Battling the bootleggers 100 years ago

A century ago the United States was adjusting to an entirely new and difficult scenario — the Constitutional Amendment which called for Prohibition, or the cessation of manufacturing, possessing or selling alcoholic liquors. Proponents of the plan considered it a noble experiment, but all it really did was to create the home industry of producing illegal liquor until the repeal of the issue in 1933.The newspapers of the 1920's decade have story after story of raids on certain homes, especially farm houses which were conveniently isolated so that no one would notice that the residents were manufacturing illegal drink. There were brave law breakers in the towns and villages, too, but they had to contend with nosy neighbors. These people were called bootleggers, as the men sometimes wore tall boots wherein they could conceal a few bottles of contraband if a lawman happened to stop them on a country road.In 1922, fire destroyed a vacant farm house in the community of White Fox in the east part of Clarksfield Township. When neighbors saw it burning they called the sheriff, since there was no fire department to be summoned. Sheriff Roose and his "county patrolman" responded and found three stills (or distilleries) in the ruins.Two of the stills sat upon a specially-built heating stove so that both could be operated at the same time. Fifty gallons of whisky also were found in the ruins along with 1,500 gallons of corn and rye mash. A few days later a man named Edward Emmons, owner of the burned house and the farm it sat on was arrested and admitted to operating the whisky mill. His partners were at least four prominent farmers from the west part of Lorain County, the county line being not far from the White Fox.Emmons pled guilty in Justice of the Peace Court and was fined $300 plus costs. At the same time an Oberlin man was arrested in the White Fox case, but he claimed to be totally innocent and was only watching the distilling going on at the Emmons Farm, but had nothing to do with it.Sheriff Roose told reporters that people were saying that he was not doing his job of arresting bootleggers, but was ignoring them. Roose said he'd been trying to follow up on some of the reports, but when he'd go to a rural neighborhood no one would talk to him. So, he resorted to looking for the most promising rumors about bootleggers, and went after them with a search warrant. One of his first arrests brought two Greenwich area men to jail after finding 15 gallons of rye whisky and a still in the basement of Elmer Keiser's home, where he and his neighbor Glenn Mosher were busily distilling. Both men pled guilty to Probate Judge John Bechtol and each paid a fine of $800 and costs.Here I'll give you a historical fact — $800 was a large amount of money in 1922. Eggs were 27 cents per dozen; butter was 39 cents a pound; and 10 pounds of potatoes cost 34 cents. Do the math and you'll realize how much $800 was worth in 1922.* * *REMEMBER: My "Just Like Old Times" books are on sale at New Directions Design, 20 W. Main St., in downtown Norwalk. These contain my earlier columns fully indexed and in permanent book form.Henry Timman, an authority on Firelands history, resides in rural Norwalk.Timman