Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book III), Part 90: A brewery for the New Albanian in all of us, Lite-free NABC debuts in 2002.
In 2002, when the New Albanian Brewing Company at last possessed a fully licensed, functional brewery to call its own, one thing it did not have on tap was a graphic artist.
A logo was needed (at the bare minimum), so we hired our friend, customer, graphic designer and chronic cyclist John Mahorney. He convened a couple of beer-fueled brainstorming sessions, during which it transpired that New Albany didn’t have an Eiffel Tower, Space Needle or Acropolis ― though there was a building colloquially known as the Parthenon ― to serve as an immediately identifiable visual tag.
However, there was the bridge named for Sherman Minton, like me a native of Georgetown who served as a Supreme Court justice and moonlighted as a crony of Harry S. Truman. Then as now, the Sherman Minton bridge carries I-64 traffic across the Ohio River and dominates New Albany’s riverfront.
And, if I recall the story, John’s brother decided to hoist a keg in fun ― voila! NABC’s logo has remained in use ever since.
In 2013, I recreated the keg-aloft logo pose at Bank Street Brewhouse for local photographer David Modica.
When it came to daily needs, the interim appointee for graphic artist in 2002 was none other than me. This was a mockery and a sham; the range of my expertise didn’t extend beyond purloining freebie old-school clip art and exploring the primitive nuances of Microsoft Publisher.
These “skills” were fine for generating pub signs and the annual Gravity Head program, but my deficiencies were glaring.
It wasn’t long before our employee Tony Beard came to the rescue; I believe his artwork began appearing in support of the brewery in 2004. In a great many ways, Tony’s vision would define NABC’s brewery for more than two decades.
During the brewery’s earliest days, I sought to link our contemporary beer-making to the New Albanian breweries that came before us.
A very long time before us, in fact. The last of them closed in 1935, and the “vintage” New Albany brewery that intrigued me the most, Hew Ainslie’s, was both the oldest recorded brewery in town and the least documented, having existed for only a flickering moment two decades before the traitors attacked Ft. Sumter.
This is what I sent local media along with the Lite Free Zone announcement (see Ch. 90 for the text).
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The NABC Brewery Press Release: Autumn, 2002
The historic Ohio River town of New Albany, Indiana was a 19th-century stronghold of the brewer’s art, but by the late 1930’s, brewing had disappeared entirely from the north bank.
Thankfully, the American microbrewing revolution of the 1990’s served to reawaken interest in the merits of fresh, unique, locally brewed beer, thus paving the way for a contemporary reclamation of New Albany’s brewing heritage.
In the fall of 2002, commercial brewing returns to New Albany in the form of a new microbrewery addition to an established restaurant and pub business: The New Albanian Brewing Company, which actually came into being in 1994, when the current owners — Amy Baylor, Roger A. Baylor and Kate Lewison — assumed control of two pre-existing entities and formed a company to operate both.
NABC currently does business as Sportstime Pizza (originally founded in 1987) and Rich O’s Public House (founded 1990). Both businesses are located on the corner of University Woods Drive and Plaza Drive in New Albany, Indiana (3312 Plaza Drive), just off the Grant Line Road corridor, and only a mile south of Indiana University Southeast.
Let’s catch up. In the beginning, there was Sportstime Pizza.
Sportstime Pizza came into existence in 1987, when Amy’s and Kate’s father assumed management of a struggling Noble Roman’s Pizza location at 3312 Plaza Drive in New Albany. He promptly severed the restaurant’s corporate affiliation, established a family-owned pizzeria under a new name (Amy’s and Kate’s mother, Sharon, still works at NABC), and within a short time contracted to buy the business itself as well as the building in which it still is housed.
In 1990, Rich O’s Public House began operations as an offshoot of Sportstime; located in the same building, operating under the same management, but with a different motif. It originally was established as a barbecue outlet, which virtually from the beginning was run entirely by Amy. She built a good lunchtime and carryout trade, refined the menu, steadily improved the recipes, but recognized a need to find a clientele for evenings.
