Republished from our newsletter, Atsmi Uvsari, Issue 22, Winter 2009, written by Rochelle Kaplan.

The Spirited in the Land of Zion and a Side Trip to Hawaii

Although the Ransohoff Brothers sold liquor wholesale along with other items in their downtown Salt Lake City store as early as 1864, Jacob Moritz was the most successful of Utah’s entrepreneurs of spirits, in his case, beer. A 1909 biography states:

Jacob Moritz, who is the energetic and progressive vice-president, treasurer and general manager of the Salt Lake Brewing Company, is a native of Germany, born at Ingenheim, Rheinpfalz, February 22, 1849. His father, Isaac Moritz, was a merchant and hotel proprietor in the old country. Jacob attended the schools of his native city, and subsequently graduated from a business college in Mannheim, Germany, and immediately entered upon a business career. September 14, 1866, he emigrated to America and soon secured employment with the F. M. Schaefer Brewing Company, one of the best in New York, where he remained for two years, acquiring much knowledge of the business in that short time. His next place was with the Anheiser-Busch Brewing Company in St. Louis, where he remained for a short time and then determined to try the mining business. He went to Helena, Montana, and engaged in that work until 1871, when he came to Salt Lake City. About that time he started the Montana Brewery, under the firm name of Moritz & Richter, near Warm Springs, and conducted a successful business there for four years, when the new brewery was built within the city limits. Success still followed him, until to-day the plant of the Salt Lake City Brewing Company is without doubt the largest in the inter-mountain country, having a capacity of four hundred barrels a day, and bottling one thousand three hundred dozen per day. The brands are American Beauty, Pilsener, and Export, and also an excellent Porter Triple.¹

I found Moritz on the 1880 Census in Blackfoot Precinct in Oneida County, Idaho Territory. Listed as Bavarian-born and a brewer, he was thirty-one and single. In 1884, Moritz was the vice-president, treasurer, and general manager of the Salt Lake Brewing Company, positions he retained until his death. In 1885, Moritz served on the grand jury when the prosecutor sought indictments against two men whose prison terms for unlawful cohabitation were set to expire. At the time, the prosecutor could prosecute a man multiple times for the same offense, each indictment naming a different date, and thereby imprison polygamists indefinitely. Moritz objected and was dismissed by the judge for refusing to cooperate. For this stand, Moritz earned the respect of Mormons, despite his liberalism and involvement in the alcohol industry.² By 1900, he owned a brewery and was living with his wife, Lahela, at 975 Fourth Street South, Salt Lake City. He owned his home and had been married eleven years. Born in February 1850, he had lived in the US for thirty years and was naturalized. His much younger wife was listed on the census as born in January 1870 in Hawaii to German-born parents; she had been in the US for eleven years, arriving in 1889, the year she wed. Hawaii was annexed to the United States only in 1898. The Moritz family had a Swedish-born live-in servant, Anna Gustafson, 25, who’d come to the US in 1891.

In 1909, the capacity (of the Salt Lake Brewing Company) is about 125,000 barrels per annum, shipping to Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, Colorado, and California. They employ about one hundred men, and the brewery is equipped with all the modern machinery in the plant, and everything known in the modern science of brewing beer is employed. The plant is a model one in every respect, and the output as pure and good as capital and brains can make it. The brewery in point of excellence is second to none in the country, and has a complete electrical equipment.³

Since there are 330 bottles of beer in a barrel, in 1908, Moritz’s company produced 41,250,000 bottles of beer. Before Prohibition, the Salt Lake Brewing Company was the largest brewer in Utah and one of the largest in the West. His output eclipsed the next five largest Utah breweries combined. Moritz’s genius was trumpeted in a full page ad from the Salt Lake Herald of December 1906 with a wonderful tagline: Beer contains less alcohol than apple cider. An October 13, 1907 Salt Lake Tribune headline announced that Moritz planned to build a business block on Second South, between Plum and Commercial Streets, in an area filled with pawnshops and saloons. He paid $100,000 for the property. He had, years earlier, established the Brewery Saloon on Commercial Street and by the early 1900s, operated thirty-six saloons.⁴

Mr. Moritz served a term in the State legislature, and was a member of the Constitutional Convention, and in many ways has evidenced a keen interest in the welfare of his party and the city of Salt Lake. Besides his connection with the brewing company, he is interested in the Burning Moscow Mine and Milling Company, a director in the Little Chief Mining Company, and is a large holder of real estate in Salt Lake City.⁵

Moritz was an Alta Club member and President of Temple B’nai Israel when Utah was granted statehood in 1905. He was a Republican in national politics and a Liberal in Utah’s party system. He chaired committees to advance Utah’s mining industry. Active in the Commercial Club, he raised money to build the first Salt Palace. He donated to charities, including $100 toward food to send to survivors of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.⁶ He died of stomach cancer in his native Germany, in Wiesbaden, in 1910, and was cremated. His estate was appraised at over $327,000 which, in 2009 dollars, is over $7.6 million. Moritz’s ashes were in a grave in Salt Lake’s B’nai Israel Cemetery and a curious legend about his tomb persists. Apparently, if you circle the grave three times while chanting, “Emo, Emo, Emo”, and then look quickly into the window at the remains of a shattered urn, you’ll see Emo’s bloodshot eyes glow. It’s unclear who Emo is or how the legend started. Due to repeated vandalism of the grave, the ashes were moved for safekeeping to another location, although the memorial vault remains.

