Listen on your favorite podcast player:
Bibliography:
Okrent, Daniel. (2011). Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Scribner.
Mockridge, Ella. (1961). Our Mendham
Emmonds, Kate. (1973). Through the Years in Mendham Borough. Self-Published.
Theme Music:
Howard Harper-Barnes / La Danse Timide / courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com
Transcript:
In the fall of 1919 Thomas Loughlin was tired and worried. In all his years of selling cider in New Jersey - first in Newark, now here in Mendham - it had never been harder to turn a profit.
Twenty years ago, business had been booming. The year 1904 in particular had produced a bumper crop of the best apples New Jersey had ever seen. Not so great for the farmers who had to sell their apple crops at record low prices - but great for cider manufacturers like Loughlin. From the pomace of those superior New Jersey apples, Loughlin was able to bottle and distribute quality hard cider and applejack - the American name for apple brandy.
1904 was also the year Loughlin got an opportunity to expand his business, eventually moving his cider press from its original location in the center of town, into the old Nesbitt grain mill three miles west on Mendham Road. It had been a calculated risk to convert a grain mill into a cider mill, but it had paid off for over a decade.
But then there was the 18th Amendment, which had been ratified earlier that year, in January of 1919, making the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol illegal. Prohibition would soon be in effect.
But as Thomas Loughlin reflected on the events that brought his business to its knees, he undoubtedly wondered what the future looked like for his mill in Mendham. What would happen to this building that he had painstakingly converted, maintained and operated? Would it even make it past the next decade, or would the wheels of his cider mill stop spinning for good?
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(Theme)
Welcome to Hometown History…A series about the iconic places and events that make a town someplace people call home - stories that people can tell to their friends old and new about the place they live, did live, or will live: In my case, Mendham, New Jersey.
And today, today we talk about how one of the icons in that town - a cider mill - evolved with the times, through legislation meant to dry up all the fun.
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Fall harvest is a very special season for Mendham. It’s like this area’s superbowl.
Porches explode with pumpkins, leaves on the trees of Jockey Hollow sparkle golden in the sunlight, and tourists flock from all over for apples.
(Apple crunch)
You can pick them, bob for them, eat them candied or caramelized - but in this town, you can also press them. Every year in early October, the Ralston Cider Mill, in Mendham Township, holds a pressing event (one might even call it a “press conference”).
Located on the south side of Rt 24 between Mendham and Chester, the Ralston Cider Mill stands like a large but unassuming sentinel. Its worn wooden stairs and slightly ill-fitting door suggest that this place is original to the era in which it was built.
JAMES: So, underneath this wooden piece, you see there's a big vertical rod there that's called the main shaft that went from a turbine…
James Malchow, the director of the Ralston Cider Mill Museum in Mendham, gave my producer Katie and me a tour of the inside of the cider mill earlier this spring.
Now, the first thing you have to know is this place didn’t always used to be a cider mill. Instead of crushing apples, this mill once used water power to crush grain.
In 1848 John Ralston Nesbitt, grandson of the first Ralston to settle here, borrowed money from his mother to build a house and a grain mill on this site. And I say that because nearly every history book mentions this strange fact. Poor guy will forever be known for borrowing money from his mom.
But, hey, it was a good investment! Because this 175 year old mill has withstood a retrofit, two gruesome deaths, prohibition, two World Wars, and a family of racoons.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
JAMES: In any case, when you start up the equipment, which I can do, if you like…
James has me reach down, and turn a wheel 180 degrees, which starts the apple pressing process. The various belts and wheels, once powered by water from nearby Burnett Brook, kick into gear.
Today, everything works using electrical power. As we walk around the mill, James points out the belts and wheels turning slowly but surely to move a giant apple press down.
JAMES: The apples come into the building from outside on that conveyor, which is controlled off this shaft. The grater that turns the apples from whole fruit into a mush called pomace is controlled off here. And then when the apples and that pomace are made, they come in down from one floor to the other. Now they are under just the power of gravity…
I didn’t realize it until I was doing research for this episode, but New Jersey is, historically, one of the biggest apple producers in the U.S. Sorry New York! I’m just the messenger.
(Music - Vivaldi
Apples are as American as apple pie, even if they are from Kazakhstan. But they made their way to North America and were planted in soils across the eastern seaboard, thanks to people like John Chapman (literally “Johnny Appleseed”), who realized that land was made more valuable by the presence of fruit-bearing trees (or vines).