Roger joined the O’Connell family business in 1992. With previous experience in bartending and retail beer sales, he traveled extensively in Europe and was involved with the burgeoning import, craft and specialty beer movement in the United States. It was decided to fulfill the dream of the owners by transforming Rich O’s into a “good beer” bar with a continental European twist, and the pub began its metamorphosis into a venue unlike any other in the Louisville area.
In 1994, Amy, Roger and Kate took over the two businesses and incorporated as the New Albanian Brewing Company, Inc. It was decided to maintain the physical separation of the Sportstime Pizza and Rich O’s Public House dining areas, but gradually to unify them conceptually so that all menu items and beers would be available in both dining rooms.
(That is, with the exception of American low-calorie, “light” lager beers, which were banned from the Rich O’s space in 1994 on general ethical principle, and will be eliminated from the premises entirely when the newly christened brewery begins operation).
In the years since, there has been continuous evolution and expansion of the offerings with respect to beer. The draft selection has grown from two to 24, and hundreds of different imported and microbrewed beers have appeared on tap. When available, authentic cask-conditioned ales are served by hand pump. The annual “Gravity Head” festival in March plays to regional renown. The bottled list now includes rare vintage ales and numerous specialties seldom seen in the area.
There has been no reason to change the operation with respect to the food, particularly the pizza, which has been made to order since 1987 and enjoys an enviable reputation for quality and value. The menu includes lasagna, salads, sandwiches and barbecued meats. An expanded range of pizza toppings, wheat pizza crust and different pizza sauces have been added to the menu, but in large measure, it remains as always as the foundation of the business.
The restaurant/pub, which has enjoyed steady growth since inception, is unique not only to New Albany, but to the entire metropolitan Louisville area. Widespread recognition (some might say notoriety) has been given to NABC’s commitment to specialty, microbrewed and imported beers. Quite literally, there are no other specialty beer bars like it within a radius of several hundred miles, and with the commencement of brewing on site, NABC strays even further from local norms – and joyfully so.
Adding an On-Premise Microbrewery.
The brewing project got under way in January, 2002, and nine months later, the following changes had been made to accommodate the brewery addition.
- A 1000-square-foot brewhouse annex to the existing building has been constructed.
- A 4-barrel (124 gallon) Elliott Bay brewing system has been installed.
- The interior of the Sportstime Pizza dining area, and the central kitchen that serves both Sportstime Pizza and Rich O’s Public House, have been remodeled.
- Exterior improvements include the repaving of the parking lot, the addition of a grease trap (as mandated by the city) and preparing the ground for outdoor seating.
67 years after the last commercial brewery in New Albany shut its doors, the New Albanian Brewing Company seeks to recapture the small-scale, artisanal spirit of brewing in New Albany during its late 19th-century zenith, while at the same time incorporating the global stylistic perspective afforded by the American craft beer revolution of the 1990’s.
Thanks to:
- Financing: Hometown National Bank, New Albany, IN
- Contractors: Dan Covington/Proco and the John Wile Construction Company
- And everyone else who has helped get this project off the ground
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I believed strongly in placing NABC within a continuum of past, present and future. It was by no means an original idea; the Louisville breweries preceding us during the 1990s freely referenced their city’s significant brewing past.
In NABC’s case, the brewing history was distinctly attributed to New Albany, which in 2002 continued to be mired in a long-running, unimaginative civic torpor.
Cheekily, we aimed to change all that.
I’m a lifelong history buff, and from almost any polemicist’s, publicist’s or propagandist’s perspective (these were my jobs), more than one positive outcome might be achieved by talking about these linkages, especially with beer, because for years I’d been preaching that the better beer movement was historically counter-revolutionary in nature.
