Rum History Part Eight: Still Mid-1800’s, On the Corner of Hancock and Fore Streets

After the Revolution ended, for a variety of reasons, the use of rum in the US began to decline.  Whiskey was the thing.

However, temperance crusaders labeled all liquor as rum and kept the name in use.  Maybe Kill-devil was still applied to wounds that refused to heal, but the ladies and gentlemen of the West End were more likely to be prescribed wine or brandy for their nervous conditions or ennui.  There was little actual rum present at the rum riot of 1855.

Still, sailors and rum go together like beans and brown bread, and Portland was a sailors’ town.  Neal Dow railed against rum, and we’ll take him at his literal word,

even if many of his opponents were Irish and more likely to be whiskey enthusiasts.

One of those opponents-- or is victim more appropriate?-- was a tavern keeper known to sailors far and wide as Kitty Kentuck.  Kitty Kentuck’s story is most thoroughly told by Matthew Jude Barker in The Irish of Portland, Maine. She bought a property from John Neal, Neal Dow’s cousin, here at 22 Hancock Street, a stone’s throw from the old Casco trading post location.

John Neal’s an interesting character, a one-time Quaker, a lawyer, businessman and landowner, an advocate for emancipation, women’s rights, and temperance.  He split with his cousin Neal Dow when Dow shifted from moral suasion to legal prohibition.  Prohibitionists, to John Neal, were too intemperate in their pursuit of temperance.

Kitty Kentuck arrived in Portland in the 1840’s and was charged with her first of many liquor offenses in 1846.  She was often defended by John Neal, who described her in print as a “a poor, but generous, kind-hearted Irish woman... maligned by a drunken vagabond.”  He and some friends posted bond for her release.  His cousin Neal Dow called her the keeper of a “notorious groggery” and jabbed at his cousin (and Kitty.  He seems like a mean guy) by saying “Kitty has some remains of beauty left, and shows that she was once very handsome; her friends were truly friends in need.”

Notorious or merely well-known, Kitty’s place was popular enough with sailors visiting Portland that a ballad about it was “known to every deep-sea sailor who could sing a song.”  Among the lyrics: 

 “We go down to Portland city, At the hour of twelve at night, 

There you’ll see my charming Kitty, Washing her feet by candlelight.

O, I goes down to Kitty Kentuck’s, I gets my whack three times a day;

Where the ding-bat’s on the table, Four and six the bummers pay.”

Kitty’s place burned in the 1866 fire.  She built herself a shanty on Hancock Street, and was found dead there on September 15, 1866, apparently murdered.  Her son was arrested and charged, but later released. There the record ends.