:: somerville distillery rum ::

I first learned of my areas rich history in rum production when I read Wayne Curtis’ And A Bottle of Rum circa 2007-08 where the book alerted me that my city of Somerville, Massachusetts, had a role in rum production alongside the better known neighboring city of Medford. It also pointed out that there was a monument a few blocks from my home where Paul Revere took a detour on his midnight ride to avoid the Redcoats and seek shelter at the home of his friend, rum distiller Isaac Hall. Isaac’s relative John Hall started distilling rum in Medford in 1715 and the city’s tradition lasted until 1905. Very little remains of the industry save for Isaac Hall’s home (that became a funeral home by the time Curtis wrote about it and a Islamic cultural center when I last stopped by around a year ago), a plaque in downtown Medford that I include in my post about my drink the Rum River Mystic, and the brand name Medford Rum which is in the hands of South Boston’s GrandTen Distillery after it was acquired from the previous owner M.S. Walker in 2013. Somerville’s distilling industry was delayed by a century and a half to open and even less remains as artifacts or remembrances. The later start of Somerville’s distilling was possibly due to the city mostly lacking access to water such as the harbor in Charlestown or the Mystic River flowing through Medford. Somerville’s current geography only has a minor portion near Assembly Square touching a river. However, railroad lines were probably Somerville’s answer with its distillery being adjacent to the Fitchburg Railroad which opened in the 1840s as a means of bringing in molasses raw materials in and finished rum out.

The distillery was opened by Daniel E. Chase when he broke away and moved his operations over from Charlestown. According to Somerville, Past & Present from 1897, Chase was born in Warner, New Hampshire, in 1829, and moved to the Boston area in 1850. The first mention of his entry into the rum industry was when he joined the firm of Ezra Trull & Company in 1857, and when Trull died in 1864, the name changed to Chase and Trull. The book mentions that they “were at one time the largest distillers of New England rum in the world.”

An article on the Edward Everett House in Charlestown written in 1996 offers up a different timeline with distiller Ezra Trull owning that house until his death in 1870. The book Metropolis of New England from 1889 confuses the matter by mentioning that Trull died in 1886 although no first name was mentioned. There were perhaps more than one Trull family member, such as his brother John, involved; before the distillery in Charlestown became Chase & Trull, the distillery was called Trull Brothers’. Perhaps Chase set out on his own when the distillery became the firm of Chapin, Trull, & Co. in 1877, and Nahum Chapin ran the Charlestown distillery after 1886.

Charles Coulombe’s wrote in Rum: The Epic Story of the Drink in 2004, “Nor did the trade with Africa cease, although the end of slavery as a result of the Civil War forced it into more benevolent channels. The Chase distilleries in Somerville and the Lawrence distilleries in Medford, both in Massachusetts, continued to make rum for export. Together with Bibles, the liquor arrived on the West African coast, and in turn bought palm oil for the Lever Brothers and black mahogany for various manufacturers.” The book Boston Looks Seaward 1630-1940 in a chapter called “Rum and Bibles” expounds on this with:

“Although less adventurous than in the past, Boston’s rum trade with the Gold Coast of Africa flourished until the Volstead Act closed down the local distilleries in 1919... The Chase Distillery of Somerville manufactured a large share of the rum, and such shipping firms as John G. Hall, Charles Hunt & Company, Crowell & Thurlow, and the John S. Emery Company carried it, as well as missionary supplies, flour, and lumber, to the West Coast of Africa. Several staid Bostonians, staunch supporters of the temperance movement, participated in this trade, and often a teetotaler Boston sea captain hedged his barrels of rum with boxes of Bibles. Instead of ‘black ivory,’ more than a score of Boston schooners brought back mahogany for a Kentucky manufacturer and palm oil for Lever Brothers of Cambridge.”

