The Rise and Fall of America's Whiskey Capital: Peoria, Illinois

[00:00:00]In 1880, 10 distilleries in one Illinois river town produced more whiskey than the entire state of Kentucky. Not close.

[00:00:09]18 million proof gallons out of Peoria against 15 million out of Kucky's 200 distilleries combined. 10 distilleries.

[00:00:18]200. Two decades earlier, that same town had already proven what it could do to a federal ledger. During the Civil War, close to half of every dollar the United States government collected nationwide in tax on liquor came out of one small revenue district built around this single bend of the Illinois River. 10 distilleries outproducing 200. One district funding roughly half a war on whiskey alone. By the turn of the century, this town called itself the whiskey capital of the world. And for a while, nobody could argue. Then in the span of a single day, five decades of that supremacy simply stopped. And the industry that built the city never fully came back. Chapter 1. The equation. The industry that built Peoria never fully came back. That fact matters later in its proper place after the trust and the barrens and the single afternoon in September that ended all of it. The story does not start with the fall. It starts with a smaller question, one nobody in Peoria bothered to ask out loud once the whiskey money started arriving. Why here? Not Louisville with its established distilling reputation.

[00:01:37]Not Cincinnati, already a river city of consequence. A bend in the Illinois River, 300 m northwest of Kucky's bourbon country, in a town most of the country had never heard of. The river did the first part of the work. It ran north out of Peoria toward Chicago and Lake Michigan, and it ran south, widening toward the Mississippi, toward St. Louis and everything below it. A barrel of whiskey loaded onto a boat at Peoria could reach the Great Lakes trade in one direction or the entire Mississippi basin in the other, and a distiller never had to choose between them. Railroads met the river at the same bend, running alongside the water, so grain could come in two ways, and finished spirit could leave two ways.

[00:02:26]Geography had not made Peoria important.

[00:02:29]Geography had made Peoria convenient.

[00:02:32]And for a distiller counting freight costs, that was nearly the same thing.

[00:02:37]Underneath the town sat something no map of trade routes could show. The Senkid aquifer. Water that had spent years working down through limestone before anyone pulled it to the surface.

[00:02:50]Limestone filtered water carries almost no iron. That detail sounds small until explained. Iron in mash water turns a batch of whiskey dark and bitter as it fermentss, ruining a product a distiller has already paid for in grain, time, and barrel space.

[00:03:10]Peoria's water arrived already cleaned by a few hundred feet of rock before a single shovel went into a distillery foundation. And on every side, in every direction a wagon could reach in a day, was corn. Not scattered farms. the start of the corn belt itself. Mile after mile of it, cheap and constant in a way that meant a Peoria distiller almost never worried about running short of grain.

[00:03:37]Water without iron, corn without limit, a river running two directions, crossed by rail at the same point. None of it was an accident of ambition. It was an accident of location.

[00:03:53]In 1837, someone finally did something about it.

[00:03:58]Andrew Idol opened Peoria's first brewery that year. A modest operation for a town that barely qualified as one.

[00:04:06]Beer came before whiskey in Peoria the way it usually did elsewhere. A smaller investment, a faster turnaround, a product that did not require years in a barrel before it reached a customer.

[00:04:21]Idlay's brewery proved the water worked.

[00:04:24]It did not yet prove the town could build an industry. Almaran Cole proved that part. Cole was a riverboat captain, a man who had spent years running freight up and down the Illinois River before he gave serious thought to what was already sitting on the bank in front of him, a flower mill, his own, doing steady, unremarkable business grinding grain for local sale.

[00:04:49]Sometime in 1843, Cole began converting it. By 1844, the mill that had ground flour was distilling whiskey instead, drawing its water from the same ground Idol had already tested, and its grain from the same fields feeding every mill in the county. Cole invented nothing. He simply noticed that the ingredients for a distillery were already standing on his property, arranged by geology and agriculture into something close to a finished recipe, and he built the vats to use it. Other men noticed the same thing. Through the 1850s, distilleries opened along the riverfront near Kohl's, drawn by the same aquifer, the same corn, the same two-way river. By 1865, 14 of them were running in Peoria, an extraordinary number for a town whose whole existence as an incorporated city spanned barely four decades. The math behind every one of them was identical.

