Distilleries od Peoria County...part of Genealogy Trails

Peoria County, Illinois Genealogy Trails

Distilleries

The Largest Distillery in the World
Source: History of Peoria 1880.

-The mammoth distillery of Kidd, Francis & Co., erected last season on the banks of the river below the I., B. & W. R.R. bridge, is the largest in the world. It was commenced on the 20th of march and went into operation on the 10th of July. The main building is 131x209 feet. A portion of it is five stories high. The malt house is three stories, and the fermenting room two stories high. The mash and yeast rooms are four stories high, and the mill five stories. The latter includes a grain room, 20x40 feet and 64 feet high. The alcohol room occupies an L of the main building and is 40x60 feet, five stories high. There are eighteen fermenting tubs, twenty feet in diameter at the bottom and sixty feet high, with a capacity of 834 bushels each. The mash tub is thirty feet in diameter and seven feet high. The beer still's capacity is sixty bushels per charge, or 240 bushels per hour. There is a cistern room 61x88 feet, containing five tubs, sixteen feet in diameter and fourteen feet high.

The bonded warehouse is erected just below the main building, and is 110x88 feet, three stories high. An office has been built on the upper side of the main building, 22x36 feet, and one story in height. The wagon scale is on one side of the office, and wagon jump and track scale on the other next to the distillery. Grain is dumped into a sink which runs to the foot of the elevator and is then carried up into the bin. The weighing or scale room is 40x64 feet. All the yeast meal is weighed in this room before entering the mash tub. The bins are overhead and the meal is let down directly into the hoppers. In this room are six pairs of Howe Scales. Four of them are 500 bushel scales and two pairs are 100 bushels. The corn is ground and conveyed immediately into the scales. This has never been done before, but it saves an extra handling of the meal. The engine room is 37x100 feet and contains two large and powerful engines. The pumping arrangement consists of five Dean pumps. Two are water pumps of a capacity of 800 gallons per minute. One a beer pump with capacity of 440 gallons per minute, and the other two are high-wines and low-wines pumps. There are eight double-flue boilers twenty-eight feet in length and forty-four inches in diameter, and three boilers six feet in diameter, sixteen feet length, with sixty-four four-inch flues. There are two wells, seven feet in diameter and thirty feet deep, to furnish a supply of water. The smoke stack is eighteen feet square at the base, with twenty feet of stone masonry below the surface. The brick stack towers 130 feet above this. It has a flue seven feet in diameter. The capacity of the malt-house is 400 bushels per day and the distillery is 5,000 bushels per day. Fifty-eight acres of ground were purchased for the distillery, but twenty acres were sold to the Sugar Refinery Company. On the bottom land, between the distillery and the river, stables are built for feeding 3,500 cattle.

The distillery buildings are all built of brick, and 2,700,000 have been used in its construction. The entire buildings cover an area of about five acres. The daily product is equal to 275 barrels of high-wines, consuming about eighty acres of good corn, and forty acres of small grain, and 1,600 bushels of coal per day. They employ ninety men on the premises, and about 125 to prepare their cooperage. The slops are sufficient to feed over 5,000 head of cattle. This one distillery pays the government $1,800 per day revenue.

Transcribed by: Yvonne! Thanks Yvonne

BACK

Peoria County, IL Genealogy Trails
County Coordinator: Candi Horton © 2007
Genealogy Trails History Group is a Volunteer Organization Dedicated to providing FREE access to Historical and Genealogical Data.
© 2006 - 2007 by Genealogy Trails - All Rights Reserved - With full rights reserved for original submitters.