1896 Vinegar Hill Whiskey Battle and the Whiskey Rebellion 1794-91
The initial Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s began when rural farmers in western Pennsylvania refused to pay a new federal excise tax on whiskey. Whiskey was their livelihood and a way of turning grain into something valuable and transportable. They saw the tax as a perversion by the same government that had benefited from them, one favoring affluent eastern interests against poor producers trying to make ends meet on the frontier. It started with protests and petitions and turned violent. Taxmen were tarred and feathered, houses burned, and armed bands blocked enforcement in entire counties. In 1794, President George Washington ordered a federal militia of almost 13,000 men west to suppress the rebellion, the first large-scale domestic test of federal authority in the young nation. The rebellion was suppressed without great violence, but its suppression proved the growing power of the federal government and a story of resistance that lived on vividly in American popular memory, a witness to independence and mistrust of centralized authority.
A century old, that same spirit of defiance resurfaced in Brooklyn in the 1896 Vinegar Hill Whiskey Battle when federal authorities stormed an illicit still hidden beneath a tenement on Hudson Avenue. The raid turned into a shootout that took one agent's life and left others wounded, exposing the city's underworld whiskey economy and captivating the public with visions of Brooklyn's secret stills. The rebellion rang with the same struggle between regulation and autonomy that had characterized the earlier rebellion. It was not a political rebellion this time, but the cause was the same—ordinary people fighting for control over something as common and personal as making spirits. Kings County Distillery carries that spirit forward today, blending farmers' rebellion against overreach with Brooklyn's rebellion against the establishment. As New York City's first legitimate whiskey distillery since Prohibition, it holds on to that time-honored tradition of defiance through craftsmanship, reclaiming the privilege of making whiskey openly and on its own terms, in the same city where the struggle turned once before to bullets. - Exerpt from the Waterbury Staff Gazette written by Wyatt
