High Times & Horror at Horn & Schwalm’s

In the late 1800s, no brewery in Oshkosh received more attention than Horn & Schwalm’s Brooklyn Brewery. It seemed something was always happening there. Newspapers in Oshkosh were all over it, publishing stories about the brewery that ran the gamut from the absurd to the tragic.

The best aspect these stories is the way they avoid conventional brewery trope. They’re not about beer production or business. They’re about people. They’re rare intimations of what daily life may have been like at Oshkosh breweries of this period.

I want to share a few of these stories. We’ll start light and end in a very dark place. Here’s one about a horse...

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, Monday March 24, 1890

A couple things about that story: This occurred at a time when Oshkoshers were bickering about Sunday beer sales and the non-enforcement of Blue Laws. Not a word is mentioned in the story about the brewery selling kegs of beer on a Sunday night. But I’ll bet that’s the first thing the prudes in town clucked about after they read the article on Monday.

That keg of beer is also worth noting. Remember, this was a time when bottled beer was an extravagance. Most folks drinking beer at home were doing just like Burkhardt Krieger. They were bringing their beer home in kegs, often purchasing it directly from the brewery. They didn’t have kegerators either. What they were drinking was gravity flow, cask lager. I’ll bet it was delicious.

Here’s one of those kegs from Horn & Schwalm’s Brewery. The keg Krieger’s horse made off with would have looked just like this one. You can’t see it from this angle, but “Horn & Schwalm” is branded into the wood on the top side of the barrel seen here.

Here’s a story that's positively bucolic. The newspaper I found it in was in rough shape, so I’ll transcribe it.

A Novel Sight

A novel sight attracted the attention of the passer by in the vicinity of the Brooklyn Brewery yesterday forenoon. It was no less than 26 wheelbarrows filled with grain and manned by 26 stalwart women that caused the usual listless pedestrian to gaze with considerable interest at the usual go-as-you-please race with grain for the sweepstakes. The women were those of the neighborhood wheeling malt and the refuse of the brewery for their pigs.
  - Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, Friday, September 28, 1883

Too bad you’re not allowed to keep pigs in town anymore. I’d like to have a pig. Back then on Doty Street there were plenty of families keeping a porker or two.

By the way, Oshkosh breweries still dole out their spent grain as animal feed. Both Bare Bones Brewery and Fox River Brewing have arrangements with local farmers who use the brewhouse leftovers as livestock feed.

I have to include this next one because it’s about one of my favorite subjects….

TRAMPS

They Have Been Congregating in Oshkosh Recently by the Hundreds

Tramps have been infesting this city in unusually large numbers for the past few days. Monday night twelve were lodged in the city lock-up and the patrol wagon is kept busy bringing the vagrants in from the suburbs. The residents of the outskirts are the principal sufferers. Out where the police are not so apt to reach them the vagrants are more bold and insolent. One of the favorite resorts fro tramps is Horn & Schwalm’s brewery. They fairly haunt the place in the hope of begging beer from some of the employees about the place. Usually they are let off by being ordered off the place or if they are too persistent one of the large brewers brings his boot into play.
    - Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, Wednesday, December 31, 1890

A boot in the ass! On New Year’s Eve, no less. Oshkosh was beset with tramps all through the late 1800s. The city tried a number novel solutions to stem the transient tide. For example, in the 1880s Oshkosh cops were paid a bonus of 37 cents (about $6.50 in today’s money) for each tramp they collared. That didn’t help.

They finally hit upon a solution. A workhouse was established near 17th and Knapp. Tramps pinched in Oshkosh were sent there to pass their time breaking rocks. By the turn of the century, word had spread among the wandering tribe that Oshkosh was no longer hospitable. Problem solved.

Here’s an interesting tidbit. One of the people who played a role in the establishment of the workhouse was Fred C. Horn, a member of the same family that owned the Horn & Schwalm Brewery. I guess kicking ass stopped being fun after a while.

OK, I warned you we were headed for a dark place. Here we are. Abandon all hope, this one is utterly bleak.  Here’s a story that hints at just how different the lives of these people were from our own. Prepare for some old-school nihilism.

Dead Infant Found

The body of a dead infant was found last Thursday near Schwalm’s Brewery on the south side. One arm and one leg were eaten off evidently by dogs. The body was turned over by the Poor Commissioner and buried without an inquest or further investigation as it was concluded that formal proceedings would be useless expense.
 - Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, Monday, October 4, 1875

Let that sink in.... A dead baby found half eaten by dogs and nobody cares to investigate it.

