The
Portrait of Abraham Overholt
When word hit the
street this afternoon that Liz Campion was putting out some junk on the
sidewalk, or, in her more delicate phrase "deaccessioning numerous objets
d'art", I hustled on over right away, knowing that I could count on
snapping up some bargains.
When Liz holds her
"porch sales", there are always bargains to be had, due to her
extravagant but wildly uneven system of pricing. Thus while she had a couple of
Ming vases for sale at $1700 the pair, she also had a silver cow creamer, which
my practiced eye told me was Modern Dutch, available for five bucks. I picked
up a couple of Warhol silk screens of Marilyn Monroe for fifty cents each --
even if my appraiser tells me they aren't strictly authentic, the possibility
was certainly worth paying a buck for.
There was a large
canvas smeared with magic markers which looked as though a five-year-old had
discovered Jackson Pollack. This, for some bizarre reason was priced at a hefty
five thousand dollars.
"Whoa, Liz, what's
this?" I inquired. Turns out it was a painting done by an elephant which
had been given to her as a wedding present by one of the in-laws.
"Fucking
in-laws," she grumbled. "Don't know whether they were trying to tell
me I look like an elephant, or paint like one, or have the taste of one."
Not wishing to tread on
the delicate topic of her in-laws, which I know is always a touchy subject for
Liz, I declined to comment. Just then I saw something which took my breath
away. It was one of those antique bar mirrors, with the legend on top in block
capitals "Our state license is a valued possession. Please do not
jeopardize it by unseemly conduct," and signed "Proprietor" in a
flowing cursive script.
But what really grabbed
me was the ghostly imprint on the mirror of an old bearded man who looked
rather like Martin van Buren. Underneath in large gold letters was the name of
the whiskey -- "Old Overholt", and in smaller letters "A
Pennsylvania Product: Pennsylvania's Favorite -- Bottled in Bond -- Straight
Rye Whiskey."
Liz was asking two
dollars for this valuable antique.
"Um, Liz," I
said, picking it up, "where did you find this one?"
She looked at it with
distaste. "Some Russian ballet dancer left it behind when the KGB came to
pick him up. Why? Ya want it? Take it. I'll give it to you free. Otherwise it
goes to the Second Mile Center."
I thanked her
profusely, and launched into the story of Abraham Overholt, the famous early
19th-century Mennonite whiskey distiller from Westmoreland County out in
western PA. He was the great-grandson of Marcus Oberholtzer, a refugee from the
Palatinate wars who arrived in Germantown in 1710. The family moved west, and
by Abraham's time were prosperous farmers raising bountiful crops of rye.
The story goes that
Abraham was a deacon in the Scottdale Mennonite congregation, but was
reproached by the bishop board, not so much for actually *distilling* the
whiskey but by leading some weaker brothers astray by selling it in bars.
Various versions of the story are extant, one being that Overholt cooled it
with the church elders by donating large barrels of whiskey to the bishops
every Christmas. Another iteration was that Overholt led like-minded Mennonites
out of the mainstream Mennonite church to form a branch known as the
"Whiskey Mennonites", thus adding to the many variants and mutations
of Mennonites and Amish to be found in rural Pennsylvania to this day.
Two facts, however, are
beyond dispute. The first is that Abraham's children left the Mennonite church,
and that one of his grandsons was Henry Clay Frick, the notorious
industrialist, union-buster, and organizer of a massacre of strikers, which
earned him the title of "Most Hated Man in America." The other is that
the site of one of the original Old Overholt distilleries is now, appropriately
enough, the grounds of the Westmoreland County Association for the Blind.
--Ross Bender