The South Carolina Dispensary system, in operation from 1893 to 1907,
was a nearly unique and completely unsuccessful attempt to control
alcohol abuse by placing a state’s entire retail liquor trade into the
hands of its government. Touted by its sponsor, Governor “Pitchfork Ben”
Tillman, as a means of encouraging temperance, guaranteeing purity of
product, and returning alcohol revenues to the citizens, the dispensary
was born as an eleventh hour compromise between pro- and
anti-Prohibition forces in the state legislature. The measure as enacted
satisfied neither side, and the dispensary remained a volatile issue in
state politics until its repeal 14 years later.
The system functioned by buying up wholesale spirits from local and
out-of-state manufacturers, repackaging or relabeling them at a Columbia
distribution center, and retailing them to the public through locally
operated dispensaries. Beer, which was never bottled by the dispensary,
was sold privately under special license, and alcohol of any sort could
be brought into the state for individual consumption. In the beginning,
all liquors were sold in special dispensary bottles, but by the turn of
the century, the dispensary was handling hundreds of products, many of
them pre-packaged national brands.
Litigation and often violent public resistance (an 1894 “whiskey
rebellion” left three dead) plagued the system in its early years. By
1905 the internal corruption had become so pervasive that a legislative
investigating committee recommended closing the system as unmanageable.
Despite the now-handsome profit that it was returning to the state
treasury, the South Carolina dispensary was abolished by the
Carey-Cothran Act of the state legislature in 1907.
South Carolina Dispensary bottles came in three basic shapes: Union
flasks, Jo-Jo flasks, and cylindrical bottles and jugs. Bottles made
before 1899 were embossed with palmetto trees (Fig. 22A and C), and
those made after 1899, when public disapproval forced the removal of the
state symbol from liquor bottles, were embossed with an intertwined SCD
monogram. Bottles were manufactured for the dispensary by over 20
different glass factories, but after 1902 all but one brief contract
went to the Carolina Glass Company of Columbia.
[Illustration: Figure 22. South Carolina Dispensary bottles. A.
Cylindrical palmetto bottle, 1893-1899. B. Monogrammed Jo-Jo flask
with embossed CFLG Co basemark, 1899-1902. C. Palmetto Jo-Jo flask,
1893-1899.]