George A. Dickel

Early life

George Augustus Dickel was born on February 2, 1818, in Grünberg, Hesse, to Elisabeth Dickel, who was not married. His father is thought to have been Anton Fischer of Marktheidenfeld. Dickel was named for his godfather, Georg Adam Fischer, likely his uncle. Anton Fischer’s father, Adam Fischer, was a master cooper near Würzburg who made wine casks.

Dickel came to the United States in 1844 and moved to Nashville in 1847. By the mid-1850s, he ran a boot and shoe business on Union Street, which he kept up until around 1860. He married Augusta Banzer, twenty years younger than him, during this time. He started selling liquor in 1861.

During the Civil War, after Union troops occupied Nashville in 1862 and outlawed liquor sales, smuggling was common. No direct proof ties Dickel to this, but the Schwab family, Alsatian immigrants long connected to him, were deep in the illegal whiskey trade.

Abram Schwab’s son-in-law, Meier Salzkotter, a business partner of Dickel since 1859, was caught by Union authorities with a large stash of contraband liquor. Salzkotter claimed his in-laws had stuck him with it, but he was arrested and jailed. After his release, he divorced his wife, Cecilia Schwab.

Liquor wholesaling and other endeavors

At the end of the war in 1865, Dickel opened a liquor store on South College Street in Nashville. He had relocated to South Market Street (modern Second Avenue) by the following year. He hired Salzkotter as a superintendent, and Salzkotter's former brother-in-law, Victor Emmanuel Shwab (1847–1924), as a bookkeeper. Shwab, who had dropped the "c" from his surname in an attempt to Americanize it, would eventually marry Emma Banzer, a sister of Dickel's wife, Augusta.

In 1867, Dickel began blending whiskey, and was arrested and charged in federal court for rectifying liquor without a license. In spite of these charges, Dickel's liquor retail continued to thrive. By 1870, Dickel had established a liquor wholesaling firm, George A. Dickel and Company, which was headquartered at 2 North Market Street. Typical of liquor wholesalers of the day, Dickel and Company purchased whiskey directly from distillers from around the region, and sold it in barrels, jugs and bottles.

The company also sold beer from Nashville-area brewers, including ales and lagers produced by South Nashville brewer Stifel and Pfeiffer, as well as wines and brandies. The company was one of the first in Nashville to directly import liquor, including Scottish and Irish whiskeys, Dutch gin, and champagnes. An 1875 advertisement described the company's specialties as "copper distilled sour mash whiskies" and imported champagnes, and noted the company shipped nationwide.

On March 17, 1874, a fire swept through Market Street, destroying the Dickel and Company headquarters, and just missing its large warehouse, which was filled with $60,000 worth of whiskey. Another fire in May 1881 destroyed the warehouse, however, which represented for the company a $75,000 loss (though partially insured). In reporting on this second fire, one newspaper described Dickel as "the great whiskey dealer". In 1882, Dickel and Company built a new five-story headquarters on Market Street.

While it's unknown when exactly Dickel and Company began distributing whiskey produced at the Cascade Hollow distillery near Tullahoma, there is no evidence to support the oft-told story that Dickel established the distillery while on a trip to the area in 1870. John F. Brown and F.E. Cunningham were operating a distillery in the valley by 1879, when Brown sold his shares to Matthew Sims. In 1883, McLin Davis became the Cascade operation's distiller, and instituted a number of innovations that greatly increased the whiskey's quality.

Shwab, who had become a full partner in Dickel and Company in 1881, purchased Sims's share of the distillery in 1888. With this purchase, Dickel and Company became Cascade's sole distributor. Along with his successful liquor enterprise, Dickel was engaged in a number of endeavors in Nashville. He lived just outside the city in a home on Dickerson Pike, where he operated a sizable pear orchard.

He was also a volunteer fireman with Nashville's Deluge Company No. 3. Dickel became a Master Mason in 1852, and was a member of the Knights Templar. He endorsed photographer and fellow German-American Carl Giers for the state legislature in 1874. In 1886, Dickel was badly injured in a horse-riding accident, and never fully recovered.

His health declined rapidly during the last two years of his life, and he died on June 11, 1894. He is interred in Nashville's Mount Olivet Cemetery.

Legacy

As Dickel's health declined, Shwab gradually took over Dickel and Company's daily operations. Dickel's will left his share of the company to his wife, Augusta, with instructions to sell it at the first opportunity. While she declined to sell, she took no active part in the company's operations, and spent her later years dividing her time between Nashville, her summer home in Charlevoix, Michigan, and annual trips to Europe. Upon her death in 1916, she left her share of the company to Shwab.

As the distributor of the increasingly popular Cascade brand, Dickel and Company's name appeared on the Cascade label into the 20th century, when the operation was forced to close with the onset of prohibition. In the late 1950s, Schenley Industries, which had bought the Cascade brand from Shwab's descendants, rebuilt the Cascade Hollow distillery, and renamed the brand "George Dickel". A bust and monument to Dickel now stands outside the general store and visitors' center at the new distillery. Dickel and Company's headquarters, built in 1882, still stands at 201–203 Second Avenue in Nashville.