Beer Gone Bad

In 1888, Horn and Schwalm’s Brooklyn Brewery was the largest brewery in Oshkosh. That big facility on Doty Street was pumping out nearly 10,000 barrels of beer annually.

Horn and Schwalm’s Brooklyn Brewery.

The Brooklyn Brewery sat 100 yards from the shore of Lake Winnebago. That was a convenient place to be. Horn and Schwalm used their lakeside location to distribute beer on ships traveling the Winnebago waterways.

The beer they sent out on those ships was packaged in wooden kegs. They’d seal the insides of those kegs with molten pitch. When the pitch cooled it formed an antiseptic coating over the interior of the barrel, which helped prevent bacteria lurking in the wood from spoiling the beer. Here's one of those barrels from Horn and Schwalm’s Brooklyn Brewery.

Despite all the care, sometimes the beer in those barrels went bad anyway. Here's an instance of that happening as reported by the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern on April 4, 1888.

Floated Them to Shore
Capt. Bangs endeavored to land with the K.M. Hutchinson yesterday near Horn & Schwalm's brewery to unload a number of kegs of beer returned from a northern point as sour. The steamer became stuck and the captain was obliged to dump the kegs overboard and float them to shore.

The K.M. Hutchinson docked in Oshkosh, 1887.

Wooden kegs of sour beer being tossed off that boat and floating to shore on the south side of Oshkosh. I would have loved to have seen that.

The occurrence was a minor setback for Horn and Schwalm. The brewery continued its explosive growth into the 1890s when it merged with two other Oshkosh breweries to form the Oshkosh Brewing Company.

The K.M. Hutchinson didn't fare as well. It was once described as "the strangest vessel that ever plied the Fox and Wolf Rivers." The ship sank several times before catching fire in 1895 and burning down on a sandbar between Lake Poygan and Lake Winneconne.

Emelius Prawl Bangs, former captain of the K.M. Hutchinson (from Oshkosh Down Under).

After his ship was destroyed, E.P. Bangs needed a job. He wound up spending the summer on the south side running the horse carousel at EWECO Park. A single season of that was enough for Bangs. When summer ended, he launched Bangs Rapid Transit Company. He had one horse and one wagon.

Bangs Rapid Transit in front of the Oshkosh Public Library (from Oshkosh Down Under).

Bangs had better luck carting his freight on land. His transit company, which became E. P. Bangs Trucking, operated in Oshkosh until 1981. Bangs was long gone by then. He died in 1930 at the age of 75. They still called him Captain. Bangs is buried in Riverside Cemetery.

For more on E.P. Bangs and his transit company, check out Julie Krysiak Johnson’s excellent book Oshkosh Down Under.