eBay Tuesday: 19th Century Liquor License

If you're looking to expand your restaurant or other business, or perhaps just make your beer den look legit, there's a liquor license for sale that might be right for you. Of course, buying one off eBay isn't really going through the proper channels. And the license they're offering has been expired for over a century.

The Jumping Frog, a used bookstore in Hartford, has expanded online to offer a wide range of products on its own website as well as eBay. It's quite a collection, with over 43,070 items up for sale including over 5,000 books and 30,000 collectibles. Among this trove they're offering up two liquor licenses and two druggist licenses for the sale of "spiritous and intoxicating liquors" from New London County in the late 19th century.

This column is focusing on one in particular: the liquor license from New London County for 1879-1880, which expired on Halloween of the latter year. The ornate certificate comes from a time when Connecticut still had county commissioners, and less than a decade after the state's first experiment with being a dry state. According to a 1903 summary of liquor laws by the Tuttle Company of Vermont, Connecticut had a prohibitionary law on the books starting in 1854, but gave it up in 1872 in favor of a license law with a local option. Another attempt to amend the state's constitution with a prohibition clause was defeated in 1889.

The study also claims that among the various attempts to stop or limit drinking back in the day, advocates of high-priced licenses for drinking establishments said this effort would work better to curb the problems of intoxication than an outright ban on alcohol. It added that prohibition could not be sustained in light of a beer and wine imbibing foreign population in the United States that considered alcohol "innocent as water," and that "Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut have all tried prohibition and given it up, it being claimed that prohibition increased the number of saloons and amount of drinking."

So this particular license dates back to that odd time between state prohibition and an unsuccessful second attempt to ban alcohol, and a few more decades before the grand doomed experiment of nationwide Prohibition. No one made a go at the saloon business with this particular document; all the spots remain blank. It's just under 14 by 17 inches, with a few small splits at the edges.

The auction for this item closes at 1 a.m. on Sunday morning. The starting bid is $14.50.