[4] Though he valued anonymity and preferred to work in the background in business dealings,[1] Dickel was a prominent resident of his adopted hometown of Nashville, Tennessee.

[1] During the Civil War, rampant smuggling took place in Nashville after Union soldiers occupied the city in 1862 and banned the sale of liquor.

A son-in-law of Abram Schwab, Meier Salzkotter (1822–1891), who had been a business associate of Dickel since 1859, was caught by Union authorities in possession of a large quantity of contraband liquor.

[1] At the end of the war in 1865, Dickel opened a liquor store on South College Street in Nashville.

Shwab, who had dropped the "c" from his surname in an attempt to Americanize it, would eventually marry Emma Banzer, a sister of Dickel's wife, Augusta.

[1] In 1867, Dickel began blending whiskey, and was arrested and charged in federal court for rectifying liquor without a license.

[1] Typical of liquor wholesalers of the day, Dickel and Company purchased whiskey directly from distillers from around the region, and sold it in barrels, jugs and bottles.

[7][8] The company was one of the first in Nashville to directly import liquor,[9] including Scottish and Irish whiskeys, Dutch gin, and champagnes.

[9] On March 17, 1874, a fire swept through Market Street, destroying the Dickel and Company headquarters, and just missing its large warehouse, which was filled with $60,000 worth of whiskey.

In 1883, McLin Davis became the Cascade operation's distiller, and instituted a number of innovations that greatly increased the whiskey's quality.

While she declined to sell, she took no active part in the company's operations, and spent her later years dividing her time between Nashville, her summer home in Charlevoix, Michigan, and annual trips to Europe.