Part Two: Early to Middle 1700’s, on the Corner of Fore and Union Streets
The rebuilt settlement here, now named Falmouth, was concentrated between Fore Street on the waterfront and Congress Street (then Back Street) along the spine of Falmouth Neck. It extended eventually from about modern-day Hancock Street to Center Street. Between Union St, where I’m standing now, and India St, Fore St. was the landward end of about ten wharves. It was a shipbuilding and shipping center for the district of Maine in the colony of Massachusetts. Maine ships carried salt fish and wood for construction, box parts, and barrel staves and heads down the coast to the Caribbean, and returned loaded with molasses.
By 1770 the colonies were importing 6 million gallons of molasses from the Caribbean. Rhode Island and Massachusetts ( including the District of Maine) produced ¾ of the colonies’ rum exports. Sixty-three distilleries in Massachusetts produced more than 700,000 gallons of rum annually. Domestic alcohol consumption rose from two gallons per person to a historic high of five gallons per person (some estimates are as high as 20 gallons per person).
New England rum was a trade commodity and a form of currency. From the still, it would have looked like Brightwater, but it was raw and strong enough to blister paint. Distilled from molasses and shipped in the old molasses barrels, hundreds of thousands of gallons of it shipped out from right here to float around the Atlantic Ocean. During the months and years at sea something magical happened to the rum. The molasses, the oak, the sloshing, and the temperature change of traveling from the Northern Hemisphere to the Equator and back again, imbued the rum with color, aroma, and complex flavors.
Instead of a fiery, raw alcohol that could be smelled a block away, it was fragrant and flavorful. Drinkers of the day welcomed the addition to their flip in winter and their switchel in summer. New England rum gained a reputation as top-shelf tipple. The boozy aged rum was the 1700’s forerunner to Nightwater.