[00:05:51]Limestone water, cheap corn, a river that went two ways. None of those 14 distillers were thinking about Washington in 1865.

[00:06:00]A war back east had already handed their industry something far more valuable than good water. Washington needed money to pay for four years of fighting and in 1862 it had started looking very closely at every gallon of whiskey the country made. Chapter 2. The war ledger.

[00:06:20]Congress passed the tax that autumn. A federal excise on distilled spirits structured the way war taxes usually are. A set sum collected on every gallon a distillery produced, taken at the source before a barrel ever reached a saloon or a grosser shelf. Spirits had gone almost untaxed before 1862.

[00:06:43]They would not go untaxed again. The law did not name Peoria. It applied to every distillery in the country equally on paper. In practice, it rewarded volume.

[00:06:55]And by 1862, volume was the one thing Peoria already had in surplus. 14 distilleries were running along the riverfront by the time the war reached its third year, drawing on the same aquifer and the same corn that had built the town in the first place. And every one of them was now, without having asked for the privilege, an instrument of federal finance. The government organized its tax collectors into revenue districts and Peoria was grouped with its neighbor Peacin into a single district for accounting purposes. What that district produced over the course of the war was not a local curiosity. By the time the fighting ended, the Peoria Peakin District had paid into federal coffers a sum equal to nearly half of everything the United States government collected nationwide from every distillery in the country in tax on liquor. Not half of Illinois, half of the country. A local historian writing decades later would call wartime Peoria the alcohol capital of the United States. The description was not sentiment. It was arithmetic checked against a federal ledger. The war ended.

[00:08:11]The tax did not. Congress kept the exis on the books once peace returned, and Peoria's distilleries kept producing directly into it, and the town's population recorded the consequence in a column of its own. 5,95 people lived in Peoria in 1850. By 1860, that number had very nearly tripled to 14,045.

[00:08:37]The 1870 census counted 22,849.

[00:08:42]By 1880, the town had reached 29,259, growing decade over decade at a pace its own street grid struggled to keep up with. Rowouses climbed in the bluffs above the river, faster than the streets could be graded to reach them.

[00:09:00]Whiskey did not leave Peoria alone.

[00:09:03]Every bushel of corn that went into a mash tub came back out twice. Once as spirit, distilled, barreled, and floated down river, and once as spent mash, the hot, soden, grain-heavy slurry left behind once the alcohol had been drawn off. Most distilling towns treated the leftover mash as a disposal problem.

[00:09:26]Peoria treated it as a second product.

[00:09:29]In 1874, a distiller named Thomas Neil of the firm Wickerton Neil opened the Peoria Union stockyards on exactly that premise.

[00:09:39]Pipe the warm slop straight from the vats to a pen and feed it to cattle before it had time to cool. At full output, the distilleries could keep 28,000 head of cattle standing on spent mash at once. The stockyards were not built to display cattle. They were built to fatten them cheaply on a feed the distilleries had already paid for once and were otherwise prepared to dump in the river and move them onward to market at a margin no ordinary rancher upstream could touch. Illinois fed more cattle on distillery slop than half the mashfed herds in the entire country combined, and more than half of that Illinois total stood in pens around Peoria.

[00:10:22]Nobody arriving in town to look at the distilleries thought to ask about the cattle. The cattle were there because of an accounting trick with a byproduct.

[00:10:30]And the accounting trick was by the 1870s an industry in its own right. The whiskey stayed close to home in other ways. Within 20 m of the city, 321 saloons, taverns, and gambling halls were operating by the post-war years. a concentration one historian would later call unprecedented for a town its size.

[00:10:53]The tax district had funded a war.

[00:10:55]Byproduct alone had built the stockyards into a second economy, and the saloons made sure a good share of the money never even left the county to begin with. By the late 1870s, whiskey money was arriving in Peoria faster than the town had ever had occasion to organize itself around before. It had built houses on the bluffs above the river. It was about to build something considerably larger.

[00:11:21]Chapter 3. The capital.

[00:11:24]It was about to build something considerably larger. And within the decade it had. By 1880, Peoria's 10 distilleries were producing 18 million gallons of proof spirits a year, more than the 200 distilleries of Kentucky combined, which managed only 15 million between them. Kentucky did not take the comparison well. When the federal tax rules for that year were finally tallied and printed, Kucky's own distillers found the arithmetic hard to believe. A Rivertown in Illinois, a fraction of their number, was outproducing their entire state. Some called it a clerical error before they called it a fact.

