Waterville and the 18th Amendment
This year of 2020 will be the 100th Anniversary year for two momentous amendments to the United States Constitution, those being the 18th and 19th. Both amendments were the culmination of years of action and lobbying by their adherents. The first and subject of this sketch, enacted January 17, 1920, prohibited the manufacture, transport or sale of alcoholic beverages with an alcohol content greater than 0.5% or better known as the prohibition amendment. The other, the 19th amendment, gave women the right to vote and we will write about that in August when the amendment was ratified. Both amendments had profound effects in American society.
Churches and organized women’s temperance groups led the fight for prohibition, noting the terrible effects of alcoholic fathers on family life. In Waterville the Methodist Church was the leading advocate for prohibition and Peter Briesach’s saloon was right across the street on the opposite corner. (At one time the Methodist Church was located at the corner of Mechanic and the River Road.) Locally, nobody came through town smashing saloons as was done in many other communities but there was intense lobbying of local, state and national governments to ban alcohol sales by statute. Waterville was voted “dry” about 1908 and voted in 1911 to remain dry by a vote of 112 to 103. The outright ban severely impacted our German citizens where drinking beer or wine with meals was part of their culture and many of them were home brewers. The local result of prohibition has been dealt with in this space before. Breisach’s saloon and several other establishments along Main Street became restaurants and, so far as this writer knows, the village was dry. The township beyond the town Marshall’s jurisdiction, not so much. Our article (February 4, 2019) on Dorothy Hattersley, Waterville’s Miss Fisher, shows that hidden distilleries sprang up many places along the river and the canal. A hotel on River Road (now a private home) was known to serve alcohol and many years later a hidden “still” was found in the basement. The 18th Amendment did not produce the intended results. Quite the opposite, as history indicates. This was such a disaster that it became the only amendment to our constitution to be repealed by another amendment, the 21st, which was ratified in December of 1933.