Oshkosh Beer: December 2025

Thanks to everyone who visited the blog this year to tramp around with me on the underside of Oshkosh history. I’ve had a great time researching and writing these stories. And I’m looking forward to a pack of new stories lined up for next year. But I thought now would be a good time to take a look back. Here’s a spirited trek through Christmas past in Oshkosh…

Bring us some figgy pudding…
I was researching a speakeasy operator named Peter Bruette this past summer when I came across a nugget that still makes me queasy.

Back in 1910, Peter Bruette launched a saloon on Main Street with a guy named Fred Doemel. It was common for saloon keepers in those days to offer a Christmas meal to their customers as a token of appreciation. For their first Christmas in business, Bruette and Doemel showed their appreciation in a rather nauseating way: roast possum.

December 24, 1910.

I had to know if they ever repeated this feast. I was hoping it might have become a sickening, annual event. Well, that didn’t happen. This was the lone serving of their marsupial meal.

The Bruette and Doemel saloon is long gone, but the building it inhabited still stands. Here it is at 452 North Main Street.

Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow…
Younger readers may not be aware of this, but the oldsters will know… There used to be places in Oshkosh called beer depots. A folksy name for a liquor store.

These weren't just alcohol dispensaries reserved for adults. Beer depots were part of the neighborhood. Kids were welcomed. It was usually the best spot around for candy and soda. Like their parents, those kids were often on a first-name basis with the proprietor. One of them was named Jordy.

In 1962, Jordan Jungwirth left his sales job at the Cook Coffee Company and opened a beer depot on the northwest corner of 9th and Rugby. He was 49. This was a risky move, but it paid off. Six weeks after opening his shop, Jordy took out an ad in the Daily Northwestern thanking his new friends and wishing them a Merry Christmas…

December 21, 1962.

Jordy’s had been at that corner for 50 years when it closed in 2012. It was the last of the true beer depots in Oshkosh.

9th and Rugby, circa 2010.

You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch…
Getting into the Christmas spirit can be a struggle for some of us. This little tale is about a pack of humbuggers who said to hell with it.

Just a few days before the Christmas of 1904, Oshkosh’s two breweries teamed up with a couple of Milwaukee breweries and a few of the local beer bottlers to make a grouchy announcement: you’re going to have to pony up an extra 50 cents for a pony barrel full of beer. And no more Christmas Presents!

December 19, 1904.

The Scrooge behind this poorly-timed announcement was William Glatz. He started out as the bookkeeper for the Oshkosh Brewing Company. He became the company president just before this ad was published. As president, Glatz would play the Grinch role to the hilt. His stinginess made local saloon keepers so angry that they launched Peoples Brewing in 1913, just to spite him. At least we got another brewery out of it!

William Glatz

O Tannebaum…
Oshkosh taverns tend to develop peculiar holiday traditions. The old nevergreen at Witzke’s for example...

Witzke’s at 17th and Oregon.

After a Thanksgiving in the late 1970s, someone brought a ragged Christmas tree into the bar. The balsam was propped up in the corner to inject some of the old holiday spirit into the place. An ornament with a snowman painted on it was placed at the top. Other embellishments were less conventional. Some smartasses began hanging dollar bills on it. The holiday sarcasm seemed about right.

When the season was over, the tree was taken to the basement, oddball trimmings and all. It was carted back up when Christmas came again the following year. The tree was brown now, but still intact. This annual ritual was repeated for almost 20 years. Cliff Sweet was a longtime bartender at Witzke’s. He became the tannenbaum’s caretaker.

Clifford Sweet, 1925-2003.

"We bring it up after Thanksgiving and leave it up a day or two after New Year's,” Sweet said in 1995. “It's been a conversation piece for many years. I don't even know who first brought it in. Nobody has ever taken any of the money off it. People will add something each year. They'll put a bulb on it, but the trimmings are never taken off. It's been brown for quite a few years. The needles are petrified. They don't even fall off anymore. I give it a shot of vodka every morning.”

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas…
A couple of blocks up from Witzke’s is the Acee Deucee tavern. This place was launched by the Koplitz family in 1876.