As such: America possessed a flourishing local and regional beer culture, but the corporate monoliths emerging from Prohibition’s shambles commoditized brewing diversity into a uniform flavorless blob, not unlike mass-produced white bread.
In 2002, we were taking back beer from the soulless corporate vandals, and restoring history’s proper cadence.
I was keen to teach Prohibition’s sad consequences, and to understand that prior to the war on alcohol, panicked red flags did not customarily greet the arrival of an ordinary kid at a brewery or bar, sent by bicycle to fetch a bucket of beer for his parents.
Don’t get me wrong; then as now, I don’t advocate juvenile delinquency.
Rather, I reasoned that reminders like this one about the former nonchalance of growlers might lead to a healthy conversation about evolving societal norms ― beer as accompaniment to food, beer as healthy refreshment in moderation, beer in a context of localism.
References to history also stood to be useful in taking the sting out of NIMBY naysayers, although in truth there was no discernible opposition to our emerging brewery apart from a shoddy letter I received from an anti-communist crackpot taking issue with the Lenin triptych in the Red Room: Baylor’s a Bolshevik! The last thing we should do is let him brew beer! Then what?
I merely shrugged. Do all UPS pilots struggle with a stunted sense of humor?
There also was an emerging free association with new urbanism. If long overdue downtown revitalization efforts embraced a return to the patterns of cities as they functioned prior to the excesses of automobile imperialism, when businesses like breweries commonly existed as an integral part of the urban tableau, then by extension, wasn’t brewing’s comeback a significant aspect of downtown revitalization?
True, NABC wasn’t located in downtown New Albany, at least yet. But it points to a shift underway inside my noggin. Localism already had been a plank in NABC’s platform; now, it was about to become a major theme.
As of 2002, I’d been connected with the business of beer in one way or another for two decades. Even before I knew what economic localization implied, I sought to feed, water and educate people right here, where I live, as in days of yore.
We weren’t in the business of shipping pizza and pints across the country. Food, drink, education and entertainment were products we crafted and finished locally, even if the ingredients came from elsewhere, as with European beers; while Europe always captivated me, the ultimate value of imported ideas came from how we interpreted them, and from what we added to them, here in New Albany.
In effect, long before NABC’s brewery opened, I’d been teaching beer and brewing history, knowing these themes had yet to be re-established in New Albany, but might come soon enough. Once we had our own house beer to drink, it became a simple process of connecting the dots to those vats behind the window.
As such, being a writer, citizen of the universe and left-of-center political adherent, it made perfect sense that I’d be drawn to the pioneering Scotsman, Hew Anslie.
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Ainslie was New Albany’s first known commercial brewer. His short-lived brewery was located in the vicinity of the current Hampton Inn, where Paul Reising later built his German heritage brewery.
Much of what we know about Ainslie owes to Conrad Selle, a Louisville goldsmith, writer and homebrewer, who contributed a biographical sketch to the Fermenters of Special Southern Indiana Libations Society (F.O.S.S.I.L.S.) homebrewing club newsletter during the 1990s.
Intent on keeping Ainslie’s memory alive, and thankful for Conrad’s characteristic diligence, I’ve been reprinting his words ever since. For those readers unfamiliar with Conrad’s tireless research into Louisville area brewing, know first that he was the co-writer (along with the late breweriana collector, delightfully gregarious Peter Guetig) of the essential Louisville Breweries.
In compiling this book, Conrad actually taught himself to speak German so he could translate passages from Louisville’s pre-WWI German-language newspapers, like the Anzeiger.
Here is Conrad’s bio of Ainslie.
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Many early brewers worked their trade as a sideline or temporary job before moving on to other occupations. Hew Ainslie is unique for having been principally a poet.
He was born at Bargany in Ayrshire, Scotland on April 5, 1792. Hew was the only son of George Ainslie, an employee on the estate of Sir Hew Dalrymple Hamilton. He was educated in the parish school at Ballantrae, and later at the academy at Ayr. In 1809 his family moved to Roslin, about six miles from Edinburgh. He married his cousin Janet Ainslie in 1812, whose brother Jock had married Hew’s sister Eleanora.
