A Wine Cellar Was Left Untouched Since 1939. Here’s What Was Found
John Smith had to actually buy the 10,600-square-foot stucco Tudor mansion before he would be able to open the wine cellar and find out what bottles had been left down there some 86 years earlier.
Hidden off the main road at the end of a circular driveway, The Sherman Estates was built on fifteen acres of land in northwest Dayton, Ohio in 1925. Its original owner was John Q. Sherman, the co-founder of the Standard Register Company as well as a prolific inventor who held over 190 patents.
Initially called The Highland, it was set on, yes, higher lands after the immense damage caused by the Great Dayton Flood of 1913. Its Zillow listing humbly mentioned six bedrooms, four full bathrooms, and two half baths, but that was a bit understated. In fact, the business magnate had filled his home with countless features he had enjoyed in the houses and castles he saw when traveling through Europe:
A butler’s pantry and breakfast nook, a grand staircase leading to the second floor, a solarium in the dead center of the home with a ceramic tile fountain, and French doors leading to an outdoor mirrored fountain and a grotto; a library, a billiards room, a three-car garage, and a then-state-of-the-art intra-room intercom system with handheld earphone and call pushbuttons.
The Great Room would offer a 30-foot high stucco cathedral ceiling with fleur-de-lis relief and king post beams, carved rosettes crown chandeliers dangling between them, and a fireplace ringed by a wrought-iron wrap with a leather seat. Sherman and his wife, Katherine, would fill the room with treasures befitting Charles Foster Kane — most notably, a Persian rug measuring 12 x 30 feet.
The Shermans had hosted a lot of fundraising parties in their heyday — Sherman was a big-time philanthropist who was a key founder of the University of Dayton as well as Good Samaritan Hospital — and there were 25 full settings of gold and silverware. At these parties, other bold faced Dayton names of the day like Orville Wright had tripped the light fantastic.
And, in an obscure corner of the house, at the bottom of a back staircase, underneath the stairs, was a wine cellar that had been sealed shut and never reopened since the year Sherman died — 1939.
Credit: John Smith
Didn’t Even Know It Was There
If someone were to have bought this house and suddenly have access to the sealed cellar, you could do worse than Smith. He’s long had a fascination with alcohol in all categories, born to a father who made his own wine, he has brewed his own beer and mead. He drinks bourbon, Scotch, and rum. But he also loves home architecture from the days of the robber barons and captains of industry.
“Since I was a kid, I’ve always loved touring old houses and mansions,” says Smith. He recalls visiting Fallingwater in Pennsylvania and the Henry Clay Frick House in New York as a child. “So it’s kind of a lifelong dream for me to have a big mansion to restore.”
The opportunity would come after a recent retirement. Born near Pittsburgh, he attended the Air Force Academy and worked in the service his whole life. With his wife’s family located in Ohio, they decided to relocate there for their golden years. They had become aware of the Sherman Estate and its availability around 2023 when it was first put on the market by the Shermans’ remaining heirs. It had a great price then and even better one now, just around a half a million bucks.
Katherine had remained in the house until her death in 1965. Together the Shermans had eight children, the last of which would survive until 2020. But after 1965 no one exactly lived in the home except for a ground caretaker who never really touched the main house, so much so that Katherine still had jewelry and open letters on her nightstand decades after her death.
You might wonder why nothing was ever put up for an estate sale, but with eight kids and several dozen grandkids, there were just too many hands in the pie — a pie that would ultimately never get cut up. Eventually, however, the cost of holding onto this relic got to be too much and there was no choice but to sell. First to a holding company apparently owned by one of the Iams pet food heirs, in 2023. They never lived there either, however, and eventually offered it to the Smiths.
“So we went back out there to make an offer,” says Smith. “And the nice thing is all the big pieces of furniture and the key stuff that you would want in the house are still there. But they had never even opened the wine cellar door.
“I don’t even know if they knew it was there, man.”
Credit: John Smith
Shock
Smith had caught a little glimpse of the cellar while first touring the house, but there was something wedged in the door so he was unable to fully check it out. The door itself really caught his attention — a cathedral door with a dozen or so square holes, inch by inch, in the top of it, surely for airflow.
Eventually, after closing on the home, Smith used his strength to get the door open. Inside the cellar it was total darkness. There was a musty, dank smell to it. Some surfaces were a bit damp.
“It was stuffed floor to ceiling with bottles. Bottles stacked on top of bottles on top of bottles,” he recalls. “I was just in shock.”
The bottles were extremely dusty with a sticky film over most of them. Some were stored on their sides, others were upright. It would take Smith nearly 48 hours to get all the bottles out and into better light, where he would discover all 400 or so were from the 1930s or earlier.
“Part of being well-heeled back then was being able to offer an impressive set of selections for people.”