The Koplitz Saloon at 14th and Oregon, now Acee Deucee.

The Koplitz clan were migrants from the Rhineland of western Germany. The region had been famous for its wines since Roman times. The Koplitz family brought that tradition with them to Oshkosh. For decades, they produced wine that they sold from their saloon. Brothers Ted and Frank Koplitz also released a holiday wine each year. They called it Glee Wine. Its arrival in early December was a reminder that Christmastime had arrived.

December 16, 1911.

The Koplitz’s Glee Wine was an Oshkosh version of German Glühwein (Glow Wine). This was a spiced and strong red intended to be heated before serving. A cup of it was supposed to give you a healthy glow. If you want to give it a go, here’s a Glühwein recipe you can easily make at home. This is an old Oshkosh tradition that’s well overdue for revival.

“The Best Home Made Wine.” The Koplitz wine wagon, 1908.

Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree…
Over at 16th and Nebraska, the Schobloski family celebrated Christmas in a most strenuous manner. I think it’s best to let the reporter from the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern tell the story. This appeared on December 27, 1880.

“There was a general row in the family of John Schobloski, south of sixteenth street, Saturday night. It seems that all the Schobloki relatives had gathered at the house of a son-in-law and tapped a keg of Christmas beer, which flowed freely until a row ensued and the party wound up by the participants mopping the floor with each other and performing other gymnastic feats of strength and skill. The police were engaged today in making arrests.”

I suspect the inspirational keg of beer came from Horn & Schwalm’s Brooklyn Brewery. The brewery was not even a block away from where the Schobloski’s festival of fists occurred.

A portion of the old Horn & Schwalm Brewery still standing near 16th and Doty.

Don we now our gay apparel…
Beer drinking and Christmas have always gone hand in hand in Oshkosh. The city’s brewers loved the season. They relied on the hefty beer drinking of the holidays to get them through the winter months when sales slumped.

Oshkosh brewers helped rouse the local thirst by offering a strong, holiday beer. It was usually released during the week of Thanksgiving. They’d dress their holiday-brew bottles with decorative caps and labels to commemorate the season. This stuff still looks good...

If the fates allow…
Here’s a photo that may seem a little out of place here. It shows the Wisconsin Public Service building decked out for the Christmas of 1935. This beauty stood at the southwest corner of Washington and State streets.

I wanted to include that photo for a couple of reasons. First, this building began life as a saloon. Oshkosh architect William Waters designed the structure for August Uihlein, the head of Schlitz Brewing. It was built in 1891 and was known as the Uihlein Block. The corner unit was occupied by a tied-house selling Schlitz Beer. Here’s the Uihlein Block during its saloon days (this photo has been colorized to give a truer sense of the building’s appearance).

And here’s a look at the lovely bar inside…

The other reason I wanted to share these last three photos is because they were given to me by Dan Radig. I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. Dan loved Oshkosh history. Over the years, he built an incredible collection of historic photographs and never hesitated to share them. Dan passed away on June 7th. I knew him for about 15 years and admired him deeply. I miss him.

Daniel Radig, 1956-2025. This photo of Dan is from 1996.

I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
See you in 2026.
Prost!

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Agnes was 40 when she quit the straight world and dove into the underworld. Her scandalous turn brought her to Oshkosh. The Jazz Age was underway and the old norms were breaking down. Agnes took a radical path to liberation.

"The Flapper" cover of Life Magazine, February 2, 1922.

She was born Agnes Flynn in 1879 on a farm in the Town of Chilton. Her parents were Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine. In America, they asserted their fertility. A new baby almost every other year. The arrival of Agnes made it an even dozen.

Agnes was two when the Flynn’s moved to Kaukauna. And there she stayed for the next 38 years. She was always a child of her time. At 13 she quit school and at 17 got married. She became Agnes DeBrue.

Joseph DeBrue was the son of Belgian immigrants and five years older than his teen-age bride. Their first baby came a year after the wedding. Agnes gave birth six times in seven years. She was on pace to outbreed her mother. As devout Roman Catholics, their birth control options amounted to abstinence, rhythm and chance. Agnes beat the odds. At 27, she had her last baby.

Summer in Kaukauna, 1905.

