That's it. That's the timeline. Fifty-seven days from incorporation to the first liquor licenses — and if the vote to license was on August 31st, the saloons were open for business by September 1st. The board didn't wait. The people didn't wait.
And almost immediately, the complications started.
The Ordinance Came First
The village board's very first liquor ordinance — passed the day they officially incorporated, during the 1887 East Dundee Village Governance|first year of village governance — was a serious piece of legislation. They weren't winging it. The ordinance covered taverns, groceries, dram shops, drug stores, and breweries. It set a license fee. It established closing hours (10 PM, no later; 5 AM, no earlier). It prohibited serving on Sundays and election days. It prohibited serving minors, lunatics, habitual drunkards, and anyone already intoxicated.
And it created what the ordinance called, simply, the Blacklist.
Here's how it worked: if you had a family member whose drinking had gotten out of hand — a husband, a son, a brother — you could walk into the Village Clerk's office and swear out a written affidavit. Once that affidavit was filed, every licensed saloon in East Dundee was legally prohibited from serving that person. A bartender who served a blacklisted customer faced a fine of $10 to $50, and bartenders were held personally liable — the law treated their actions as the licensee's own.
The fines for major violations ranged from $25 to $200. The license itself could be revoked. These weren't symbolic rules.
To get a license, a saloonkeeper had to post two separate bonds: $500 to the Village of East Dundee, Illinois|East Dundee, and a separate $3,000 dram shop bond to the People of the State of Illinois. For context, $3,000 in 1887 is roughly $100,000 today. You had real financial skin in the game.
The First Five
At a special meeting on August 31, 1887, the board received $150 each from five men and ordered their licenses issued for September through December of that year. The handwriting is sometimes difficult, but the names the ledger gives us are:
Joachim Lorentz. Ernest Herrman. Charles Koch. Henry Plinke. And at least one more — a name whose first and last are still being puzzled out from the ink.
These were almost certainly German immigrant men or the sons of German immigrants. Nearly every name in East Dundee's early village records is German — the trustees, the clerks, the contractors. The Fox River valley was heavily settled by Germans in the mid-1800s, and East Dundee was no exception. The saloons these five men ran were almost certainly old-country-style taverns: beer on tap, card games in the back, probably sausage somewhere nearby.
At $150 for four months, the license fee was substantial — around $5,000 in today's money for a single year's right to operate. The village knew what it had.
The Blacklist in Action
Here's the part that will stop you cold.
The first liquor licenses were issued August 31st. The first blacklist petition arrived September 6th. Six days later.
A woman identified in the record as Mrs. C. Kelly appeared before the board and asked that F.B. Kelly be removed from the Blacklist. Which means F.B. Kelly had been placed on the Blacklist sometime between August 31st and September 6th. The first saloons weren't even two weeks old.
Mrs. Kelly's petition to remove him was granted.
Two weeks after that, on September 21st, Mrs. H. Ruth appeared and asked that her son William Ruth be removed from the Blacklist. That too was granted.
We don't know the full stories behind either petition. Did Mrs. Kelly file the original blacklist complaint herself, then change her mind? Or did someone else file it? The record doesn't say. What it tells us is that within weeks of East Dundee's first saloons opening their doors, families were already navigating the legal apparatus the village had built — using it, testing it, sometimes reversing their own decisions.
The Kellys were a prominent East Dundee family with property along River Road. William Ruth's 1887 Blacklist episode stands on its own — a separate Sunday liquor case six years later, once attributed to a "Louis D. Ruth," turns out on closer reading to involve a different man entirely (see below), so the record doesn't currently support a two-generation Ruth story.
Six Years Later: Sunday Business
At the meeting where the board seated its new officers following the April 1893 election — Henry Peters succeeding C.J. Bethke as President — the board took up a different kind of complaint.
Louis C. Rabe was accused of selling liquor on a Sunday. (This case was previously recorded here under the name "Louis D. Ruth," conflated with the unrelated 1887 Ruth family Blacklist story above; a direct re-check of the source photograph — knowledge/sources/1887-1893_physical-archive_east-dundee-record-book-vol1.md, p.332 — confirms the name is Rabe, not Ruth. See docs/name-spelling-register.md.) The board appointed a three-man committee to investigate: Fred Rath, chairman, with Fred Conrad and John Foelschow. (Fred Rath was likewise previously misread here as "Fred Ruhl" — he is a distinct person from Fred Roehl, both of whom appear as separate trustees on the very same page, pp.332–333.) Their report was due at the next meeting.
The Sunday prohibition wasn't accidental. It was the cornerstone of the "temperance wing" of liquor regulation — the idea that even people who accepted alcohol six days a week deserved one sober day, and that churches shouldn't have to compete with open bars on Sunday mornings. East Dundee's 1887 ordinance was clear: no service on Sundays. No exceptions in the text.
Whether Louis C. Rabe was found guilty, fined, or had his license revoked, the follow-up record hasn't surfaced yet. But the investigation itself is significant: six years into the village's history, the Sunday prohibition was still being actively enforced, not ignored. Notably, Rabe himself had a saloon license approved just days earlier in the same volume — worth checking against his eventual Person page once one exists.
Who Was Tending the Peace
Through all of this — the licenses, the complaints, the Sunday violations — East Dundee had one primary law enforcement officer: Henry Guldan, listed month after month in the village financial records as "police." His wages ran about $57–$58 per month, which made him one of the highest-paid people on the village payroll.
Guldan's beat, in a village with five or more licensed saloons along a main street running parallel to the Fox River, would have been largely saloon work: checking closing times, enforcing the Sunday ban, keeping peace on weekend nights. He was East Dundee's entire police department for most of the late 1880s and early 1890s.
The Names Add Up
By the early 1890s, more names had entered the licensed trade. August Schumann received his license in September 1890 — a special meeting was called specifically to approve his $3,000 dram shop bond. By 1893–1894, the active licensees documented in Record Book Vol. 2 included Joseph Loung, Fred Ahrens, Helmuth Schumacher, Henry F. Holzmann, August Koeman, and Herman Ahrens.
Every name, German. Every bond, dual. Every license, contested by someone's family somewhere.
And Joachim Lorentz — one of the original five licensees from 1887 — was still in East Dundee in April 1893, six years later, writing to the board to ask them to repair the sidewalk in front of his property. He had stuck around.
What This Tells Us
East Dundee in 1887 was a Fox River town of a few hundred people, mostly German immigrants or their children, living along a single commercial street beside a river that had already been worked for mills and industry for decades. The same men who approved the water tank and the jail and the road grades — under village president Charles J. Bethke — also set up a comprehensive liquor licensing system, not because they were reluctant about alcohol, but because they had thought carefully about how a community manages something central to its social life.
The Blacklist was a community-designed harm reduction tool. The dual bond was a financial accountability mechanism. The $200 fines for major violations were a real deterrent. These weren't the rules of a temperance town. They were the rules of a town that drank and knew it, and was trying to do it with some order.
The saloons are gone now. But the names are still there in the ledger, in faded iron-gall ink on ruled pages that have spent the last 130 years in the East Dundee village archives. Joachim. Ernest. Charles. Henry. August. Their bonds, their licenses, their neighbors' complaints about them — all of it preserved.
Do you have family stories about East Dundee saloons, taverns, or bars — from any era? Contact us and share your history.