the amount was far less, but in December 1867 it awarded the government $235,680, according to a review of the case (press reports gave different figures.)

Besides the jaw-dropping size of the fine on a small distillery in a small midwestern town, the trial also produced a bit of drama. The Dec. 24, 1867 Chicago Tribune reported the defendants claimed some jurors had tried to bribe them, offering to find in their favor in return for cash to four jurors. The alleged bribes were in two anonymous letters they submitted to the court, but the evidence apparently didn’t sway the judge.

Chaffee and Co. appealed the verdict on other grounds all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1873 ruled the judge in Cincinnati had made a procedural error. The court reversed the  judgement and sent the case back to the district court for retrial. Two years later, the March 12, 1875 Cincinnati Star reported a jury had sided with the government agin, but this time it only awarded  $500.

In the meantime, a fire on Jan. 6 burned the Chaffee distillery to the ground. Press reports of the damage ranged up to $16,000 on the building and $60,000 on the whiskey stored in it. The Highland Weekly, a newspaper in Hillsboro, Highland County, asserted the distillery “was set on fire by an incendiary.”

I didn’t learn if the distillery was rebuilt, but as late as 1879 Chaffee and Co. was making news over another government lawsuit that claimed it owed $100,000 in back taxes.

This is where I ended my research. I’m sure more can be learned about Issachar Clark, his brewery, the ill-fated distillery and the government’s attempts to wring tax revenues from it. I included links to some of my sources in this post in case anyone is interested continuing this research.

Dayton Beer: A History of Brewing in the Miami Valley is available in Dayton-area bookstores and online at Amazon.com, which also offers it as a Kindle edition.