The crowds, as expected, were immense.
As the end of legal beer and liquor sales approached, Hamilton Chief of Police Charles G. Stricker and city officials braced themselves for riots with a stern warning that the midnight closing law would be strictly enforced with “no leeway” given to any saloon.
“This closing proposition is governed by state law,” the chief said, “and we intend to enforce it.”
At 5:30 a.m., Saturday, May 24, 1919, the seventy-six saloons in Hamilton opened their doors for one last hurrah.
At the request of the saloon owners, police stationed themselves in some of the bigger establishments to prevent the destruction of property in case the crowds became too “hilarious”. Every man was on duty Saturday, most officers working double shifts.
For the next 18 hours, “more of the spirited stuff changed hands than in any other three days in the history of the city saloon business,” the Daily Republican News reported. “Early in the morning, the sight of men and women emerging from cafes and wholesale liquor houses with packages beneath their arms was common and until nine o’clock in the evening, this stream of package carriers continued to be in prominence.
“By the time the clock had ticked off the ninth hour, every wholesale house in the city had disposed of their bottled stock and only the barrooms remained to be visited and put in a Sahara-like condition.
“And with the coming of the morning, every saloon in the city with the exception of Lyman Williams’ place on Fifth and Henry streets offered their final rounds and the curtains were drawn and saloondom passed out of existence in the city.
“Two hundred locals witnessed the inauguration of the dry spell and drank deep of the passing beverages. The contents seemed to be lacking in producing the ‘fighting’ effect and but little disorder was reported to the police headquarters.
“But four arrests were made and of these none were more succumbed to the high-tension powers of that ‘stuff’ of former days…
“After the close of the bars, hundreds of men, their arms burdened with bottles, cases, jars and other containers carrying the ‘juice’ wended their way homeward.
“This procession was the most congenial which has been witnessed in some time. Everybody as everybody else, friend. Mr. Jones had known Mr. Smith since he was a boy. They were all good fellows. Yes, everyone on earth was a good scout and the only ones upon whom was heaped the anger, wrath and the ‘unspeakable,’ were those who had voted for prohibition.”
The Evening Journal said there was “no gaiety at the bars although all were packed during the evening.” Many of the bars sold out their stock by early evening. At the bars with ample supply, the prices dropped as the evening wore on.
As the hour of midnight came, the revelers bid farewell to John Barleycorn in song. Voices that were “not particularly melodious in keys unknown to the musicians,” songs such as “How Dry I Am,” “Good Night, Ladies,” and “Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here,” penetrated the air.”
When midnight struck, the lights over the bars were dimmed, which was the usual signal that leaving time had approached, all turned toward the door, glancing back with a sigh for the last time at the “wet” bars. Fleeting thoughts of the sight of coming soft drink and near beer bars only added to their depression.
Outside the saloons people quietly gathered in small groups. No one was particularly boisterous nor were there any drunken brawls. The people seemed to not know what to say or do. The small groups stood still a moment, and “almost mute opened their mouths only to lick their lips and close them again. The congregations lasted only a few minutes, when they parted, each member going his way silently, carrying with him his sorrow and depressed spirit.”
The Republican said, “Till as early as three o’clock in the morning many men were seen about the streets, resting in unconventional poses wandering far into the land of dreams where was pictured nothing but ‘barrels of the juicy fluid’. Many were disturbed from their slumbers and taken home but quite a few were awakened this morning by the break of day.
“Tho not boisterous and uncontrollable, the ceremonies from Saturday night were far from impressive…
“The most humorous of the entire number of incidents related of occurred as the clock was nearing 3 a.m. Sunday morning. A party of ‘farewell celebrants’ were coming into the city from the South in a Ford car.
“Cries of ‘glorious, glorious Sahara,’ ‘When I’m Stewed,’ and many other choice selections were heard from the machine.
“At the end of a pole attached to the front of the machine hung a very much empty ‘booze bottle’ scornfully decorated with crepe. The black drapings waved remorsefully in the breezes bearing on them, the inscription in chalk, ‘Gone but not forgotten.’”
At one party in Lindenwald, a group of partiers held a mock funeral, digging a nine-foot hole and burying a case of Wiedemann lager with moans, dirges and mock blessings.
“Sunday was a day of rest, regrets and recuperation for many,” the Journal concluded. “As they arose, many of them along toward noon day, they were given to contemplation, especially as to whether the morning after had been worth the night before.
They “kept their spirits up by the knowledge that one more day—Monday—and one more saloon—the Lyman Williams café at South Fifth and Henry streets—still remained to them for a last chance to quench their thirsts, which seemed to have greatly increased with their thoughts of Prohibition.”
***
Butler County and the city of Hamilton were dead-set against the Prohibition of alcohol. There were four votes on the issue from 1917 to 1919, and the “wet” vote was never less than 68 percent in the city, never less than 56 percent in the county.
Nevertheless, Prohibition came, but whatever moral high ground the Prohibitionists felt they had gained, the economic losses were nothing less than staggering—and with dire consequences.
On the eve of Prohibition, the Hamilton newspapers projected that the city would lose $50,000 in annual revenue—nearly $700,000 in today’s money—which would lead to drastic cuts in services, including police protection.