[00:12:06]Peoria simply had cleaner water, cheaper corn, and 10 men willing to run their stills at a pace nobody downstate had thought necessary. The man most responsible for turning that embarrassment into an industry was Joseph Green Hut, an Austrian-born former tinsmith's apprentice. In 1881, Green Hut built the Great Western Distillery on the riverfront, and within a few years, it was being described as the largest distillery in the world. No surviving record fixes exactly how many gallons a day the plant could turn out.

[00:12:40]The figure was never written down or has not survived.

[00:12:45]What survived instead was the reputation, repeated often enough that it stopped sounding like boasting and started sounding like fact. By 1890, Peoria's distilleries alone were producing 40% of every gallon of spirits made in the United States. Peoria had a name for what it had become by then, and the name did not arrive from outside. No federal agency and no rival city had granted it. The town called itself the whiskey capital of the world, printed the phrase on its own letterhead and guide books, and by the turn of the century, almost nobody thought to argue.

[00:13:23]The men whose names filled that letterhead had mostly arrived with nothing. Five brothers named Woolner, Adolf, Samuel, Ignatius, Jacob, and Morris had come from Hungary as poor immigrant peddlers, selling goods doortodoor across the county before any of them owned so much as a warehouse. In the mid 1870s, they bought the Grove Distillery. Within a decade, they had built the Peoria Grape Sugar Works, founded the Union Distillery, and raised a five-story headquarters at the corner of Adams and Fulton downtown.

[00:13:59]The Woolers held their grip on Peoria's whiskey trade for the better part of 45 years, longer than almost any other family in the business. And it started with five brothers going doortodoor with a peddler's pack. Charles and Chanty Clark built a smaller fortune on a single label, Clark's Pure Rye, sold under their own name because their name had become worth something.

[00:14:23]Matthew Hannibary took a longer road to the same result. Born in County Kilkenny, Ireland, he had arrived in Peoria before 1849.

[00:14:32]One of the many who left during the famine years and went into the liquor trade in 1851 with a single partner and no capital to speak of. By the 1880s, he sat on the city council as an alderman, served as vice president of the first national bank, and had co-founded a distillery of his own. A man could still arrive in Peoria a stranger and end the decade owning part of a bank. All of that money went eventually into architecture.

[00:15:02]High street filled with the mansions of the men who had built the industry in its first years. Brick and stone houses standing shouldertosh shoulder above the river. Each one a little larger than the last. Moss Avenue paved earlier than almost any other street in the city filled in behind it with the houses of the second generation of barren. A distillery made a fortune. A house on High Street proved you had made it.

[00:15:30]Green Hut's own mansion, built in 1884 at the corner of High Street and Sheridan Road, ran to 35 rooms, a dining hall that seated 50, a tower built like a castle, a salarium, a ballroom, and a carriage house behind it big enough to be a home in its own right. Green Hut did not stop at a house. By the middle of the decade, he had stopped thinking of himself as the owner of one distillery, however large, and started paying close attention to what a Cleveland oilman named John D.

[00:16:01]Rockefeller had done to the American oil business. Green Hut wanted to know how that was done. He was about to find out.

[00:16:09]Chapter 4, the trust. He was about to find out.

[00:16:15]What Green Hut wanted from Rockefeller's example was not another lesson in building one distillery bigger than its rivals.

[00:16:24]Great Western had already answered that question. He wanted to know how a single man ends competition altogether without technically owning what he controls. In 1887, Green Hut and a circle of the country's largest distillers founded the distillers and cattle feeders trust, built deliberately on the standard oil model. The mechanics were nearly identical to Rockefeller's own. A distillery owner did not sell his plant to the trust. He signed control of it over to a board of trust appointed managers and received trust certificates in exchange, paper promising a share of whatever the combined operation earned.

[00:17:04]The certificates paid dividends. The managers decided everything else. Which distilleries ran at full capacity, which ran at half, which closed outright because the trust had judged the market overs supplied and in need of fewer gallons, not more.

[00:17:22]65 distilleries went into the trust on those terms. 24 of them in Illinois.