Ainslie studied law in Glasgow, and worked as a clerk in the Register House in Edinburgh. In 1820 he revisited Ayrshire on foot with James Wellstood and John Gibson and in the next two years wrote A Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns, which was published in London in 1822. The book was an account of their travels and visits with some of Robert Burns’s contemporaries, with songs and ballads by Ainslie that were much in the style of Burns, and illustrations by Wellstood.
In July, 1822, Ainslie sailed from Liverpool to New York with his friend Wellstood. Mrs. Ainslie and their three children joined him in the following year. Ainslie and Wellstood purchased Pilgrim’s Repose, a farm at Hoosac Falls in Rensselaer County, New York. Ainslie and his family lived there for almost three years before joining Robert Owen’s utopian socialist cooperative community at New Harmony, Indiana in 1825.
When Owen’s community failed about a year later they moved first to Cincinnati, where Ainslie became a partner with Price and (Thomas) Wood in a brewery, then to Louisville. In Louisville, a town of 7,000, Ainslie opened a brewery in 1829 at 7th Street between Water and Main. Records show that B. Foster, Enoch Wenzell and Robert McKenzie worked there.
In February, 1832 there was a major flood of the Ohio River, with the river’s waters rising to 46 feet above the low water level. A contemporary account of the “calamity” reads:
This was an unparalleled flood in the Ohio. It commenced on the 10th of February and continued until the 21st of that month, having risen to (an) extraordinary height … above low-water mark. The destruction of property by this flood was immense. Nearly all the frame buildings near the river were either floated off or turned over and destroyed. An almost total cessation in business was the necessary consequence; even farmers from the neighborhood were unable to get to the markets, the flood having so affected the smaller streams as to render them impassable. The description of the sufferings by this flood is appalling …
Ainslie’s brewery was swept away with most of the neighborhood, but in the following years he remained in the beer business, working at the Nuttall brewery on the west side of 6th Street between Water and Main.
In 1840 he opened the first brewery in New Albany, the partnership of Bottomley & Ainslie. Soon that business was destroyed by fire. In the 1841 Louisville City Directory, Hew Ainslie is listed as a maltster; it was his last listing in the brewing trade. Discouraged by fire and flood, he gave up the brewing business altogether. Thereafter, his working life became somewhat intertwined with that of his children, particularly George and James Wellstood Ainslie.
Hew and Janet Ainslie had ten children, seven of them surviving to adulthood. George Ainslie, the eldest Ainslie son, had been apprenticed to Lachan McDougall around 1830 to learn the iron foundry and moulding trade, and he had acquired a solid business and technical education. He became a foreman at John Curry’s foundry and married Mary Thirlwell, daughter of Charles Thirlwell, who was a brewer at the Nuttall Brewery (Hew Ainslie’s one-time employer).
Thirlwell eventually acquired Nuttall and operated it until 1856. In 1842, George Ainslie became a partner in Gowan and McGhee’s Boone Foundry. By 1845 Hew Ainslie — still a poet throughout — was employed as a finisher there as well as working as a contractor and in the building trades.
George and James Ainslie became highly successful in the foundry and machine business, enabling their father to devote more time to writing in later life. In 1853, Hew Ainslie made a long visit to New Jersey to visit members of the family of James Wellstood, undoubtedly providing the poet with a nostalgic link to the Scotland of his youth.
In 1855 a collection of Ainslie’s verse, Scottish Songs, Ballads and Poetry, was published in New York. One latter-day commentator called Ainslie’s songs of the sea “the best that Scotland has produced,” and perhaps this assessment was borne out by the reception accorded Ainslie in Scottish literary circles in 1863, when he returned to Scotland for a final visit.
