Sep 29, 2022 - Sale 2615

Sale 2615 - Lot 147

Price Realized: $ 1,875
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
(FOOD & DRINK.) Oliver Cromwell Rood. Daybook of a Vermont distillery selling copious amounts of gin. 295 manuscript pages. Tall folio, 15 x 6 inches, original calf, moderate wear; minor dampstaining. Waterbury, VT, 1809-44
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Additional Details

This daybook records the retail liquor sales from a distillery operated by Oliver Cromwell Rood (circa 1778-1845?) in the Colbyville neighborhood of Waterbury, VT. He sometimes made dozens of sales in a day, mostly of gin (selling for between $1.00 and $1.25 per gallon), and to a lesser extent whiskey and "high wines." Rood also ran a grist mill and was involved in other ventures, but those must have been recorded in other volumes--this daybook records little other than liquor sales until about 1815, comprising more than 200 pages of densely written entries, each one naming the purchaser and the quantity. The entries after 1815 are much sparser and reflect other kinds of business, but are in the same hand and the customers still appear to hail from Waterbury.

Rood's heavy involvement in the liquor trade is alluded to rather disapprovingly in the 1882 Vermont Historical Gazetteer: "Mr. Rood had a rather varied fortune in life, and one habit, almost universally prevalent in his day, he lived to overcome, much to the comfort of his later years. . . . O. C. Rood put up here a potato whisky distillery, and ran it as long as self interest or a true sense of moral propriety, in his judgment rendered it advisable" (pages 833, 912).