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I am in 1953. C W Hay and his wife died in a house fire in 1951 and Kenner Taylor has passed away in July of 1953. Taylor Hay Jr. has married and has Taylor Hay III (Taybaby III). Mary Belle Hay has also married. They are breeding horses on Scotland Farm as well as sheep. It is all quite domestic and quite boring stuff right now, unless you are interested in Horse Racing and the breeding of mares.

Mike Veach

There is a great letter from July 1957 from Julian Van Winkle to Taylor Hay. Pappy states he remembers Taylor's grandfather and great-grandfather well (J Swigert Taylor and his father E H Taylor Jr.) and credits E H Taylor Jr. with getting bottled-in-bond passed. He then laments that National Distillers has just released an 86 proof version of Old Taylor and predicts it will hurt the traditional bottled-in-bond version in the future.

Mike Veach

Today there is a newspaper clipping of an advertisement from Jurgensen's, a store in California, stating they found some Old Taylor made in 1916 and bottled in 1933 and will sell them for $23.50 a pint or a case of 24 pints for $500.00. That may explain why there are so many bottles of Old Taylor prohibition to be found today.

Mike Veach

bourbonv wrote:Today there is a newspaper clipping of an advertisement from Jurgensen's, a store in California, stating they found some Old Taylor made in 1916 and bottled in 1933 and will sell them for $23.50 a pint or a case of 24 pints for $500.00. That may explain why there are so many bottles of Old Taylor prohibition to be found today.

Mike Veach

Mike,
What was the date of the article?
Joe

Joe,
The letter acompanying the article was in the fall of 1964. I forget the exact date, but can check tomorrow at work.

Mike Veach

Today there is a program from Actors Theatre of Louisville with a "Lost Cause" spirit whisky from Charles Farnsley on the back cover. The whiskey is advertised as being 9.8% straight whiskey and 90.2% Grain Neutral Spirit. No this is "brown Vodka"!

Mike Veach

I am up to 1977. Taylor Hay is retired from the Union League Club and is in Houston, Texas being treated for throat cancer. There are still letter that discuss Creel Brown and his family, but the distilling part of the collection has become small. Taylor' Hay's main interest is breeding horses.

Mike Veach

I am winding down on the correspondence section of the collection. The people are dropping like flies! Today there have been funerals for Creel Brown and two of Ruthie Hay's sisters. Taylor Hay's sister Eugenia is also sick. I am in 1983 and the correspondence ends in the early 1990's. After that I get to go back and start cataloging business papers.

I have finished the dated correspondence and I am working on the undated letters and fragments. I have an undated newspaper article from before prohibition of 8 people in the same New York neighborhood who have died of suspected poisonous whiskey. The area is "Stryker's Farm" on the west side from Forty-third to Fifty-ninth Streets and Tenth Avenue to the river.

While going through the correspondence for the Taylor, Shelby and Co. Bank from 1856, I found a personal note stating that they hoped Taylor enjoyed the "Old Bourbon" and if he wanted more they could sell a barrel or two at $2.50 a gallon.

Today I found an August 1856 letter from Oscar Pepper to Taylor, Shelby and Co. (Bank owned by E H Taylor, Jr. and Isaac Shelby). The bank had acquired a note from Oscar Pepper and he was making arrangements to pay the debt.

Today there is an account receipt showing that Taylor made $685.69 profit off of hogs kept at the OFC distillery and sold in Louisville on 1 June 1871. It cost him $95.99 for transportation and other expenses.

Mike, the association between raising livestock and distilling is very old, e.g., M' Harry (circa 1809) devotes a full section to it including porcine diseases, etc.

This is a spin-off from brewing, when livestock were fed on the by-products of the fermentation process.

When did this tradition die out? We see it alive and well as late as the date you cited for the sale of pigs in Louisville, KY in 1871 by Col. Taylor. When did this agricultural adjunct to distilling drop off from the activity of distilling and selling potable liquor per se?

Gary

Gary,
The association is still alive today. There are still farmers that come to the distilleries to by "slop" for their cows and pigs. The distilleries no longer have their own herds but that is probably because of the expense of keeping the distillery grounds clean with the livestock pens nearby. Besides, in this day and age of tourism, the stock pens would be too smelly and dirty for most people, let alone what that would do to their image of the product. It is better to sell the slop to the local farmers.

To add to what Mike said, some people still sell (or give away) wet slop while others go to the considerable expense of drying the spent mash. This adds expense but broadens their market for the product. Although it can be used for other things, animal feed seems to be the main one.

Although most beef comes from further west, Nelson County and some of the other counties in that area have a significant beef cattle industry, because of that legacy.

When Barton had its big fire, during WWII, part of the "story" was that a lot of pigs and cows had to be sent to slaughter prematurely because they had lost their source of feed for them.

The most recent case of animals being fed from spent mash on the grounds of a distillery was just a few years ago, when Brown-Forman experimented with a catfish farm at Shively.

I keep kidding the folks at Mount Vernon that they need to keep pigs at the restored distillery. Dennis Pogue told me that they did keep pigs at the distillery in Washington's time and thereafter, about 150 head.