The Somerville Directory of the Inhabitants and Institutions proffers up the distillery’s address at 15 Bleachery Court and that they were making “double copper-distilled molasses rum.” Peter’s Rum Labels website provides that they not only produced the Somerville Distillery Rum brand, but the distillery sold Chase’s Fine Old Blend Whiskey (no mention if they distilled grain or merely rectified the spirits for sale). And that site points to The Pre-Prohibition Glass-Collector’s Site which offers up tax records for the distillery that begin as early as 1898 and last reported in 1914. Many of the years’ records were never saved, and the distillery could have been in production before well before 1898 (I show evidence of the distillery being open a decade before this below). Those years show that spirits were deposited in the warehouse, spirits were withdrawn for export with payment of a tax, and that spirits remained at the end of the year. The last record of 1920 mentioned the distillery but did not provide any tax data perhaps due to a final inspection with the onset of Prohibition.

The Massachusetts Historic Commission wrote up an article about Duck Village in Somerville, and it mentions that the house at 85 Properzi Way was built for Daniel and Mary Chase circa 1890, and that Chase’s business a half mile away remained active until at least 1915. Having lived and worked near 15 Bleachery Court (although the current street location has been shifted over), I knew that the distillery laid under the current ice skating rink and parking lot with no trace of its existence left behind by marker or sign (see split image at the end). This lack of evidence all changed after a connection I made in Colorado Springs when I gave my talk on The Cultural Significance of Cocktails pointed me to Matthew Dickey of the Boston Preservation Alliance. Over a few Guinness stouts at the Eire Pub, Matt introduced me to the MapJunction website that overlays historic maps along with modern aerial and satellite photos. I was able to find the distillery clearly labeled on the map in 1888, 1895 (top map), and 1900. For decades after Prohibition, the area appeared to be barren until it was developed into the Founders Memorial Ice Skating Rink. Of the three maps, the 1888 one (above) opened up a world of information. It clearly shows the layout of the building including the location of the still, fermentation tanks, and two bonded warehouses. The label for the coal pile suggests that was the fuel to power the still (no evidence whether it was direct fire or using the new 1870s technology of steam jacketed). Next to the coal pile were refuse tubs (unlike the Medford distilleries, they could not dump their waste into a river) and return tubs where the water to condense out the distillate in the worm tube was kept. The map also describes how there was one private and one government watchman to keep tabs on the distillery, and safety was ensured by hand grenades and water pipes. Hand grenades in a distillery? Back then, that was the name for hand-thrown fire suppression devices to extinguish smaller fires. The original ones patented in 1863 were glass and filled initially with salt water (since it was harder to freeze) and by 1912 with carbon tetrachloride; firefighting had grenades was phased out in the 1950s well before it was learned circa 1970 that this effective chemical was actually carcinogenic. Unfortunately, no dram of Somerville Distillery Rum remains. Most of it was probably packaged into barrels for export across the Atlantic and for sale at local taverns. In conversation with rum scholar Matt Pietrek, I surmised that the distillery as “a major producer of non-noteworthy rum” especially in comparison to how well received and respected the rums from Medford were. However, given that the Massachusetts rum that I tasted in 2010 at Steve Remsberg’s house was rather good – an aged rum from the Everett Distilling Company around 4 miles from my home and sold by Brooklyn’s Austin, Nichols & Co. of Wild Turkey fame – yet never got much mention in the literature either. Then again, that rum sat around for 17 years before being bottled due to Prohibition, and much of the Somerville product and the Everett rums sold before Prohibition would not have experienced any wood rest that long due to financial considerations. Given Chase’s pair of bonded warehouses, it was definitely an aged spirit even if were to be sold off relatively young. Perhaps the major cooperage in town under three-quarters of a mile away from the distillery, S. Armstrong & Co., that utilized mills in Athol, Massachusetts, and Brookline, New Hampshire, made sourcing barrels rather convenient.With the map information and a few other primary sources made available in the last few years, this concludes the research project that I started back in June 2009 (according to my Microsoft Word document file information). The initiation would have been a little over a year before I would have the rare chance in New Orleans to taste Massachusetts rum distilled before Prohibition. Since 2009, rum distilleries started appearing in Massachusetts like Privateer, Bully Boy, GrandTen, Berkshire Mountain, Short Path, and others to continue on the tradition.