New Jersey’s success with apple growing dates back to the early 1700’s. In fact, one of the towns where apples flourished was an eastern section of early Newark, which now goes by the name of South Orange. (“The Oranges” were originally named for King William of Orange. So the town’s name and the fruit were two totally different things. Apples and oranges.)
Now you can make a lot of things with apples - apple pie, apple sauce, apple…strudel? Maybe, if you were German. But the number one thing that American colonists made with apples was alcohol. Hard apple cider and apple brandy were produced and consumed in almost every community where the fruit was grown. These beverages were more popular than wine, beer, whiskey - even more popular than water, which colonists were actually afraid to drink because it carried disease.
So cider was the drink of choice in colonial America, and Cider made from Newark apples was known as some of the best in the New World (even favored by the likes of Thomas Jefferson). Apple historian and food writer Fran McManus says that it has something to do with the growing conditions here.
FRAN: So it was the soil was considered to be the reason that the apples were so good from there, but the trees were described as kind of gnarly and the apples were kinda It wasn't like, lush. It was almost as though they had to work hard in order to achieve that level of flavor.
In 1817, Newark cider was selling for $10 a barrel while other cider makers weren't even clearing $2 a barrel.
In 1828, one Connecticut farmer complained in the American Sentinel that Newark cider was selling for four to five times that of New England cider. He went on to say that it was “wrong to have the Yankees so much outdone.”
Why was Newark’s cider the best in the land? Because not all apples are created equal.
FRAN: They didn’t need to match our expectation for eating apples. The good cider apples can be very bitter, they can be very tannic. Those are qualities you want in a hard cider.
There are apples for eating, and apples for drinking, and some even more appropriate for distilling.
FRAN: Then the other thing was that the cider makers in Newark had a reputation for the quality of the work that they did. They chose apples very specifically for the cider. They produced a high-quality product because they were craftsmen in a way.
And one of those craftsman was named Thomas J. Loughlin.
Thomas Loughlin was a liquor distributor and cigar salesman from Newark. He had a shop on Market Street but, notably, enjoyed spending time in the country.
People’s thirst for applejack had grown dramatically throughout the 1800s. So Loughlin, a shrewd businessman, decided to expand his business by making the liquor that he was distributing. And in 1899 he moved his business to a rural outpost of Newark that he was fond of visiting…Mendham, N.J. Where he was in good company.
Two hundred years ago, on Sunday mornings in Mendham, the pews of Hilltop Church were full of devoted worshippers…who also happened to own distilleries. Mendhamites loved their alcohol - so much so that when Reverend Philip Cortlandt Hay vigorously attacked members of the church who manufactured liquor, he was…uh, quickly dismissed.
By 1830, Morris County had 53 working brandy stills, second only to Hunterdon County. In 1850, a quarter of Mendham’s farms reported income from apples1. One of those farms was run by the Thompsons, who owned a distillery on Hilltop Road. Like a lot of folks at the time, the Thompsons made cider from the apples they grew. The resulting cider or applejack could then be sold locally or even traded for other products in the small town’s barter economy. Who needs gold when you have applejack?
But by the end of the 1800s, the economics of cider making had shifted away from distilling at home in favor of larger cider making operations that would serve the entire community. By 1899 the Thompsons had not run their cider mill for some years.
This presented Loughlin with the opportunity he was looking for. He started leasing the distillery at the Thompson farm.
Savvy as ever, Loughlin took out a patent on his product “Tiger Apple Jack” in 1901, just as demand for the beverage was peaking. By 1904, New Jersey was on track to produce an estimated one million gallons of the spirit2.
But it must have been hard to run a fledgling business off of the Thompson family estate. Loughlin would have been on the lookout for a more permanent home for his cider making operation.
And then…a piece of property became available. And not just any property. An old grain mill, just three miles west down Mendham road.
Old mama’s boy Nesbitt (just kidding) was in his late 80s at the turn of the century. He had been running his grain mill for close to 50 years. Until one day, when he was on the third floor of the mill, he keeled over from a heart attack.
Seizing the opportunity, Loughlin purchased the grain mill and retrofitted it into a cider mill.