Janet Ainslie died in 1863 prior to Hew’s last Scottish journey. In 1868 the elderly poet/brewer went to live with his son George in a new home on Chestnut Street (between 9th and 10th) in Louisville, where he spent the last decade of his life and was a familiar sight as he passed time tending the garden there. Ainslie died on March 6, 1878, and was eulogized in the Courier-Journal as “a poet of considerable merit to the people of his native land.” Hew and Janet Ainslie are buried in Cave Hill Cemetery.
In addition to the many accomplishments noted previously, Ainslie is remembered for his height — at 6 feet, 4 inches, he referred to himself in his works as “The Lang Linker” — and for never losing his Scottish accent during almost six decades in America.
There is no specific information to be found as to the products of the breweries with which Hew Ainslie was involved in Louisville and New Albany, but we can surmise from the available evidence that they were typical small breweries of the time, with four or five employees, making ale, porter and stout. As a man who appreciated truth and beauty, it is likely that Hew Ainslie made good malt, and being conscientious with it, good beer as well.
Three poems by Hew Ainslie, as copied from the Filson Historical Society’s extremely rare copy of A Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns and Poetry, (1822; reprinted 1892) are included below in a postscript.
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Ainslie was an outlier. Students of post-Colonial history in America know that through the early 1800s, beer generally played second fiddle to cider and whiskey, until substantial numbers of Germans (and Central Europeans) began arriving following the revolutions of 1848, bringing with them the formative technological underpinnings of lager brewing, as poised to explode into a worldwide phenomenon.
The 19th-century German diaspora wasn’t scattershot. Upon reaching their ultimate destinations in America, immigrants were absorbed into full-scale communities. Cultural proclivities included beer as an integral part of daily nutrition and social life, and consequently, some Louisville-area neighborhoods were as German as Leipzig.
Beer was consumed voluminously at dozens of breweries: at breakfast (soup with stale beer used as stock); in the workplace, where “small” beer was preferred to mere water; and at night, when men gathered over platters of pork and dumplings to soothe the rigors of the day.
However, there was a backlash. Precisely because these new arrivals so enjoyed their tankards, it was a natural next step for “Know Nothing” nativists to conflate beer with the evils of immigration, incorporating pre-existing xenophobia into a program of opposition.
(Hmm. Sound familiar in 2026?)
When anti-immigrant sentiments merged with fundamentalist Protestantism, finding a ready ally in do-gooder “progressive” groups espousing the imperative of societal improvement, a full-fledged temperance movement was birthed.
It was Carrie Nation-Building.
God says drinking is bad, and just look at all those non-English speaking, beer-drinking immigrants taking our jobs; what’s more, if we’d all work sober and harder, we’d be more efficient cogs of capitalism – and that’s the real American religion.
Cue hatchets flying, mostly against barroom furniture, but sadly, sometimes aimed at people, too.
Still, for five largely uninterrupted decades following the Civil War, the German and Central European ethos made for a new paradigm in places like New Albany. Growlers (pails, or jugs) of beer were carried home from neighborhood bars, or the breweries themselves, to accompany the workingman’s evening meal, and to fuel his nightly conversations with friends and neighbors on the front porch. On weekends, locally brewed beer quenched thirsts engendered by sandlot baseball games.
According to a writer for the New Albany Ledger Standard in 1877, the beer was good. He observed that “for many years New Albany has been famous for the excellence of her beer … and the demand is so great that until recently our brewers could not supply orders.”
As the twentieth century dawned, thirsty residents of New Albany still had a choice of at last three local breweries. There may well have been smaller backroom brewing operations here and there, including “saloon” breweries (known as “brewpubs” today).
Another moderate-sized brewery operated in Jeffersonville, while across the river in Louisville, there were as many as 20 breweries in operation at various times during the years prior to World War I.
