Distillery Row: Whiskey Capital of the World
Near Peoria, Illinois
Stand near the Illinois River here and imagine the smell. Between the eighteen forties and the arrival of Prohibition in nineteen nineteen, Peoria was the whiskey capital of the United States, and for a stretch of decades it was arguably the whiskey capital of the world. The concentration of distilleries along the riverbank, known as Distillery Row, ran from roughly State Street south toward what is now the interstate bridge. By eighteen sixty-five there were fourteen distilleries operating within sight of each other. By eighteen eighty, Peoria and its surrounding area were producing eighteen million gallons of alcohol a year.
The conditions were ideal. The Illinois River provided water filtered through limestone aquifers. Local corn was cheap and abundant. The river itself, and later the railroads, moved product efficiently. And there was a ready market: America was drinking, and the frontier was thirsty.
The first commercial distillery was established here around eighteen forty-three by a man named Almiron Cole. Others followed fast. By the eighteen seventies, Peoria was not just producing whiskey, it was defining what American grain whiskey meant. The city's distillers were among the first to adopt industrial-scale fermentation, turning out consistent, high-proof spirit in quantities that made smaller producers irrelevant.
Prohibition did not kill Peoria's distilling identity. It only paused it. When Repeal came in nineteen thirty-three, Hiram Walker, the Canadian spirits company, immediately broke ground on a new distillery here, reportedly the largest in the world at the time, with a capacity of one hundred thousand gallons of new-make whiskey a day. It employed over a thousand people at its peak in the nineteen sixties. The plant stopped making whiskey in the seventies and has since operated as an ethanol plant, a use that is, in some ways, continuous with the original idea.
The barrels are gone. The smell is mostly gone. But the water is still filtered through limestone, and the corn still grows.