[00:17:29]12 of them in Peoria itself, the city that now served as the trust's own headquarters. 12 distilleries whose owners had traded what they built for a stack of certificates and if they were fortunate, a seat on somebody else's board.

[00:17:48]The New York Times, covering the trust's formation that July, reported that its founders expected to pull 90% of the country's distillers into the pool within 30 days. Not every distiller signed. A distillery that joined the trust kept its doors open, kept its workers paid, kept its owner's name on the certificate even after his name had come off the door. A distillery that refused, struggled to buy grain at the price everyone else paid, struggled to sell its spirit through channels the trust now controlled, struggled to survive in a market where the largest buyer and the largest supplier of nearly everything a distiller needed had quietly become the same organization.

[00:18:37]Most holdouts folded or sold. Chicago's HH distillery did neither. It refused and it went on refusing. By the spring of 1888, someone inside the Shoufeld company was reporting to people outside it. In April, the distillery's own management uncovered the man, confronted him, and got a confession. Whoever had sent him did not stop there.

[00:19:05]In September, a workman checking one of the fermenting vats found its valve quietly altered, fitted to open the vat to pressure it was never built to hold.

[00:19:16]Nobody could say how long it had sat that way, or how close the plant had already come to a disaster. No one would have been able to explain afterward.

[00:19:26]Then in December, two objects landed on the roof of the Shufeld distillery in the middle of the night, thrown from the street below or a neighboring building.

[00:19:37]Nobody was ever able to establish which.

[00:19:40]Dynamite, both of them. The first detonated, and the blast tore a hole clean through the roof and into the floor beneath it. The second did not go off. It was found afterward, unexloded, lying among the fermenting vats it had been aimed at, close enough that if it had gone off on schedule, the hole in the roof would have been the smallest part of what remained of the building.

[00:20:06]Nobody was ever convicted for the bombs.

[00:20:09]The case came closest to daylight in February 1891 when a trust employee named George Gibson was federally charged with offering a government tax inspector up to $25,000 to plant an explosive of his own beneath a vat of spirits. A Chicago judge Sanjas dismissed the charges before they reached a jury. Gibson resigned his position at the trust within weeks and disappeared from the record. The organization that had survived a bombing at a rivals plant could not survive Washington.

[00:20:46]Congress passed the Sherman Antirust Act in 1890. By 1893, the trust's own finances were already unraveling, and in 1895, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled it an illegal monopoly outright. Green Hut was pushed out of the company he had founded. The court broke up 17 of its distilleries into a new concern called the American Spirits Manufacturing Company and considered the matter closed. The trust was dead within 8 years of its founding. Peoria was not.

[00:21:23]In 1895, the city, whose own cartel had just been dismantled in an Illinois courtroom, was still running more distilling capacity than it had ever run before. Its population passed, 41,000 and still climbing. Chapter 5, the last good years.

[00:21:43]It kept climbing. 56,100 people were counted in the 1900 census, nearly double what the city had held 20 years earlier, 66,950 by 1910.

[00:21:58]The count would keep rising past this decade, too, onto 76,121 by 1920. a number that would arrive when the census takers finally wrote it down after whiskey itself had already stopped having anything to do with the growth of the city it once built. The trust that Green Hut had built was dead, broken apart by an Illinois court in 1895, and Green Hut was gone from its board in the same ruling. Peoria did not appear to notice the absence of either fact.

[00:22:31]American Spirits Manufacturing. The company assembled out of the trust's confiscated pieces, kept the old Peoria plants running under a new letter head, and the barrels kept moving down to the river landings exactly as they always had. By 1913, 11 distilleries operated along the Illinois Riverfront, and at least one of them still described itself, without apparent embarrassment, as the largest in the world. The names on the gates were a mix of the familiar and the merely reorganized. Clark's Pure Ry still carried the family name that had built it. The Woolner brothers, 40 years into a business, two of them had started as door-to-door peddlers, still ran a plant of their own downtown. Newer signage read Corning and Standard. And Great Western still stood where Green Hut had raised it under managers who had never met the man who founded it. a business that had outgrown the person who invented it, which was in Peoria by then simply how the industry worked.

[00:23:35]Between them, the 11 plants along the river still pushed more proof gallons through the federal gauging houses each year than most entire states could claim. The same comparison that had made Peoria famous three decades earlier, repeated so often by then that the city had stopped finding it remarkable.