In 1900, the granddaddy of New Albany’s breweries was Paul Reising’s plant, which took up a whole West End city block (the Hampton Inn site again), and had been brewing Bavarian-style beers since just after the Civil War.
A half-mile away, Virt Nirmaier crafted a well-regarded “common” beer at his brewery on State Street, the western route out of New Albany, up Buffalo Trace and through the Knobs. Nirmaier’s Common sold to taverns for $1.25 a keg or $5.00 a barrel. His charge for smaller quantities is unknown.
Near the present-day high school on Vincennes Street, the Nadorff family brewed beer and cut ice in winter from a pond on their property, having purchased the Spring Brewery from the widow Sohn in 1877. In 1907 the family ceased brewing and opened a wholesale beer distributorship, which went dry during Prohibition, but returned after Repeal.
(On January 1, 2023 the firm of L.C. Nadorff & Son closed down at the tender age of 146, having sold its portfolio to Orange County Beverage from French Lick, itself a company dating to the 1940s.)
There had been other breweries in New Albany, owned and operated by men named Buchheit, Kaelin, Schmidt and Hornung. Forgotten today, at one time their names were synonymous with business acumen and civic rectitude, and their breweries held respectable places in the pantheon of local manufacturing excellence.
But the business of brewing in America began to change in the early years of the 20th century, when social and economic developments conspired to weaken the bond between Americans and their local beers.
Brewers in larger urban areas applied techniques of industrial mass production to the brewing process. Markets were expanded by refrigerated rail cars, and smaller local rivals fell victim to unfavorable economies of scale, as well as the unscrupulous methods familiar to the “Robber Baron” period of American history.
(Hmm. Sound familiar in 2026?)
New Albany’s German brewing tradition was dealt a blow when America entered the Great War, then Prohibition effectively killed smaller-scale local brewing in much of the United States. The way was paved for the rise of the monopolistic, multi-national beer factories that have diluted not only beer, but also the experience of drinking fresh beer locally in the sense that our forbearers intuitively understood.
Repeal of Prohibition’s cultural atrocity proved too late for the majority of family-run breweries. The sole New Albany brewery to operate after repeal was the Southern Indiana Ice & Beverage Company, known as Ackerman’s, with brands like Vienna Select, Old Rip and Imperial Double Stout. Ackerman’s was short-lived, closing in 1935, and New Albany brewing entered a period of dormancy.*
Then came NABC.
Following is an alphabetical list of beers brewed at NABC between 2002 and 2006, part of a larger effort of mine at the time to list all the beers we’d served on draft up to that point since 1992, Roughly 700 that could be documented. How many thousand more beers have poured two decades later?
NABC Beers 2002 – 2006
NABC Artemsia
NABC Beak’s Best
NABC Black Hand
NABC Blonde Abbey
NABC Bob’s Old 15B
NABC Bonfire of the Valkyries
NABC Bourbondaddy
NABC Bush Hog
NABC Community Dark
NABC ConeSmoker
NABC Croupier IPA
NABC Elector
NABC Elector Select
NABC Haggisdaddy
NABC Homecoming Common
NABC Hoosier Daddy
NABC Hop Scotch
NABC Hoptimus
NABC Jenever
NABC Homecoming Common
NABC Kaiser 2nd Reising
NABC Merckx
NABC Mt. Lee
NABC Naughty Claus
NABC NobleSmoker
NABC Oaktimus
NABC Old Lightning Rod (Poor Richard’s Ale)
NABC Phoenix Kentucky Komon
NABC St. Alfonzo
NABC St. Radegund
NABC Saison Scalawag
NABC Silent Oath …40 Years of Sidebars: Hugo Claus, Frans Masereel & NABC’s one-off Silent Oath Oud Bruin (2004)
NABC Solidarity
NABC Strathpeffer Heather
NABC Stumble Bus
NABC Thunderfoot
NABC Tunnel Vision
NABC Turbo Hog
Next: Millennnial potpourri: church pews, beer judging and Saturnalia.