The DeBrues were working-class on the verge of middle-class. Joseph was a foreman at the Kaukauna Machine Works. They had a comfortable home in a pleasant town. Their future prosperity was practically assured. Agnes didn’t want it.

In 1919, she filed for divorce from her husband of 22 years. Joseph counter-sued. The judge ruled in his favor and gave Joseph custody of the kids. The youngest was a 13-year-old boy. The middle-aged mother left town.

Cut Loose
First, she went to Fond du Lac. There were friends and family there. Then she hooked up with Herman Wichman. He was 18 years younger than Agnes, about the same age as her oldest child. Herman was married and had two young kids. He worked on a farm west of Fond du Lac, near Brandon.

Herman F. Wichman.

Herman’s wife died of blood poisoning in 1922. Seven weeks later, Agnes and Herman went to Menominee, Michigan for a quickie wedding. Both fudged their age on the marriage certificate. Herman made himself two years older. Agnes shaved off four years. At 43, she was a newlywed again.

Marrying Herman was like slamming a door on her past. It was an explosively complex relationship. Herman was thickheaded, “powerfully built,” and violent. Agnes was fearless and could not seem to resist him. He frequently beat her. Yet her young husband was surely her subordinate. Agnes brought him along when she moved to Oshkosh. In the summer of 1923, she opened a speakeasy called the Pastime Inn at what is now 24 East Gruenwald Avenue.

The Jockey Club at 24 East Gruenwald Avenue, former home of the Pastime Inn.

The ex-saloon had been vacant since the start of Prohibition in 1920. The place was just north of the Oshkosh city limits, in the Town of Oshkosh. The neighborhood was called Nordheim. It had a reputation for being rough and unruly.

But Nordheim’s lawlessness did not extend to the sale of illegal liquor. The town board had been dominated by Prohibitionists for a decade. They badgered the County Sheriff into raiding the speakeasies that kept popping up near the township’s southern border. The Pastime soon had deputies at the door.

The first raid came in the fall of 1923. Agnes was ready for it. The Sheriff's office complained that during the initial visits, she was too quick for them and had "destroyed the only evidence available.” The evasion triggered a more vigorous investigation.

Winnebago County Sheriff Peter Carlson, who investigated Agnes and the Pastime Inn.

On the Saturday evening of October 27, Sheriff Carlson and his deputies were back. They didn’t bother with trying to catch her in the act. They had learned that Agnes was storing liquor in a shack behind the barroom. They found six pints of moonshine under the floorboards.

They discovered something else inside the bar. There were women hanging out at the Pastime Inn who weren’t there for the moonshine. Carlson handed Agnes a ticket for running an unlicensed dance hall. It was a tactic used against suspected brothel keepers when obvious evidence of a carnal crime was lacking. And it was the first indication that Agnes was offering something more than bootleg liquor.

Agnes was 44 and locked up for the first time. The following morning she pleaded not guilty and got a Fond du Lac friend to post an $800 bond for her release (about $15,000 in today’s money). A week later, her trial began. Everyone was there but Agnes.

Over the next month, Agnes did everything she could to avoid standing in front of a judge. She jumped bail and then claimed she didn’t know about the court date. She missed her next hearing, saying she was too sick to leave home. Her condition grew suddenly worse. By January, she was terminally ill and so close to death that the charges against her were dropped. All of this was a fabrication.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, December 24, 1923.

No judge would have fallen for such a transparent scheme without a doctor vouching for her imminent death. Somehow she made that happen. There were several doctors in the area helping folks skirt the dry law. Prescriptions for whiskey were commonplace. Agnes and her doctor appear to have taken it a step further.

The Blazing Stump
While faking her death, she was busy planning her next move. Nordheim had proved too risky. She moved to Appleton and searched for a new place. She found what she wanted near the east edge of Appleton on what was then a lonely road leading to Darboy.

For years, William Hopfensperger had been running a saloon and meat market on what is now County Hwy KK near North Coop Road. It took two years of Prohibition to drive him out of there. Agnes came in and opened another kind of meat market.

The Hopfensperger saloon, circa 1916, about eight years before it became the Blazing Stump.