[00:23:55]Green Hut did not stay to watch that particular lesson play out. He moved his family to New York within a few years of losing the trust and spent the remainder of his life there, a considerable distance from the 35 room house on High Street that had once announced his arrival in the city. He died in 1918, 75 years old, having outlived by 23 years the organization he founded and lost.

[00:24:22]Something else was moving through Illinois in those same years, slower than a distillery and considerably more patient. The Anti-Salloon League had spent two decades organizing county by county across the Midwest. And by the middle of the 1910s, it had learned to speak in the language of a nation getting ready for war rather than the language of a church basement.

[00:24:46]Grain kept out of a mash tub. The argument went, was grain available for an army? Peoria, whiskey capital or not, was never asked to settle the question at its own ballot box. The decision was not going to arrive from a county courthouse.

[00:25:04]It was going to arrive from Washington.

[00:25:06]And by the spring of 1917, Washington had a war to run. Grain stopped being simply a crop that year.

[00:25:14]It became a line item. The government tracked the way it tracked coal and rail capacity, and a bushel diverted into a whiskey barrel had become, in the language now coming out of Congress, a bushel not available for a soldier's ration. Peoria was not weighing its own barrels against that arithmetic.

[00:25:34]Washington already was. In August of 1917, Congress passed the Food and Fuel Control Act, prohibiting the use of grain for producing beverage alcohol for the duration of the war. It was argued on the floor of the House, as a matter of feeding soldiers, not silencing distillers. In Peoria, the barrens read the same newspapers as everyone else, filed the news alongside a decade of wartime measures that had come and mostly changed nothing, and kept the stills running while the paperwork made its way down from the capital. Nobody in the city had yet worked out what the new law actually meant for the taps at Great Western, or for the 10 distilleries still running alongside it. That arithmetic was still ahead of them.

[00:26:22]>> [clears throat] >> Chapter 6. One day in September. That arithmetic was still ahead of them. The Food and Fuel Control Act had passed on August the 10th, 1917.

[00:26:33]And for nearly a month afterward, Peoria's 10 distilleries kept running almost exactly as they had for half a century. A statute on paper in Washington was not yet an order on the ground in Illinois. The law banned converting grain into beverage alcohol for the length of the war, but it left the actual stopping date to a presidential proclamation still to come.

[00:26:57]And through the last weeks of August, the distilleries filled their vats and ran their columns as if some part of what they had read in the newspapers might still be negotiated.

[00:27:09]It was not going to be negotiated. The proclamation arrived on September the 8th. September the 8th, 1917 was a Saturday. And under the terms of that proclamation, it was also the last day fermentation or distillation of beverage alcohol was legal anywhere in the United States. By some accounts, six houses were still running full production that morning. American, Clark, Corning, Great Western, Standard, and Walner. The last names left standing from an industry that had once counted 73.

[00:27:45]Workers pulled a final shift. Mash tubs that had not stood empty in living memory were drained and left to dry. The stills, which had run through wars, panics, and a federal antirust prosecution without stopping were banked and allowed to go cold. For the first time, most of the men tending them could remember. No one wrote down that Saturday how many of those men walked out the gates and did not come back to them Monday. Nobody in Peoria was counting. Nobody since has managed to either. The precise number of jobs the order erased in a single week has never turned up in any surviving record.

[00:28:30]Most residents treated the closure as exactly what the government had called it, a wartime measure, temporary by nature, certain to lift once the fighting in Europe ended, and grain was no longer needed for soldiers instead of sour mash.

[00:28:48]Distillery owners kept skeleton crews on through the winter, maintaining equipment a peacetime restart would need. The war ended in November of 1918.

[00:28:59]The distilleries did not reopen.

[00:29:03]Great Western, the plant Joseph Green Hut had built to be the largest distillery on Earth, shut down for good in 1919.

[00:29:11]A full year before prohibition became the law of the land, felled by an order that had never technically been about prohibition at all. Congress passed the 18th Amendment in December of 1917.

[00:29:25]The necessary 36 states ratified it by January the 16th, 1919.

[00:29:31]By the amendment's own terms, it took effect exactly one year later on January the 17th, 1920.

[00:29:39]For Peoria, the amendment changed almost nothing on the ground. It only made permanent in careful constitutional language what a wartime grain order had already finished doing 2 and 1/2 years earlier. The temporary measure never lifted. It simply stopped being called temporary.