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*For a brief, shining moment (2021-2022), there were six breweries in New Albany: NABC, Floyd County, Donum Dei, Fistful of Ale, Our Lady of Perpetual Hops, and Monnik.
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POSTSCRIPT – Three of Hugh Ainslie’s poems
THE DAFT DAYS.
The midnight hour is clinking, lads,
An’ the douce an’ the decent are winking, lads;
Sae I tell ye again,
Be’t weel or ill ta’en,
It’s time ye were quatting your drinking, lads.
Gae ben, ‘an mind your gauntry, Kate,
Gi’es mair o’ your beer, an’ less bantry, Kate,
For we vow, whaur we sit,
That afore we shall flit,
We’se be better acquaint wi’ your pantry, Kate.
The “daft days” are but beginning, Kate,
An we’re sworn. Would you hae us a sinning, Kate?
By our faith an’ our houp,
We will stick by the stoup
As lang as the barrel keeps rinning, Kate.
Thro’ hay, an’ thro’ hairst, sair we toil it, Kate,
Thro’ Simmer, an’ Winter, we moil it, Kate;
Sae ye ken, whan the wheel
Is beginning to squeal,
It’s time for to grease an’ to oil it, Kate.
Sae draw us anither drappy, Kate,
An’ gie us a cake to our cappy, Kate;
For, by spiggot an’ pin!
It’s waur than a sin
To flit when we’re sitting sae happy, Kate.
LET’S DRINK TO OUR NEXT MEETING.
Let’s drink to our next meeting, lads,
Nor think on what’s atwixt;
They’re fools wha spoil the present hour
By thinking on the next.
Then here’s to Meg o’ Morningside,
An Kate o’ Kittlemark;
The taen she drank her hose and shoon,
The tither pawned her sark.
A load o’ wealth, an’ wardly pelf,
They say is sair to bear;
Sae he’s a gowk would scrape an’ howk
To make his burden mair
Then here’s , &c.
Gif Care looks black the morn, lads,
As he’s come doon the lum,
Let’s ease our hearts by swearing, lads,
We never bade him come.
Then here’s, &c.
Then here’s to our next meeting, lads,
Ne’er think on what’s atwixt;
They’re fools who spoil the present hour
By thinking on the next.
Then here’s, &c.
THE HOOSIER.
We lads that live up in the nobs,
Tho’ our manners might yet bear a rubbing,
We’re handy at neat little jobs
Such as chopping and hewing and grubbing.
Tho’ we roost in a cabin of logs,
And clapboards lie ‘twixt us and heaven,
Our mast makes us fine oily hogs,
And from hoop-poles we pick a good living.
Right quiet — to a decent degree —
it’s seldom we guzzle it deep, Sir,
Tho’ we don’t mind a bit of a spree,
Provided the liquor is cheap, Sir.
Our neighbours, that live ‘cross the drink.
May laugh at our fondness for cider,
But so long as we pocket their clink
They may laugh till their mouths they grow wider.
Our gals make our trousers, you see,
From that beautiful stuff called tow linen,
and in coats of the linsey — dang me,
If we don’t look both handsome and winning.
Our wives are our weavers, to boot;
Ourselves are first rate on a shoe, Sir;
We can doctor a tub with a hoop —
And hark ! we’re our own n_____s* too, Sir,
So here’s to our Hoosier land,
The sons of its soil and its waters !
May the “nullies” ne’er get it in hand,
Nor demagogues tear it in tatters.
But still may it flourish and push,
Thro’ vetos and all such tough cases,
Till railroads are common as brush,
And the nobs are as sleek as your faces.
* The proper context of Ainslie’s use here of the “N” word comes from knowing that “The Hoosier” was intended as an anti-nullification poem — a direct jab at the slave-owning caste south of the Ohio River, as well as a self-mocking espousal of the poor but free residents to the north.
