From the collection of the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library
Have you excavated any cornerstones lately?
As Prohibition slithered through the 1920s, Cincinnati’s landmark buildings faced a serious threat from cornerstone thieves. With the legal sale of alcohol no longer an option and bootlegging growing dicier by the day, a lot of old-timers remembered that it was once customary to plunk a bottle of booze into the cornerstone of a new building.
Cincinnati’s beer taps had hardly been stoppered before the barflies started hunting for easily accessible cornerstones. According to the Cincinnati Post [16 January 1920] they weren’t having much luck.
“Cornerstones in Cincinnati buildings have attracted an interest traceable to Prohibition. Recollection of a reported custom in ‘the good old days’ of putting a quart of good booze in some cornerstones, along with newspapers, coins, stamps and other things, is the reason. But diligent search so far has failed to uncover any clew. There are plenty of cornerstones, but the owners of all the buildings deny there is any liquor in them.”
Perhaps the building owners protested too much. They certainly didn’t want to find a chunk of their façade missing because some lush got curious. Strangely, some of the local experts denied that cornerstone liquor was ever a thing. Judge John Caldwell told the Post:
“A man would have been foolish to put good liquor he could drink himself into a stone for the benefit of somebody he would never see.”
County Clerk Fred Wesselmann argued the same point from the opposite direction.
“Booze was so common 75 or 100 years ago, that probably no one thought of putting it away as a curiosity for future generations.”
Up in Montgomery, Ohio, however, village historian William Swaim claimed that the cornerstone of the landmark Universalist Church (with the brick pillars) contained a quart of liquor. Or maybe, he averred, it was only a pint. Whether Mr. Swaim was correct or not remains a matter of conjecture, because no one has excavated the cornerstone to check. Yet.
The “History of Montgomery, Ohio” edited by Mary Lou Rose for that city’s 1995 bicentennial, recounts the liquor rumor, but suggests the hootch is ensconced in one of the pillars, not the cornerstone.
“These four round brick pillars have a greater circumference at the bottom than at the top, and stories have been told that one pillar holds a bottle of whiskey.”
J. Stacey Hill, president of the Gibson Hotel Company, energetically pooh-poohed the idea that a bottle of anything was hidden in the “century box” incorporated into a lobby pillar in 1913. His denials were supported two years later as workmen demolished the neighboring Johnston Building to make way for a Gibson Hotel expansion. A laborer sank his pick into a hollow stone several feet below the pavement. Inside the stone was a large box made of zinc. The box was hauled up for examination and found to contain an Enquirer from 1875, a May Festival program, a handful of coins and a dossier full of facts about the now-demolished building. But no liquor.
At about the same time, according to the Commercial Tribune [16 June 1922] a demolition team in Covington also came up dry:
“Workmen tearing down the old Parker Building, East Pike street, to prepare a site for the new Covington Theater, are looking for treasure. A quart of whisky. The liquor has been buried in the cornerstone of the old building for nearly forty years. It is said, the liquor was nine years old when placed in the cornerstone. Ben Vastine, contractor, kept a close watch on the workmen to avert the possibility of one of them finding it and converting it to his own use. The liquor had not been found at quitting time.”
With all these dry runs, how did rumors about immured booze get started anyway? It appears that alcoholic cornerstones, although uncommon, were actually a thing. Over in nearby Vernon, Indiana, the local high school yielded a quart of whiskey when it was demolished in 1927. The bottle rested serenely next to an old Bible and the usual miscellany of newspapers and coins. All of the discovered contents were allegedly reinterred in the cornerstone of the new high school erected on the same site.
From the collection of the Hamilton Lane Public Library
Up in Hamilton, Ohio, back in 1907, the Globe Opera House produced a bottle of whiskey when the cornerstone was moved during remodeling. That bottle was cradled in a stack of Hamilton and Cincinnati newspapers dating from the 1860s. The wrecking crew drank it.
In other words, the thirsty souls eying the downtown cornerstones weren’t totally off the mark. It’s just a good thing they didn’t expand their research beyond cornerstones. Heaven knows what would have happened if they learned about Samuel Behymer over in Withamsville. His last wishes might have inspired grave robbing. According to the Cincinnati Post [14 October 1978]:
“Samuel Behymer, who had been a part of the Ten Mile Baptist Church, became the first man to be buried in the cemetery. On his death bed, he had requested that he be buried with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a plug of tobacco in the other. ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘I only got two sins. One of them is terbaccy and the other is whiskey so when I go through them pearly gates I want to be honest and have one of them in each hand.’ So they buried him with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a plug of tobacco in the other.”
Although most of the memorialized whiskey dated from the mid-1800s or earlier, as late as 1902, builders were still asking clients whether they wanted to set aside a bottle for posterity. In that year, Garry Herrmann, one of Boss Cox’s lieutenants and President of the Cincinnati Water Works Commission, reviewed plans for the city’s new Western Pumping Station. That building had a perfectly round footprint, so Herrmann decreed that there would be no cornerstone in a building that lacked corners. The Cincinnati Post [3 November 1902] predicted future frustration:
“As a compromise with sentiment, a bronze tablet, like on a burial vault, will grace the building when finished, and in 2082, when it is razed to make room for more skyscrapers, the workmen will look in vain for a cornerstone with a pint bottle of 1902 whisky concealed in it.”
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