| The first national convention of the
Prohibition Party in 1872 in Columbus, the founding of the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union (WCTU) in Cleveland in 1874, and formation of the Anti-Saloon League in
Oberlin in 1893 firmly established Ohio’s leadership in the temperance movement. The
Anti-Saloon League’s first national convention in Columbus in 1913 advocated a
prohibition amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This became fact in 1919 when the 18th
Amendment was ratified, instituting prohibition, the nation’s great but eventually
failed experiment in legislating public morality. Shelby County citizens gave early
support to the Anti-Saloon League’s efforts. In March 1911, Mrs. N.C. Enders,
great-aunt of Barbara Adams (Perry Township), signed the following pledge to The
Lincoln Legion, the Westerville, Ohio, based "abstinence department" of the
league: "I hereby enroll with the Lincoln Legion and promise, with God’s help,
to keep the following pledge, written, signed and advocated by Abraham Lincoln: --
Whereas, the use of intoxicating liquors as a beverage is productive of pauperism,
degradation and crime, and believing it is our duty to discourage that which produces more
evil than good, we therefore pledge ourselves to abstain from the use of intoxicating
liquors as a beverage."
Yet the "snakes of evil" prospered in Ohio despite its stellar achievements
against drinking. Cincinnati, for example, was home early in this century to the
nation’s largest distillery industry and the third largest brewing center. Under the
local option laws, Shelby County consistently surfaced on the wet side, while Miami County
always voted dry. The Western Ohio Railway, the interurban connecting Sidney with Piqua
and other points south early in the century, was known in some quarters as the
"drunkard’s express," as our Miami County neighbors, knowing a drink was
just a short ride north, voted the righteous way.
Carry Nation, once married to an alcoholic and later raging
publicly against drinking, represents on a personal level the larger scale alcoholic
schizophrenia long characterizing Ohio’s political, economic, and social affair with
liquor: . prohibition leadership in a state where the majority was politically wet, public
demonstrations against saloons in a state with strong economic ties to the liquor
industry, dry counties neighboring with wet counties, and state control of alcohol as a
sop to anti-drinking forces while still accommodating the drinkers. Decades after
his death, the drunken Charles Gloyd was still very much on Carry Nation’s mind even
as her hatchet tours were in full swing. On a stopover in Troy just after the turn of the
century, she made a bitter-sweet inquiry about his father who once lived in the area.
The April 4, 1901, the Miami County Union
newspaper reported on Carry Nation’s visit and her questioning of those gathered:
"Mrs. Carry Nation, who achieved some notoriety in Kansas by smashing saloons, passed
through Troy Saturday enroute from Springfield to Indianapolis via the Big Four. "She
inquired of the small crowd on the platform if anything was known of Squire Henry Lloyd,
who was a Justice of the Peace in the vicinity about thirty-five years prior, and
volunteered the information that he was her father-in-law. Nobody could give her any
information concerning the father of her first husband and the train pulled out with
everybody’s curiosity gratified except that of Mrs. Nation herself" (Troy
Historical Society, Juda Moyer).
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