Curious about Moritz’s Hawaiian-born wife, I decided to do some research. One article noted,

The press, both Californian and Polynesian, featured regular columns headed: “From the Sandwich Islands” and “News from California.” The islands saw a considerable number of California pioneers, who came in the winter for vacations, and also apparently in connection with mercantile reconnaissance. This personal acquaintance with the Sandwich Islands also applied to many Jewish individuals… Abraham Watters undertook a trip to the islands in 1857.⁷

(An earlier article for the UJGS newsletter about Utah’s Jewish History mentioned the Watters brothers, Ichel and Abraham. Abraham divided his time between San Francisco and Salt Lake City until 1878 when he and his wife moved to Birmingham, England. In 1888, he returned alone to his brother’s home in Salt Lake City and remained there until his death in 1893.)

The first Jewish mercantile establishment was a San Francisco firm which opened a branch in Honolulu. As with many other Jewish families of merchants in California, it was a large family which could well afford to staff the branch of the firm in the islands with a partner, while other family members remained in San Francisco. A. S. Grinbaum is to be regarded as the first founder of a firm of this kind. He arrived in Honolulu in 1856 and remained there seven years. Due to his business success, he was able to have one of his nephews, Morris Louisson, settle there permanently. Together with another nephew, Morris S. Grinbaum, he founded the firm M. S. Grinbaum and Company. This firm was numbered among the most important export and import firms on the islands. It was also active in the development of the sugar industry, operating both plantations and sugar mills… The Grinbaum, Hyman, and Phillips firms were the outstanding Jewish-owned companies prior to the annexation of the islands by the United States in 1898.⁸

Lahela Louisson, who wed Jacob Moritz in Honolulu in 1889, was the eldest child of Morris Louisson, and the first Jewish woman born in Hawaii.

In the Sandwich Islands Jewish, social life was integrated with that of the Germans. M. Louisson was president of the German Club in 1870. The Odd Fellows Lodge was established in the islands in 1846. An 1885 report by the Excelsior Lodge in Waikiki noted the presence of M. Louisson and his lady guest.

The Hawaiian Gazette noted the first Jewish wedding:

Tuesday, the 22nd of July, 1879, in the presence of a numerous society of invited guests belonging to the elite of Honolulu in the house of the uncle of the bride, Mr. Louisson, Esquire, in Honolulu, the wedding of Mr. I. Hyman of the firm Hyman Bros. of this city with Miss B. Frankel, niece of Mr. and Mrs. Louisson took place. Everything imaginable or available for money had been done for the pleasure of the company. The stately and elegant home of Mr. Louisson was arranged with great taste and lavishness. Outside the main building a tent was set up and adorned with green plants, tropical flowers and the flags of the United States, Hawaii, and the German Empire, the porch and tent were splendidly illuminated by Chinese lanterns and tastefully decorated. In the tent itself, for the comfort of the guests who numbered 200, an excellent meal was served.

Exactly at 8 o’clock, the fixed time, the bride and bridegroom entered the hall where the guests were assembled and also Mr. Peck, a Jew and friend of the families sent by a Jewish rabbi at San Francisco to perform the wedding ceremony in accord with the Jewish rite, which he did in the Hebrew language reciting from a book. It is important to note that Mr. Peck, before he functioned as a substitute for the rabbi in San Francisco, used the precaution of procuring for himself the authoritative power of Hawaiian law which permitted and legalized the ceremony. Thus not only the holiness of the Jewish religion but the civil law of this kingdom was secured at the same time to make the bond of marriage a rightful one, and to serve as a precedent for all future cases.⁹

The article continued with a description of a Hawaiian musical band, with Mr. Berger conducting, in a pavilion, the roomful of elegant presents for the couple, and the happiness of the first Jewish wedding in the Hawaiian Islands. The piece notes the wedding of the first Jewess born in the islands. In May 1889, Mr. Jacob Moritz was married to Lahela Louisson, who was born in Honolulu.¹⁰

