"The Infernal Traffic"

This late nineteenth century photograph shows the Wooster Brewing Company.  During the time of the temperance movement it was the main producer of beer in Wayne County.

Political cartoons were a popular means during the United States temperance movement to spread warning of the danger of consuming alcohol.  This 1840s lithograph by Nathaniel Currier shows an extreme view of the slippery slope of alcohol consumption.  It begins with a man drinking one glass and ends with him committing suicide.

In the late-1800s, many men and women belonging to the Protestant churches of Wooster began to resent the presence of taverns and the problem of drunkenness in the city.  They were disturbed by the effect that the city’s 16 local saloons were having on the behavior of men both in public and in the home.¹  Throughout the late nineteenth century, crime in Wooster and the surrounding area was often associated with alcohol.  An 1884 article from the Wayne County Herald covering a manslaughter in nearby Shreve explained how the case was “clearly an outgrowth of the infernal drink traffic … as long as we tolerate this high pirate on society, this barbarous saloon system, we may expect such things to occur in every community.”²   

Seeing it as their moral responsibility to battle the perceived evils of alcohol, a group of Wooster women banded together in the spring of 1874 and formed the Women’s Temperance Union.  These reform-minded women endeavored to follow their Christian principles by actively fighting Wooster’s vice and ridding the city of the saloon system for good.³   

¹ Lucy Lillian Notestein, Wooster of the Middle West, Volume I (Kent: Kent State Univ. Press, 1971), 128.
² “The Shreve Tragedy,” Wayne County Herald, March 29, 1884.
³ Paul Locher, When Wooster Was a Whippersnapper (Sugarcreek, OH: Carlisle Printing, 2008), 151-154.