[00:30:00]One narrow channel stayed open. The federal government issued a small number of licenses allowing a handful of Peoria distillers to keep producing whiskey for medical use only, sold by prescription through licensedarmacies.

[00:30:16]Charles R. Walgreens ran something like 20 drugstores when the 18th amendment took effect. By the end of the 1920s, his chain had grown to somewhere around 525.

[00:30:28]A share of that growth built on doctors writing whiskey prescriptions and pharmacists filling them with spirit distilled a few blocks from the cold, empty vats at Great Western. Prohibition had not ended Peoria's whiskey. It had simply moved the paperwork. It did not happen because of a vote taken in Peoria. It did not happen because of a fire, a flood, or a courtroom defeat the Barons had finally failed to buy their way out of.

[00:30:57]It happened because of a clause in a wartime statute enforced on a single Saturday that most of the city assumed it would outlive.

[00:31:07]50 years of being the whiskey capital of the world stopped on September the 8th, 1917.

[00:31:14]One proclamation, one day, and a city that would spend the next 13 years finding out how much whiskey a place can still drink after the law says officially that it no longer does.

[00:31:27]Chapter 7. The shadow city. The answer turned out to be a lot. Long before the medicinal license and the drugstore prescriptions, Peoria had already earned a reputation the whiskey barons never put on their letterhead. a wide open town, gambling halls running a few blocks from where distillery paychecks had once been cashed, brothel running with a continuity nobody at city hall seemed to mind. The reputation predated national prohibition by decades and outlasted its start by more than 10 years. Not until October of 1930 did the Illinois State's attorney order Peoria's gambling halls closed. the first such order in the city's recorded history.

[00:32:13]The word first said more than the order itself. 38 years into the tenure of Peoria's own longest serving mayor, nobody had ever given that instruction before because nobody with the authority had found a reason to. Bootlegging filled the space, the Rits the medicinal licenses left open, moving spirit through channels no federal ledger tracked until the trade grew large enough to draw organizers from outside the city. In the early 1930s, the Shelton brothers arrived from the Cole counties of southern Illinois, already seasoned in liquor and gambling rackets.

[00:32:51]In Peoria, they went to work first as muscle for a gambling operator named Garrison, who ran the city's rackets the way an alderman runs a ward, informally, thoroughly, without interruption.

[00:33:04]An apparent kidnapping attempt against Garrison in 1930 left his wife dead instead.

[00:33:11]By most accounts, the arrangement soured over the following decade, and by 1941, Garrison was out, and the Sheltons controlled it. The Saturday Evening Post later called them America's Bloodiest Gang. And 1946 through 1948 bore the title out. Three men tied to the gang killed in Peoria that first year. Carl Shelton shot dead near his farm in southern Illinois in October of 1947.

[00:33:40]Bernie Shelton killed outside a Peoria tavern in July of 1948.

[00:33:46]Most of what survives of the feud comes from a narrow set of local accounts consistent on the broad shape of events, if not on every detail. Repeal came in 1933, and the industry it allowed back did not return to where it had stood in 1917.

[00:34:04]Of the 17 distilleries running in Kentucky before prohibition, only seven reopened. And within a few years, four companies controlled threearters of the nation's whiskey trade. None was headquartered in Peoria. The business had consolidated around the very state Poria's 10 distilleries had once outproduced 200 to1 postwar taste bending with it toward the Kentucky bourbon those four companies were building their names on. One company looked at the numbers differently. Hyram Walker, a Canadian firm built on Canadian club whiskey, put $5 million into a new plant on the Peoria Riverfront in 1934, ground that had carried a distillery once before, the same stretch of riverbank by most accounts, where Joseph Green Hut's Great Western works had stood until 1919.

[00:34:59]The plant ground 20,000 bushels of grain and turned out up to 100,000 gallons of spirit a day, fed by grain barges arriving weekly on the same river that had floated Peoria's first whiskey downstream 90 years earlier. Hyram Walker called it the largest distillery in the world. Of all the ground available in the post repeal United States, the company had picked this stretch of bank anyway, and the claim carried an echo nobody needed to point out. The plant ran for 47 years and closed in 1981.

