This image is from a Harper’s Weekly magazine from the 19th century. It is a black and white drawing of the distillery located in Germantown, Ohio. I don’t know a lot about the distillery other than in 1909, Mida’s Criteria Financial Index has it listed as DSP 11, 1st district of Ohio and has a capital value rating of CCC, meaning it was worth $150,000 to $200,000. It was located north of Cincinnati, and south of Dayton.

I purchased this image several years ago. I like the image because it is of a distillery that I know so little about and had never heard of before I saw the image when I purchased it. Harper’s Weekly is an important source of images from the 19th century. The magazine often printed images from industries in rural areas of the country. They were most often black and white images, but every now and then, they colorized the image. That is rare because color images were hand colored, an expensive process before the invention of the lithographic process became common in use by magazines.

The D. Roher & Co, Distillery is a good example of the many distilleries located in the State of Ohio. In Ohio, the distilling industry was an important industry in the 19th century. From the earliest days of European settlement, people were distilling whiskey in Ohio. The earliest settlers brought stills with them when they first came west. Certainly, there were no signs in the Ohio River saying if you had a still, settle on the south side of the river in Kentucky. Settlers usually came west by flatboat down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was the easiest route west and allowed them to carry the goods that they would need to set up their homestead.

A quick look on the Pre-Pro Whiskey Men website however gave me more information about David Roher and his distillery. The Rohers came to Ohio in 1837 from the Pittsburgh area. They settled in Germantown, Ohio and the head of the family, Christian Roher, set up farming and built a distillery that made about ten barrels a day – a fairly large operation for that time. It became known as the Mudlick Distillery. David Roher was born in 1835 and when he reached the age of 22, he became a partner in the distillery and the company was known as C. Roher & Son. He became President of the company in 1861 and changed the name of the company to D. Roher & Co in 1883. The distillery operated until 1913, when devastating floods in Ohio destroyed most of the distillery along with a ruptured gas line burning many of the buildings. Due to the growing Prohibition movement in Ohio, Roher decided not to rebuild the distillery. For more information on David Roher and his distillery, check out the Pre-Pro Men website.

I like this image of the distillery. It is a lost distillery in Ohio. It tells the tale of the distillery and the importance of Harper’s Weekly for finding such images.

Image from the archives of Michael Veach