A new window display at the Allen County Historical Museum marks the 100th anniversary of the days when it was illegal to make or sell alcohol in Kansas and across the US.
The exhibit features an antique still and bottles being smashed, along with angrily crumpled copies of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which outlawed all hooch, spirits or sauce.
Prohibition was Kansas law from 1881 to 1948, longer than any state in the nation, but a federal ban was not ratified until Jan. 16, 1919.
In The Annals of Allen County, an entry from that date reads: Constitutional prohibition is effective at midnight tonight and declares places where liquor is sold to be common nuisances.
Leading up to this legislation, dry Protestants and social Progressives from the Prohibition, Democratic, and Republican parties had joined together in opposition to the beer industry as well as wet Catholics and German Lutherans, the former convinced that an end to alcohol would curtail many of societys evils.
Given these political dividing-lines, many people viewed the prohibition movement as imposing rural religious values on urban America.
AS FOR Allen County, prohibition and attitudes toward alcohol certainly had an effect through the years.
On Jul. 10, 1905, the infamous Charley Melvin detonated hundreds of sticks of dynamite in order to destroy saloons on West Street in Iola. The explosions were powerful enough to stop the courthouse clock, and were heard in Neosho Falls.
In letters to the Register, mayor, governor, saloon owners and local bootleggers, Melvin had warned if the lid isnt put on therell be a hot time in the old town some night.
Melvin, who fled Iola after the explosions, was apprehended months later in Iowa.
His exploits were recreated about a century later for the new defunct Charley Melvin Mad Bomber Run For Your LIfe.
ON OCT. 29, 1920, a striking headline from the Register reads: Horseshoe Bend Went Bone Dry Yesterday.
According to the accompanying article, so many of the boys about town had been getting stewed up that the county and city officials whose duty it is to enforce the law began taking copious notes on the source of the supply.
After a shake-down from police headed up by Federal Prohibition Officer Warren Wilson, the local drunks or lit ups revealed they had procured the liquor that makes men rave from local grocery stores selling potent 80-proof peach extracts, and from George and Abe Townsends homes on the Neosho River.
The raid of the Townsends revealed around $1,000 worth of alcohol, and soon eight bountiful barrels of sparkling elderberry and raisin wine were being poured into the river. Because officers could find no production still and no witnesses who would admit to purchasing said wine, the Townsends were neither arrested nor prosecuted.
Almost two decades later, however, Abe Townsend was sentenced to 60 days in jail, after pleading guilty to possession of intoxicating liquor and maintaining a nuisance at his farm northwest of Iola sheriffs officers raided his place and found more than 450 gallons of what they said was wine.