[00:35:37]The following year, Archer Daniels Midland bought the site and put it to different work. Not whiskey, not spirit meant for a glass, but industrial ethanol drawn off by the ton for fuel and chemical use rather than poured into a bottle with a name on the label. The water came from the same aquifer. The grain arrived by the same river. What the plant made from them no longer resembled whiskey in purpose, in name, or in the fortune it once built. By 1982, the ground that had made whiskey since Andrew Idol's first brewery in 1837 was making neither whiskey nor much of anything a Peorian could drink. 3 mi from the river, a different machine had been running since before Prohibition ever reached the city, quietly at a scale nobody in the whiskey trade had thought to measure.

[00:36:36]And it would take Whisky's second death to finish becoming the thing that fed Peoria in its place.

[00:36:43]Chapter 8. The tractor and the river.

[00:36:47]The machine had a name by then, though nobody at Great Western had bothered to learn it. In February of 1910, a company called Holt opened a small factory across the river in East Peoria with a dozen workers and a machine built to move earth on tracks instead of wheels.

[00:37:05]Within two years, the payroll had grown to 625 and the tractors were already shipping out to Argentina, Canada, and Mexico.

[00:37:14]After a 1925 merger gave the company its permanent name, an antramari, Caterpillar moved its headquarters into Peoria itself in 1930.

[00:37:25]Not east across the water, but into the same city whose distilleries had just gone cold for good. The tractor did not replace whiskey by design. It replaced whiskey by arriving at the moment whiskey left. It grew for half a century without much interruption. By 1979, employment at the Peoria plant had reached its high point. Then in 1982, the company posted its first annual loss in its history, and the workers walked out.

[00:37:56]The strike ran 205 days, the longest the United Auto Workers had ever called against a single employer to that point.

[00:38:05]Two further defeats followed in 1992 and 1995. Neither one close. By 1992, the Peoria plant's own workforce.

[00:38:16]The number depends on whether the count means the plant, the union local, or the company as a whole, and the sources disagree on which to use had fallen from 24,000 to somewhere around 9,000.

[00:38:29]And then in 2017, Caterpillar announced it was leaving.

[00:38:35]Not the plant, the headquarters. The address on the letterhead moved to a Chicago suburb along with the company's own plan to build a new headquarters tower downtown, which it quietly scrapped. 5 years later, in 2022, the headquarters moved again, this time to Texas. More than 12,000 people still work for Caterpillar around Peoria today. Still the region's largest private employer. Only the letterhead left. The tractor that had outlasted whiskey by a century did not in the end stay in the city that had built it a home. Peoria's population had peaked at 126,963 in 1970. It stands today just over 113,000.

[00:39:21]The city's name, meanwhile, had traveled further than its population ever did.

[00:39:26]The phrase came out of vaudeville decades earlier. A new act tested on a Peoria audience before it went on tour.

[00:39:33]on the theory that anything that worked in Peoria would work anywhere in the country. Richard Nixon's aid, John Erlickman, revived it in 1969, reassuring a reporter about a decision built to needle the East Coast.

[00:39:47]Don't worry, it'll play in Peoria. And Nixon kept the phrase afterward as his own shortorthhand for middle America, the audience that mattered more to him than Washington or New York. The whiskey came back first in a small building in the warehouse district where Blackband Distillery opened in 2021.

[00:40:05]The first legal spirits producer in Peoria in over 90 years, drawing its water from the same sanity aquifer the Barons had used. In 2024, the city built an economic district around the old distilling ground itself, a distillery TIFF, tying the derelict Hyram Walker plant and its neighbors into a single zone meant to bring investment back to the river. Blackband has since announced plans to expand into a former Caterpillar rubber parts warehouse a few blocks away. The two machines that had run Peoria, a century apart, about to share a roof. On Moss Avenue, the mansions the Baronss built are still standing. The same bend of the river has been making spirit in one form or another for close to 140 years now.

[00:40:53]Great Western, then Hyram Walker, then Archer Daniels Midland, then a company called BioA, which bought the plant in 2021.

[00:41:03]The river still runs two ways past it.

[00:41:06]North toward the lake, south toward the Mississippi, the way it did when a riverboat captain first noticed his flower mill sat on the wrong ingredients for flour and the right ones for something else.

[00:41:19]The water under the city still filters down through the same limestone. It still comes up without iron in it.