Regionally, the "Northeast" (i.e., New England, NY, NJ & PA) was always the strongest market for ale. The best known brand (which, at one point was marketed nationally) was Ballantine, out of Newark NJ. In the pre-Prohibition era, their main brand was known as "Ballantine Newark Ale" but they also brewed and market IPA, Porter and Stout. In 1877, P. Ballantine and Sons was among the top 4 brewers in the US (Pabst the only other well known name being one of the others, along with "Bergner & Engel" in Phila. and NYC's Ehret- those 4 the only "100,000 bbl" or over brewers).
Peter Ballantine (against the opinion of his sons) eventually bought a local lager brewery (Ballantine was also a malster, and one of the small local outfits, Schalk Brothers, during a recession owned a big malt bill to Peter and his sons) and, even tho' it was strictly a keg (no bottling) lager brewery, it eventually came to equal the production of the ale brewery- Ballantine Lager Beer production went from 40K barrels in 1880 to 227K in 1890 (when production at the separate "Ale and Porter" brewery was 202K). By the eve of Prohibition, Ballantine Beer came to outsell Ale by 75% to 25%.
Ironically, when American-born brothers of German extract, the Badenhausens, bought Ballantine on the eve of Repeal, they specifically set out to be a mainly ale brewery (they saw it as a more "upscale" product and charged more for it 15 cents a bottle vs. the normal 10 cents for beer). They hired a UK ale brewmaster from Burton (he created the modern Ballantine IPA as well as the Canadian-influenced "Ballantine XXX Ale" and, most notably, Ballantine Burton Ale) and the ale to beer ratio during the brewery's heyday (1930's-1950's) was reversed to 75% ale to 25% beer and the brewery was #3 in the US, far and away the largest single brewery (both Anheuser-Busch and Schlitz, which took turns at #1 and #2, were multi-plant companies by then).
In addition, other famous Northeast breweries continued to brew ale for many years (Genesee, Matts, Schaefer, Rheingold, Narragansett, many PA. breweries like C. Schmidt, The Lion, Yuengling, Ortlieb, Neuweiler). Even as late the 1970's, Falstaff (in the old Narragansett brewery in RI) was brewing Croft Ale, Pickwick Ale, Narrangansett Ale, Narrangansett Porter, along with Ballantine XXX Ale, Ballantine IPA and Ballantine Brewers Gold Ale, along with a few "cream ales" (Ballantine, Narragansett, Krueger).