The place was big with a barroom downstairs, a dancehall upstairs, and private rooms at the rear. A fence stood at the perimeter of the property, adding even more privacy to an already isolated setting. The only thing lacking was a splashy name. She called it the Blazing Stump.

The origin of that name remains in question. But there are a few compelling clues. A member of the Hopfensperger family said there was a natural gas reservoir on the property with a blowoff pipe that they referred to as a blazing pump. That might have been all the inspiration Agnes needed.

Blazing Stump was not original to Agnes. By the 1920s, it had already been applied to a number of bawdy, frontier saloons. The name was popularized by an often-reprinted story that appeared in an 1895 edition of the Overland Monthly magazine. The tale involved an adventurous woman who finds love in a rough, country tavern named the Blazing Stump. The woman in the story was named Agnes.

The Blazing Stump became the best-known brothel in the area. A public secret. The first, and still the best, depiction of the BS didn’t appear until 1966, with the publication of Dirty Helen, the autobiography of Helen Cromwell. Helen was a brothel keeper in Superior and Milwaukee and seemed to know everyone in the Wisconsin underworld. She and two women from her Superior stable spent a night at the Blazing Stump on an unspecified date. Here's Helen’s abridged version of that evening.

We arrived in Appleton late in the afternoon. The big convention parade was just over and the streets were swarming with people. We checked into a local hotel and I made a couple of inquiries. All inquiries pointed in the same direction: about three miles out of town to a place called "Blazing Stump." It was a converted farmhouse in the fork of the road.

We entered the farmhouse and found the place absolutely jammed with men. A pale, limpid, distracted-looking guy was standing behind a beat-up bar, dishing out the rottenest moonshine I had ever tasted. I signalled to the girls and they flew up the stairs. There was a slight squabble among the men about who was going to be first with the girls. I helped settle it, and the remainder of the fans lined up to wait their jolly turns…

As the night wore on I felt like a timekeeper at a track meet. I pretended I was a coach at a ball game, and every time there was an opening available I'd slap a new "player" on the rump and tell him to get in there and fight for the home team. At seven-thirty we pulled up stakes and went back to our hotel room. The girls had made well over five hundred dollars each.

Helen Cromwell, circa 1946.

Despite the hot and heavy traffic, Agnes had little trouble with police or Prohibition agents. Yet she had plenty of other trouble. Most of it came from her husband. Herman Wichman’s venom was made more toxic by his binge drinking. He began carrying a gun and was growing increasingly erratic. His beatings of Agnes were more frequent. In the span of eight months, Herman broke her nose twice. She finally kicked him out and filed for divorce.

Agnes liked to drink, too. In August 1924, she was arrested in Winnebago County for drunk driving. She gave the cop a fake name and a hard time. He tacked a drunk and disorderly onto her résumé. Her soon-to-be ex-husband bailed her out of jail.

Her hearing on the charges was moved to Calumet County, the same jurisdiction that oversaw the Blazing Stump. Not a good move. She told the judge, “I was sleepy and that may have affected my driving to some extent, but I certainly was not drunk.” He laughed at her and fined her $25. And then he gave her an ultimatum: get out of the county in 30 days or go to jail.

That same week, Agnes was in an Oshkosh courtroom getting her divorce from Herman Wichman. They had been married for two years and one day. The judge added a restraining order that excluded Herman from Agnes’ affairs in general and the Blazing Stump in particular. It was an unusual decree considering that the business was illegal. It didn’t matter much. At the end of September, she moved out of the Blazing Stump and Calumet County.

Burning Out
Five years had passed since Agnes had left her first husband and their children in Kaukauna. She now inhabited an alternate universe. She was locally famous. Her name, attached to one outrage or another, appeared regularly in area newspapers. When an older brother died, the obituary listed her as Agnes DeBrue. She hadn’t used that name in years. The name Agnes Wichman, a name everybody recognized, would have attracted the kind of attention her family didn’t want.

But she wasn’t turning back. Neither was Herman Wichmann. He ignored the restraining order and was twice arrested for beating Agnes after their divorce. The first attack got him a five-dollar fine (about $100 in today’s money). The second cost him nothing. The charge was dropped after Agnes went back to him.