By 1910, Loughlin had this cider mill up and running - producing thousands of gallons of apple cider and then applejack. At its peak, Loughlin’s cider mill was pressing apples with a yield four times that of the Thompson distillery.
But time was running out for Thomas Loughlin and his successful cider making business. Prohibition was on the horizon. The Anti Saloon League was pushing the 18th Amendment through congress, which prohibited the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors. By January of 1920, prohibition was in full swing.
This effectively put an end to Thomas Loughlin’s cider business…Loughlin himself died just a few months later. But it was NOT the end of the cider mill.
By the early 1920s, the Ralston Cider Mill was under new management - a family of French bootleggers by the names of the Dubuchs. And it was retrofitted AGAIN to be useful in the underground economy.
JAMES: The garage from the outside if you imagine there was a building there.
Outside the Mill, James points over to where an unassuming garage once stood on the property. But in reality it was the key to the cider mill’s successful bootlegging operation throughout the 1920s.
JAMES: You would never know that there was actually a foundation and a basement underneath it. The basement down there was for bottling liquor, but you wanted to keep it hidden. So it was accessed through a trap door in the middle of the floor or if you needed to load up a car, you could park it to the side of the trapdoor and carry things up the steps and load it up. But basically you could drive an empty truck into the garage, load it up without and pull it out again. And nobody would be able to know that something funny was going on because everybody was downstairs in the basement that was hidden doing the bottling.
So to the casual observer, the cider mill continued operating as a manufacturer of sweet cider - a beverage that was still popular since, if you left it out for long enough, it would eventually ferment and turn into hard cider.
But it was also secretly making applejack - and transporting it to parts unknown via it’s sneaky “car parked in the garage” trick.
In reality, it might not have been that big of a secret - local lore suggests that nearly everyone in Mendham, including the police chief, knew what was going on at the cider mill, and knew where to get some applejack if they ever needed it.
Throughout the 1920s, The bootlegging Dubuchs operated the mill, until one day Mr. Dubuchs was crushed to death by the mill’s machinery. And, honestly, I don’t want to dwell on it too much because the details really are gruesome. Accounts of his death make the phrase “bloody pulp” sound like an understatement.
So the mill was sold again, this time to the Fornaro family. Yes, Sammy Fornaro, of Sammy’s Restaurant fame (a place that likely deserves its own episode).
Even though the cider mill could legally produce Applejack again after 1933, lots had changed during the decade of Prohibition.
Mendhamites still had a thirst for alcohol, though the deviousness of drinking illegally might have worn off. But their tastes had changed with the market: Applejack wasn’t as in-demand, and it was expensive to make.
JAMES: Grain alcohol is much more cheap to manufacture. It's much more reliable in terms of planting a crop and so on. And the mill basically went out of business in the thirties.
So the Fornaros boarded up the cider mill, effectively creating a time capsule of cider operations from the turn of the century. And for decades the only activity at the mill came from a bunch of racoons that found it a nice place to raise a family.
But a love of history, and apparently apples, runs deep in this town. And in 2000, some local preservationists got to work saving the mill.
JAMES: And they created a nonprofit museum to focus on restoring it. The town and the state both had open space money that went towards buying the property and preserving it. And so there is no end of the story.
And the mill will press on.
So, while Thomas Loughlin’s cider business technically didn’t make it through to the present, the building that housed the operation and the story of that business remains - just as the machines that do the pressing are still operable. In fact, the Ralston Cider Mill is the only one that is operational with its original historic equipment, a piece of history that feels right at home here in Mendham.
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Next week on Hometown History, we step inside an institution that was here even before Mendham was called Mendham. A place where travelers passed on their way from Morristown to Easton Pennsylvania when they wanted some shut eye and full belly. A place that people continue to gather today and taste nostalgia.
This episode was written and produced by Ryan Ross and Katie Feather. It was mixed and edited by Katie Feather. Our theme music is La Danse Timide by Howard Harper-Barnes. Special thanks to James Malchow, Fran McManus, Megan Muehlbauer, and the New Jersey Folk Festival. Additional information provided by the Morristown Library History and Genealogy Center. For more information, visit our website, hometownhistorynj.com.
https://ralstoncidermill.org/historic-mill/
https://ediblejersey.ediblecommunities.com/drink/pressing-applejacks-history-new-jersey
Episode 4: When Apples Were King