On May 19, 1919, the Hamilton Evening Journal polled over sixty saloon owners and other liquor-related business as to their plans for when the laws would go into effect later that week. Many said they would simply shut down. Some planned to sell their place or convert it to a butcher shop or a grocery store, while others planned to continue serving soft drinks, “near beer” and food.
In that alphabetical list, Lyman Williams, who owned a saloon at the corner of Fifth and Henry streets across from the B&O Railroad station, reported that he would “probably try the soft drink business.”
Although statewide Prohibition didn’t officially begin until the end of the day Monday, May 26, all annual liquor licenses expired May 25, but because that was a Sunday, none would be open anyway. So essentially, all of the local bars were to stop selling liquor at midnight, Saturday, May 24.
Almost all. There was a loophole, and Lyman Williams found it. For $305 (over $4,000 today), Williams purchased from the state a special one-day license for that Monday, making his shop the last legal saloon in Hamilton and Butler County.
***
Anticipating a busy final day as the last legal saloon in Hamilton, Williams engaged the help of some of his friendly competitors—George Renners, Dennis Buckley and Charles Grieser—to help him manage the crowds.
They took out the pool tables in the back rooms and expanded the bar to get ready for the big day, the grand finale.
“From early in the morning to the last minute the café will be open, with excellent service and plenty of ‘suds’ to serve,” the newspaper promised.
They opened at 8 a.m. People lined up around the block to get one last legal drink. Six police officers were stationed on the premises, at the expense of the Williams consortium.
But there would be no trouble.
Williams reported rushing business all during the day and up to the final minute. “When the clock struck twelve,” the Republican reported, “it tolled a death knell for ‘booze’ in Hamilton, but some went home with stocks to last them for some time.
“The memories of Saturday and Monday will live long in the lives of those who took part in the farewell ceremonies for Old John Barleycorn. From now on the traffic between here and Kentucky should be very heavy” for the next five weeks until national Prohibition kicked in.
Prohibition came to Hamilton peacefully and quietly, but the peace and quiet would not last long.
***
The moniker “Little Chicago” had already been kicked around Hamilton for at least a decade leading up to Prohibition. There was a “colored gentlemen’s club,” as described by the Hamilton Evening Journal in 1911 named Little Chicago down in the center of the city’s prostitution trade, an area of town even the newspapers referred to as “the Jungles,” in spite of the racist root of the name. Little Chicago was a troublesome spot, the site of several reported shootings involving liquor and women, and even when the club shut down, the name lingered to describe that part of the neighborhood, roughly where Monument Avenue meets the railroad tracks, not far from police headquarters.
Because it was convenient by both highway and railway to nearby larger cities–Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Detroit, and the actual Chicago–Hamilton started picking up a lot of illegal liquor traffic in addition to the local trade, and the nickname and reputation of Little Chicago grew.
Although he didn’t seem to be involved in the notorious gangster wars that would scandalize Hamilton before Prohibition ended, Lyman Williams would remain one of the city’s most reliable purveyors of alcohol. The Cincinnati Enquirer called him “The King of the Hamilton Bootleggers.”
He paid his first fine for violating the Volstead act on October 10, 1919, not quite five months into the dry era, for selling beer of more than 2.75 percent alcohol. The fine was $1,000, equivalent to more than $13,000 in today’s money.
“Some of the beer was a product of Milwaukee breweries and others is being brought into the city from Kentucky being a product of breweries in that state, and if Ohio remains dry as to 2.75 percent beer complications may ensure on the score of shipping liquor into dry territory, which is forbidden by federal law,” the Daily News reported.
Lyman Williams and the other café operators were not only under the constant eye of federal Prohibition agents, but also local vigilantes operating as “The Butler County Dry Enforcement League” and the “Ohio Anti-Saloon League.”
Along with seven other establishments, Williams’s café was targeted for a massive federal raid on a Saturday afternoon, January 29, 1921. Officials called it “one of the most successful Prohibition raids in Ohio.
“Bursting into the city in seven high-powered automobiles and working with clock-like precision the dry forces scurried to many parts of the city simultaneously and at precisely the same moment instituted two-thirds of the raids… Pointing revolvers on entering each place the Federal men made their raids quickly and immediately upon discovery of evidence corralled the proprietor or man in charge. Their prisoners were taken to the county jail.”
In some places, the feds confiscated a few bottles or a few cases of whiskey. They even found a still. In others, like the Lyman Williams café, they found nothing, but arrested the owners and bartenders anyway based on what proved to be rather flimsy information provided by some of the “unofficial” detectives.
These “detectives” said that they went into each place, ordered whiskey, took the drink but held it in their mouths while they went to the restroom to spit it back into a bottle.
Charges against the 11 men arrested, including Lyman Williams and two of his bartenders, were dropped, and the case set an important national legal precedent. The courts ruled that “evidence secured through private agencies… would not be permitted as a basis for federal cases in the future.”
The big raid, therefore, was a complete waste of time, effort and money.
Although the vigilante enforcers were now out of business, local café owners soon had to contend with the pesky Squire Morris Schuler, a justice of the peace in the little village of Seven Mile, who found his own little loophole to become the scourge of bootleggers all over Butler County.