Two months after their divorce, and 10 days after her latest beating from him, Agnes and Herman were back in Menominee, Michigan. Another quickie wedding. Another chance to lie about their ages. After all that had transpired, it was both awful and touching that they would even bother.

The newlyweds returned to Appleton and a home just west of Richmond Street on what is now Wisconsin Avenue. They installed a barroom and got back to work. The moonshine was flowing, the ladies were laying, and the neighbors were complaining.

Around midnight on a Sunday in early December, Appleton police raided the home. Agnes, Herman, and a sex worker named Jennie Miller were arrested. A guy named George Doine was hauled in, too. He got off easy. Doine claimed innocence, saying he had noticed a chimney fire and went inside to put it out. The judge was so tickled by the lovely metaphor that he allowed Doine to go free. The punishment was saved for Agnes and Herman.

Appleton Post-Crescent, December 30, 1924.

Agnes had been ordered out of a county for the second time in four months. And four months later, Herman Wichman made matters worse. He was arrested in Waupun for getting drunk and beating up his brother. While he was being held in the Fond du Lac jail, Herman babbled about Agnes. He claimed she was working with Prohibition agents gathering evidence against bootleggers. His loose talk got picked up by a reporter. The story appeared in newspapers across central Wisconsin. He might as well have put a target on her back.

She couldn’t take it anymore. Agnes dropped Herman and dropped out of sight. She disappeared for a year.

Out of the Shadows
Agnes was calling herself Helen Leiberg when she resurfaced in the spring of 1926 in Aurora, Illinois.

McCoy’s 1926 Aurora City Directory.

She had probably known Chester Leiberg since the early 1920s. He was dividing his time then between Oshkosh, where he worked as a bricklayer, and Florence County where he did seasonal work in a lumber camp.

Agnes was living with Leiberg in Aurora by early 1926. They were married later that fall. She wrote on the marriage license that she was 42 and that her last name was Flynn. She was actually 47. Chester Leiberg was 36.

By 1929 she was calling herself Agnes again. She and Chester remained in Aurora until Prohibition ended. Her notorious past was receding. They moved back to Wisconsin.

Herman Wichman was gone by then. He ended up in Detroit and got married again. And again. And again. His life after Agnes was only slightly less repugnant. He died in Detroit in 1959.

The Blazing Stump was renamed the Clover Inn after Agnes left. The new proprietor, Louis Soffa, tried turning it into a respectable country tavern. It was a flop.

Appleton Post-Crescent, December 30, 1924.

About five years later, the Clover Inn backslid. A longtime flesh-trader named Ella Gouley relocated there after being driven out of her Menasha brothel. “Dirty” Helen Cromwell knew her as “Old Ma Gooley” and wrote that “She was grotesque… the ugliest apparition of a woman I had ever seen – clumps of fat all squashed together like mounds of modeling clay.”

Agnes and Chester Leiberg were living near Tipler in Florence County when the Blazing Stump turned into a hot topic again. A 1939 raid uncovered ties to the Milwaukee mafia. The story was shared by newspapers across the state. Agnes must have heard about it. Most of those stories contained a reference to the old days of the Blazing Stump.

The Clover Inn name never did catch on with folks living in the area. The Appleton Post-Crescent was still calling it the Blazing Stump when the tavern was destroyed by fire in 1945.

Clippings from August 1945, and the burning of the Blazing Stump.

Agnes had left that scene 20 years ago. She had since reconnected with her children. How much of her story did they ever know?

In 1950, Agnes and Chester celebrated Christmas and the New Year in Kaukauna with her three daughters and youngest son. Their father, Agnes’s first husband, had died in 1945. She and Chester were heading back to Tipler when their car collided with a truck carrying 12 tons of pulpwood. Chester was driving and wasn’t hurt. Agnes took the full force of the collision. They used wrecking bars to get her out of the car. She was taken to the hospital in Oconto Falls and died 15 minutes after her arrival.

The obituary of Agnes Leiberg was a study in omission. Not a whisper of her wild years. She was buried in St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery in Kaukauna. The dating on her gravestone shaved a year off her age. Agnes would have liked that.