There were 47 bottles of Niersteiner Rhine wine from 1895, 42 bottles of Chanson Père & Fils Sparkling Burgundy from 1934, 12 bottles of Tokaji Royal Blend wine produced in Austria-Hungary in 1895. There were 5 bottles of Barton & Guestier Haut Sauternes from the same era, 5 bottles of Old California Port from 1905, and 8 bottles of what appears to be “Fisson Frères Bordeaux Port,” though the exact name on the label is somewhat hard to decipher after so long.
There were bottles of Old Overholt rye from the 1910s, Prohibition-era Bourbon de Luxe from United Distillers, and three bottles of the legendary Golden Wedding Rye, an old Pennsylvania brand.
There was Prohibition-era non-alcoholic Old Town London Dry Gin, Ronrico Gold Label Puerto Rican Rum, and Hiram Walker’s Sloe Gin. There was Noilly Prat dry vermouth from 1934, grenadine, apricot syrup, blackberry cordial, and crème de cacao (with a “Great for Alexanders” motto on the neck label).
There were 100 Cuban cigars dating to the early 1900s as well, surprisingly not fully dried out.
There were Scotch flagons from 1896 and giant demijohns without labels that were presumably wine. Smith popped the cork on one and it didn’t smell like vinegar, a positive sign. He dipped his finger in and tasted it on his tongue — not bad.
Then Smith saw some strange wicker jugs he likewise thought might be wine. He spun the gallon size jugs around and there were cardboard tags around the necks:
CIA. “Ron Bacardi” S.A.
Sucesores de Bacardi y Comp.
Proveedores de la Real Casa de España
Santiago de Cuba
This was pre-Revolution, pre-Prohibition Cuban rum from around 1919 or so. And Smith had three bottles of it.
Credit: John Smith
A Well-Heeled Collection
“It’s like Christmas here at Bacardi,” Rachel Dorion Guerin, a sixth-generation family member and the brand’s heritage curator, told Smith after she got her hands on one of his bottles. He had reached out to her on a whim, eventually selling the company one of the three bottles — one already opened and just half-full — for $1,000.
It’s hard to estimate what one of the full bottles might be worth on an open market as nothing of this type has ever exactly appeared for sale with auction houses or otherwise. A Bacardi Superior Carta de Oro from the era sold on the Rum Auctioneer website for £1,850.00 (around $2,500 USD) in 2023. However, that was a mere 24-ounce bottle lacking the wicker covering.
If Bacardi was founded in 1862, it initially didn’t sell rum in bottles at the outset, instead offering rum straight from the barrel into whatever containers customers brought with them. That said, founder Don Facundo Bacardí Massó was unusually early to branding his spirits; by 1873 he had a flagship expression, Ron Superior Extra Seco, and by 1909 a standardized bottle format. The oldest bottle currently at Bacardi headquarters dates to 1904, a small, unlabeled hip flask of Bacardi Carta Blanca.
The wicker covering is another story, initially used as an old shipping form to protect fragile, mouth-blown glass bottles on long transit. However, by the 1950s and on, the wicker had become more of an aesthetic choice, and countless, mostly empty examples of the “Palmas Extra” bottles distilled in Mexico and Puerto Rico are available on places like eBay and Etsy, selling cheaply for around $25 apiece.
The Bacardi company was pursuing the American market from the get-go, especially after the U.S. forced the Spanish out of Cuba in 1898. By the 1910s there was even an American bottling plant in New York. But with Smith’s bottle most likely being packaged right before or just at the start of Prohibition, Bacardi wouldn’t have been able to legally sell it in the country. So how did a rich man in Dayton, Ohio get several bottles of it?
“The wicker basket seems to have been a common thing for tourists buying somewhere in the Caribbean to take home,” says Matt Pietrek, a rum historian and most recently the author of “The Rum Never Sets.”
“It was stuffed floor to ceiling with bottles. Bottles stacked on top of bottles on top of bottles. I was just in shock.”
It’s most likely that the jet-setting Shermans had simply traveled to Cuba and brought the gorgeous bottles (and those 100 or so cigars) back as keepsakes. Like a lot of wealthy people of this era, having unique bottles to pour your guests would have been of great social value. I can’t help but recall what Joshua Feldman, a vintage spirits expert, had told me when I was writing “Dusty Booze: In Search of Vintage Spirits”:
“Part of being well-heeled back then was being able to offer an impressive set of selections for people.”
And, indeed, now that he himself is the ostensibly well-heeled owner of a mansion, Smith may use his remaining two demijohns to serve guests this more-than-100-year-old rum whenever he’s finally able to have them over to his new digs.
Maybe he’ll host a Roaring Twenties-themed party. Or perhaps he’ll open the Bacardi and other bottles at a charity dinner to help raise funds for the local schools, churches, hospitals, and universities the Shermans had once supported.
“Or, maybe once the house is finished,” he told me, “I’ll just find the biggest, oldest, comfiest chair in the house, pour myself a drink of one of the bottles, close my eyes, breathe deeply, and imagine the sights, sounds, and people of the early 1900s all around me — and enjoy making a dream come true.”
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