Temperance in the 20th Century

This article from the Wooster Daily News describes how the vote to make Wayne a dry county resulted in the closure of eleven saloons in the cities surrounding Wooster. (Click the image to read the full text of the article.)

Wooster’s Christmas Run Park has links to Prohibition.  The city originally paid for the land on which the park is built with fines collected from violators of the prohibition laws.

The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 marked the end of the temperance movement’s influence in the nation and in Wooster.  Today, beer is once again brewed at the JAFB Wooster Brewery, opened in 2012.  

In the years leading up to Prohibition, the temperance crusade once again gained support throughout the nation.  In 1908, Wayne County, along with 34 other Ohio counties, enacted a local option law under Ohio’s Rose Law, allowing the county to vote itself dry for a period of three years.  The sale of alcoholic beverages was prohibited and Wayne County’s eleven saloons were forced to close.  Wayne’s two alcohol manufacturers, the Wooster Brewing Company and the Cedar Valley Distilling Company remained open by selling their wares to buyers outside of the county.  The Wooster Brewing Company also increased its production of artificial ice to make up for the lost profits.  

However, increased pressure before the establishment of Prohibition forced the Wooster Brewing Company to cease its production of beer in 1916 and sell its plant to the Mougey Beverage Company, which bottled colas.¹  Temperance had finally doomed the manufacture of alcoholic beverages in the county.  When Prohibition took effect, several smugglers were arrested while trying to bring alcohol into Wooster.  Using money collected from fining these violators of the Prohibition laws, the city was able to purchase land on which it later built Christmas Run Park.²  Although the temperance and prohibition movement died out in Wooster as it did across the nation, it still was instrumental in shaping the social atmosphere of the city as it transitioned into the twentieth century.   

¹ Robert A. Musson, M.D., Brewing Beer In The Buckeye State, Volume 1: A History of the Brewing Industry in Eastern Ohio from 1808 to 2004 (Medina, OH: Zepp Publications, 2005).
² “Five Days for Liquor Dealers,” Wooster Daily News, October 31, 1908; “Saloon-Keepers Quit Business,” Wooster Daily News, November 9, 1908; Harry S. McClarran, “Harry’s Mystery Question,” Summer Quarterly Newsletter, (Wooster: Wayne County Historical Society, 2013), 5.