Lakela is Hawaiian for Rachel, according to a Hawaiian/English dictionary; Lahela is a variant. Lahela was born January 1, 1868 to Morris and Therese, nee Guenther. (The 1900 census makes Lahela two years younger.) Lahela’s California-born siblings were Abraham Lincoln Louisson, born in January 1864, during the Civil War, Henry Louisson, Hawaiian-born William Saul, born 1874, and Julius Lester born 1876. I found some of the Louisson family on the 1880 Hawaiian Islands Census of 1900, in Hamakua District of Hawaii Island. Henry was listed as the head, born in January 1866, single, a rancher, who had come to the Hawaiian Islands in 1896, Abe L., rancher, single, who had immigrated to the Hawaiian Islands in 1893, parents Morris, born March 1825 in Germany and a merchant who immigrated to the Hawaiian Islands in 1866 and was naturalized, and Morris’s wife Therese, born in Germany in July 1847. They had been wed 38 years and Therese had borne seven children, six of whom survived. She also came to the Hawaiian Islands in 1866. A Japanese-born cook, Sataro Inada, lived with the family. Morris’s son William S. at the time lived in Seattle, Washington, listed as a prospector. Another son, Julius, was living in Portland, Oregon with his sister Belle, born in Honolulu in October 1871, her German-born husband Gustav Simon, 42, a dealer of wholesale cigars, their daughter Helen, 8, and two servants. Julius, born in Honolulu in May, 1876 was an owner in the business with his brother-in-law and was naturalized in 1893. Gustav Simon was naturalized in 1880 and Belle was listed as having immigrated to the US in 1890. The couple were married eight years and had a daughter. The family remained in Oregon in the cigar business and Julius also stayed in Oregon, wed, and had two daughters. Abe and Henry remained partners and owners of a coffee plantation in Hawaii and were still single in 1910; in 1920 they were mistakenly labeled Octoroons (ancestry one-eighth black), and Abe was listed as divorced. William S. was a dentist in Goldfield, Nevada in 1910 and married and living in Santa Monica in 1930. Henry by 1930 was retired and living with his wife in San Francisco. Julius, now widowed, was an executive vice president and owner of a fruit packing company in San Francisco. How amazing this family’s odyssey is.

Lahela, once married, became a leader of the Hebrew Ladies’ Relief Society in Salt Lake, while Moritz served as president of the B’nai Israel Congregation. Lahela remarried, after Jacob Moritz died, to Joseph Lippman, a widowed lawyer in Salt Lake City.

Lippman too is profiled in the Sketches of the Inter-Mountain West. Born in Alabama, he studied and practiced law in Pennsylvania, then went to Chicago and to Colorado, before moving to Utah. He first was in the newspaper field, publishing and editing the first Gentile evening newspaper, The Chronicle, in the Territory of Utah, beginning in October, 1882. In 1884, he joined the Tribune as city editor and later telegraph editor. He returned to law practice in 1889.

A staunch Republican, he found in Utah no such party to which he could ally himself, and he devoted himself and his paper to the Liberal cause, which was opposed to church interference in politics, and from then on to the time of its dissolution, took an active part in the campaigns of the Liberal Party. He was one of the founders of the American Party in Utah, in 1904.¹¹

He served as manager of the Tribune for a year and a half in 1904 to 1905, was U.S. District Attorney from 1902 to 1906, served as Territorial librarian and statistician from 1890 to 1892, and was Salt Lake County recorder in 1893 and 1894. In 1909, he had lived for thirty years at 603 Third Avenue with his son and stepdaughters. After he married Lahela, the Lippmans lived at 1067 E South Temple and 15 E South Temple in 1930. Lahela died in Los Angeles in March 1959, and was long widowed.

Although Jacob Moritz was the most prominent brewer, other Jewish alcohol sellers offered their wares. Simon Hanak advertised wines, liquors, and segars as a wholesale dealer and importer in an 1876 ad.

E. and G. Boukofsky concurrently advertised both wholesale and retail sale of liquor.

Michael Amshler advertised a beer hall and city brewery in the Corinne Daily Register in the 1870s.

And the Baer brothers (Isaac and Adolph) moved from Leadville, Colorado to establish their company in Salt Lake City in 1909. Originally from Baden, Germany, both were prominent businessmen in Leadville. Adolph was a founding member of Leadville’s B’nai Brith and its first Vice President. He was a member of the synagogue choir, President of the Hebrew Benevolent Association, and superintendent of the Sabbath school. He was on the building committee of Congregation Israel and its first president. Isaac was an officer in 1880 of the Leadville Turnverein Corporation, a society of Germans in Leadville. The brothers were partners in a wholesale liquor and cigar company. By 1910, the Baer Bros. Mercantile Company, wholesale liquor dealers, was located at 245-247 S State Street in Salt Lake City. Old Caribou Whiskey was one of their products. Adolph’s daughter Minette married Daniel Alexander, a prominent Salt Lake City attorney.

1. Sketches of the inter-mountain states: together with biographies of many prominent and progressive citizens who have helped in the development and history-making of this marvelous region: 1847-1909, Utah, Idaho, Nevada. Salt Lake Tribune, 1909, p. 263.
2. Parshall, Ardis. E. Emo’s Grave? No, it’s the resting place of master brewer Jacob Moritz, Salt Lake Tribune, July 12, 2009
3. Sketches of the inter-mountain states.
4. Parshall, Ardis. E.
5. Sketches of the inter-mountain states.
6. Parshall.
7. Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly, April 1974, Vol. VI, Number 3, pp. 177-187.
8. Ibid.
9. Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly, April 1974, Vol. VI, Number 3, pp. 177-187.
10. Ibid.
11. Sketches of the Inter-Mountain West, page 215.

Photographs courtesy of the Utah State Archives.