Zeal, “great energy or enthusiasm in pursuit of a cause or objective”.

Alzina, or Alzie as we have come to know her, was passionate about her faith and her family. But she had zeal toward another objective as well, one that took up a great deal of time later in her life after she retired from teaching. The cause was prohibition of alcohol. She learned from a young age to work for the cause and although “Prohibition” never became a federal law, it was adopted in some states, Kansas being one of them. It happened largely through the efforts of hard working pioneer women. Here is how it went for Alzie.

The Peach Crop Story

By Emma Pomeroy Brandt, Alzie’s younger sister.

A few years after the Civil War, in 1867, my father took a homestead in Kansas. On it he planted both shade and fruit trees, including a peach orchard. He could not go to a store and buy everything as we do now. Indeed he and Mother saw very hard times trying to get a home started and raise food for a growing family. They had gotten deeply in debt and placed a mortgage on the homestead.

One year when most crops were burning up, they had a bountiful crop of peaches, but no market to sell them. One day two well-dressed men came driving in behind a fine team of livery horses and offered Father one dollar a bushel for the whole crop.

That seemed a wonderful offer and Father started to tell them he would bring the first load the next day. He said he would pick them carefully so as not to bruise them. “Oh”, they said, “you need not be too careful. Just shake them off and scrape them up. If you get a few rotten ones, it won’t make any difference.” Then Father asked, “What are you going to do with them, that you will take rotten ones?” They answered, “We are going to make peach brandy.”

That was a big shock to Father. He thought of his debt and his family needs, and then “me, a Christian man, sell my peaches to make brandy???” They told him he would be a fool to turn down their offer when he could not sell them elsewhere. But he said, “I am raising children. They shall never be tempted to drink brandy made from MY peaches.”

So the deal was called off. He struggled on for years, and had to sell his farm to pay the mortgage, but he kept a clear conscience. He moved his family across the road onto the “timber claim” and made there the home where we five younger children were born, and which was named “Prairie Home”. I can’t remember that we ever had to go hungry for lack of food.

Later, around 1907, Alzie’s mother Philena wrote to Alzie describing her “mother’s club” which she had started for local women. These women were wives of men who were working on the railroad. The husband’s wages were often spent in the bars, leaving the women to find a way to support the family. Seeing situations like this as she was growing up, and attending local Temperance Meetings with her family, made Alzie a staunch supporter of the temperance movement. Partially retired from teaching she took work as a field secretary for the National Prohibition Party. She traveled around the United States securing pledges and support for her Party’s candidates for general elections. There were many disappointments in her work, but her zeal was undaunted, as this paragraph in a letter explains.

“I gave much time in 1941 and 1942 to work for an initiative amendment, but failed to get enough signatures in time. But I learned many lessons, and more than ever came to the feeling that the Prohibition Party is the only force that God can use to overthrow the liquor traffic. It is the “Joshua and Caleb” of the dry movement. But, as the majority kept the people of Israel out of the Promised Land forty years, so the “old party drys” may keep from having prohibition that long, too. But the Prohibition Party will be victorious in the end as Joshua and Caleb were.”

There was no lasting success, although Kansas was a state that wrote a prohibition amendment in its constitution, and upheld it longer than any other state. Follow this link to read about some amazing women activists of the Temperance movement. Kansas and Prohibition