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| Atherton High School, 3000 Dundee Road, Louisville, KY, is not in the whiskey business, but was named for a prominent distiller. |
Atherton High is a public high school in Louisville, Kentucky. It serves about 1,400 students. It was named after John Atherton; a prominent Louisville businessman and politician of the late 19th and early 20th century who helped reform the city’s school system. Founded in 1924 as J. M. Atherton High School for Girls, it became co-ed in 1950.
The school’s web site includes a 307-word biography of John Atherton, mentioning some of his business and civic accomplishments. Conspicuously absent is any mention of the source of his great wealth: the making and selling of whiskey.
Today, Athertonville, Kentucky is a tiny, unincorporated community but in the 19th century it was a bustling distillery town, surrounded by farms that supplied its distilleries with grain, fruit, seasonal labor, and customers.
The town was named for Peter Atherton, its founder, who was John Atherton’s father. Peter Atherton came to Kentucky in 1791 with land grants from Virginia for about a thousand acres. Among his many enterprises was a distillery on the west bank of Knob Creek, near its junction with the Rolling Fork. He operated there from 1800 until 1834. It was a small distillery, one of many, doing primarily local business, typical of that era.
Peter Atherton and Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ Whitehead were newlyweds when they arrived in Kentucky. Children came fast, two girls and a boy. We don’t know much about them. In 1834, with the kids long since grown and gone, Peter closed the distillery and retired. Betsy, age 55, died that same year.
Peter, then in his early 60s, remarried. His new wife, another Elizabeth, was 28. They had two sons, Peter and John. Peter was six and John was three when their father died. Elizabeth remarried and by all accounts the boys had a happy and secure childhood.
Although Peter Atherton, the Boone family, and many others distilled on Knob Creek from a very early date, it was the younger son of Peter Atherton’s second marriage, John McDougal Atherton, who put the town named for his father on the whiskey-making map almost a century later.
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| A fanciful rendering of the Atherton distilling interests. |
In 1867, John opened his new Atherton Distillery. It made sweet mash whiskey, about seven barrels a day. He later bought a sour mash distillery a few miles away, which he relocated to his site but on the opposite bank of Knob Creek. Working with him was a cousin named Alexander Mayfield, so they named the second distillery A. Mayfield & Co. Their Mayfield Sour Mash Whiskey became a successful brand.
Among Mayfield’s customers was George Garvin Brown, the founder of Brown-Forman. His original Old Forester Bourbon was a blend of whiskey from Mayfield and two other distilleries.
Athertonville grew up around its distilleries. John Atherton steadily expanded his operation, acquiring two additional plants. At its peak, the entire enterprise produced about 50,000 barrels of whiskey a year.
In addition to the distilleries, Atherton owned most of the town; about 75 houses that he rented, a 100-room hotel, blacksmith shops, and livery stables. His brands included Atherton, Mayfield, Clifton, Windsor, Howard, Carter, Kenwood, Brownfield, and Baker.
John Atherton was joined in the business by his son, Peter. Business was good and both men became wealthy. Their offices and homes were in Louisville, 50 miles away. They didn’t visit the distillery every day, but when they did, they took the train. Atherton’s distilleries had helped build the spur line from Athertonville to New Haven, where it connected to the main line that ran between Louisville and Nashville.
In the late 19th century, as distilleries like Atherton’s grew larger and more modern, continuous stills replaced pot stills, and railroads gave every producer an unlimited potential market. This quickly put everyone in competition with everyone else. The market became flooded with whiskey, driving down prices and, therefore, profits.
Several attempts were made to ‘rationalize’ the industry by limiting production through consolidation, ideally by creating a monopoly or near-monopoly.
This had already been done in other fields. John Rockefeller did it with oil. There were hundreds of small producers in the Western Pennsylvania oil fields, but Rockefeller controlled them by controlling the refineries. Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick had a monopoly with steel. Cornelius Vanderbilt controlled the railroads. James Duke did it with tobacco and Joseph Benedict Greenhut did it with whiskey. Their industry-spanning monopolies, known as trusts, are illegal now but weren’t then, although the various trusts committed plenty of illegal acts in pursuit of their goals.
Greenhut’s Whiskey Trust began in Peoria, Illinois, which then rivaled Kentucky as a producer of distilled spirits. Its formal name was the Distillers' & Cattle Feeders' Trust. The Kentucky version was called the Kentucky Distilleries and Warehouse Company. The two trusts did not compete with each other but rather cooperated to drive everyone else out of business.
In 1899, the Athertons cashed out and sold their distilleries to the Trust, which operated them until Prohibition. John was 58 and Peter was 37 at the time of the sale.
To say the Athertons were well-connected in Louisville would be an understatement. John was president of the Lincoln Savings Bank and Trust Company, and vice president and director of the National Bank of Kentucky. He also served on the boards of the Louisville Realty Company, Louisville Gas and Electric, and the L&N Railroad. He served briefly in the state legislature. He was chairman of the Louisville City Government Committee, which studied municipal reform. He helped reorganize the Louisville public school system and that’s how Louisville’s Atherton High School came to be named in his honor.
The younger Mr. Atherton also served in the state legislature. He became a real estate mogul. One of his companies owned Louisville’s historic Seelbach Hotel.
Such is the stigma of whiskey-making that you can find lengthy biographies of both men that don’t mention how their original fortunes were acquired.
During Prohibition, the whiskey in Athertonville’s warehouses was sent to Louisville for consolidation. Athertonville’s distilleries were closed and dismantled but not entirely forgotten. After Prohibition, whatever was left was acquired by the Cummins family.
We'll cover the Cummins history and the site's current status in PART TWO.
