Peabody's and the Atwood Bathhouse

The name H. A. Atwood is written in brick near the top of the building at 544 N. Main. You have to look closely to see it, but it’s there.

544 N. Main Street.

The building is home to Peabody's Tavern. Its first use, though, had nothing to do with Oshkosh drinking culture. This place was the brainchild of Dr. Herbert Alger Atwood. And his thing was giving baths to people. His specialty was the Turkish bath.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, July 18, 1887.

A Turkish Bath at Atwood’s began with you stripping down. Dr. Atwood would then lead you into a steam room where he would heat you to a heavy sweat. Then he’d start scrubbing on you. He’d go over your entire body with a wool mitten to grate away dead skin cells. Next, he’d give you a full-body shampoo. Then he’d hose you off – first with warm water, then with cold – leaving your flesh clean, tingling, and invigorated.

Before coming to Oshkosh, Atwood said he had given over 4,000 such baths. He learned his technique from a master, his father, Dr. Isaac Atwood. The elder Atwood had been applying Turkish baths to Western Wisconsinites since the 1870s.

Atwood the younger was 45 and operating a bathhouse in Fargo when he began scouting Oshkosh in March 1887. No doubt, he liked what he saw here. Two months after his initial visit, Atwood leased a building near the corner of Parkway and Main. The place was prototypical Oshkosh: a cigar factory on one side and a saloon on the other. By the summer of 1887 Atwood was working up a lather at his first bathhouse on Main Street.

Atwood’s first bathhouse in Oshkosh was located at what is now the parking lot next to Winners Sports Bar in the 600 block of N. Main.

Herbert Atwood presented himself as a doctor. It was an honorific he appears to have awarded himself. There’s no indication in his biography that Atwood received medical training of any kind. Nonetheless, he claimed his bathing methods could cure just about anything: diabetes, pimples, rheumatism, all forms of kidney and liver ailments, neuralgia, dyspepsia, headache, night sweats, limpness, lameness…

The Turkish cure didn’t always take. In 1889, one of Atwood’s “patients” dropped dead during a visit to the bathhouse. The incident didn’t dent Atwood’s reputation. People swore by him.

By 1891, Atwood had outgrown his original location. That summer, construction began on the Queen Anne-style building that still bears Atwood’s name at 544 N. Main.

Atwood’s new bathhouse was a Main Street attraction for the next 30 years. The good Dr. Atwood missed most of that. In 1903, he contracted tuberculosis. But not even the dreaded TB could keep Atwood from his bathing campaign. It wasn’t until the sweltering summer of 1906, when he began spitting up blood in the bathhouse, that Atwood finally threw in the towel. He expired ten days later in the apartment above the bathhouse that he kept with his wife, Anna.

Herbert Alger Atwood was 64 years old at the time of his death. His body was loaded into a Northwestern Railroad car and taken to Lake Mills, the town of his birth, where he was buried.

Anna Atwood leased the bathhouse to a bath man from Appleton named Sam Hyram. Both Sam and his wife, Kittie, were established bath givers. The Hyrams even added a new wrinkle. They introduced communal bathing for folks who didn’t want to soak alone. The bathers were segregated. Ladies were allowed to bathe en-masse from 8am to noon. The “Gents” got their turn from 1pm to 10pm. The extended hours for the fellows seems to indicate that group sponging was more popular with males. Go figure.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, September 16, 1907.

It didn’t go well. Soon there were suggestions that the Hyram’s bathhouse hygiene left something to be desired. And in 1911 the couple got bounced out. Their replacement was Ernest Reif, an Oshkosh native who had married Atwood’s daughter, Frances, in 1907. Reif was working as a laborer at Schmit Brothers Trunk before becoming head scrubber at the Atwood. He promised that the place had been thoroughly disinfected, renovated, and put “in a perfect sanitary condition.”

But Reif came to the game too late. Indoor plumbing was now standard in Oshkosh homes. The need for public bathing facilities was at an end. Reif managed to keep the bathhouse going until 1922. In 1923, Atwood’s building was turned into a wallpaper store.

An Exercise in Forgetting
The Atwood building saw 75 years of flux and failure after the baths were taken out. All sorts of businesses took a turn there. Stores that sold fruit, furniture, fur… A business would come in and be gone a couple years later. They all lacked the sparkle of the Atwood baths.

The first tavern was planted there in 1941. It was put in by Joe Barnett who had been running a bar next door, named the Annex, where Peabody’s Sideyard now sits (some people may remember that bar when it was called The Sheik). The new tavern in the Atwood building survived into the early 1950s. It was called Club Ramie for most of that period. The place was part tavern, part dance hall and featured a steady stream of well-known dance and jazz bands.

The recordings jazz musician Bob Anderson made for Jump Records in Hollywood were cut during the same period when he played at Club Ramie. Click here for a sample of the sounds played at the club in the 1940s.

Club Ramie turned into the Crow Bar in 1950 and promptly failed. Then another rotation of unremarkable endeavors passed through. By 1965 the Atwood building was sitting vacant.

The Atwood Building in 1965. The sign for Percey Fur was left behind in 1941 when Percey Fur left the building.

Morgan Brothers Music was the last business to take hold here prior to the Atwood finding its true calling as a tavern. The music shop occupied the building from 1975 through 1982.

Another tavern finally arrived in 1983. It was called the Blue Moon Cafe and was run by a couple of Vietnam war veterans named Jim McCarthy and Michael Schrage. McCarthy and Schrage started out across the street at 579 N. Main with a vegetarian restaurant also named the Blue Moon Cafe. In the fall of 1983, they moved the business to the east side of N. Main, ditched the vegetarian angle, and made their new Blue Moon into a legitimate night club.

October 28, 1983.

Jim McCarthy (left) and Michael Schrage at the Blue Moon bar in 1984.

McCarthy and Schrage had a silent partner in the business named James Brill. It all started to fall apart in 1985 after Brill got caught holding a quarter pound of cocaine. Brill was revealed as the head of a multi-million dollar drug ring. In 1986, as part of his plea deal, he agreed to forfeit his interest in the Blue Moon. Brill went to prison and the Blue Moon went into foreclosure.

The crash of the Blue Moon instigated a decade-long sequence of tavern failures at 544 N. Main. In 1986, there was Harvey’s, which gave way to Boomer’s in 1991. Boomer’s went out a year later. It became Sydney’s for a couple of years, and then the short lived After Dark, which was followed by Three Fingers Pub in 1994. Each of these taverns was something of a throwback to the days of Club Ramie. Live music, especially blues, was the main attraction. It was not enough. The Atwood was back in foreclosure in 1996.

The Atwood building finally found its purpose again in 1997 when Wally Melchior opened Peabody’s Ale House. Melchior was a veteran barman who had been running the Lizard Lounge (now Reptile Palace) on High Street since 1987. He changed the focus at the Atwood from blasting the blues to better food, craft beer, and single malt scotch.

Wally Melchior

Melchior sold Peabody’s to real estate developer Eric Hoopman in 2008. The building is currently owned by Brickhouse Properties. Despite the ownership changes, the name that Melchior gave the tavern 27 years ago remains. Peabody’s has been there for almost as long as the Atwood bathhouse was.

There have been countless renovations to the Atwood building since its construction in 1891. The upheavals obscured the history of the place. But the building’s exterior remains essentially true to the vision Herbert Atwood had for his Turkish bathhouse… with his name still there, written in brick high above Main Street.

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