Imagine the uproar that would ensue if it happened today. It would be national news instead of a 9-line blurb consigned to an inside page of a local paper. No doubt there’s more to this story. The rest of it was taken to the graves of those involved. Maybe that’s for the best.

Boiled Alive!

Here’s a tragic tale. I first came across this about five years ago. It made my stomach turn then. Same thing now. I’ve touched on this incident a couple times before, but never posted the entire, gruesome episode. Well, here it is...

We’re back at Horn & Schwalm’s Brooklyn Brewery located at what is now the 1600 block of Doty St.

On the Friday evening of February 2, 1872, a young brewer named Leonard Schiffmann was finishing up a long brew day when things went horribly wrong…

BOILED ALIVE
A Man Falls into a Vat of Boiling Beer
On Friday, a young man named Leonard Schiffman [sic], employed in Schwalm’s Brewery, Third Ward, met with one of those horrible accidents which occasionally startle the community and make us wonder at the carelessness of human nature.

A large vat, seven or eight feet deep had just been filled with hot beer which had just been drawn off from out of the kettles where it had been boiling. A plank lay across the top and Schiffman attempted to cross it. The room was dark and in groping his way across, poor Schiffman slipped and fell into the seething hell beneath him. Fortunately he grasped the plank and saved himself from a descent which would have ended his career at once. As it was, he descended into the boiling liquid as far as his waist, and then, after struggling for several minutes, during which his lower limbs were in the boiling beer, he succeeded in extricating himself, with the assistance that his agonizing screams soon brought to his aid. Dr. C. and F.H. Lind were at once sent for and they did what was possible for his relief.

His flesh is boiled and his recovery is very doubtful. The physicians think that the amputations of one or both limbs may be necessary, and even in that event he may not recover.
  - Oshkosh Weekly Northwestern, February 8, 1872

A double amputation in 1872 would have been as torturous as his plunge into the boiling liquid. He was spared that additional agony. Three days after his accident, Schiffmann died on Tuesday, February 13, 1872. I haven’t located his exact birth date, but he would have been about 22 years old at the time of his death.

Some background on young Schiffmann: He was born about 1850 in Prussia and immigrated to America with his parents and siblings sometime prior to the Civil War. The family had reached Oshkosh by 1865.

Early on, Schiffmann worked here as a carpenter while living above his father’s saloon on the east side of what is now the 400 block of N. Main.

But the Schiffmann’s were brewers. In addition to the saloon, his father operated a Weissbier brewery in Oshkosh, first on N. Main and later on Doty. And Leonard’s older brother Andrew appears to have preceded him into the Horn & Schwalm brewhouse.

Leonard Schiffmann took up the brewing trade just months prior to his death. The 1872-1873 Oshkosh City Directory lists his occupation as “saw filer and carpenter.” That directory was being compiled about the same time Schiffmann was changing careers. A move in the direction of a very bad end.

Mythical Oshkosh - Fun with the Boys

This is a the second in a two-part series of posts concerning myths about Oshkosh spread by American newspapers. You can find the first post here.

More reports on the city that couldn't possibly exist – Oshkosh. Tall-tales continued being spun about Oshkosh throughout the latter half of the 1800s. But not all the stories were myth. As we'll see, Oshkosh's unruly reputation wasn't unwarranted.

The Main Street of Myth, circa 1887. - Photo courtesy of Dan Radig

Let's start with a whopper. In February 1868, the Fond du Lac Commonwealth ran a story titled Fun with the Boys in Oshkosh. The point of the piece was that mayhem and violence were the natural state of affairs here. Papers everywhere picked up the story and ran with it. If there was a single fable that cemented Oshkosh's reputation as a wild town, this was it.

The late Oshkosh historian Jim Metz explains what Fun with the Boys in Oshkosh was all about.



Metz is absolutely right when he says, "Fun with the Boys in Oshkosh became a euphemism for mayhem.” It was repeated constantly. I can't count the number of times I've comes across it in old newspapers.

Almost 50 years after it was introduced, the catchphrase was still in use. In 1910, Wisconsin author Jerome Watrous wrote in the Milwaukee Sentinel, “Having fun with the boys in Oshkosh — There may be back towns in China and a few dark spots in Africa where the inhabitants haven't heard the remark, but I doubt it.”

It became part of the common vernacular. You can see why. Fun with the Boys in Oshkosh. There’s a mad kind of ring to it. It ought to be revived.

Here's another one that made the rounds. It's boosted by a dose of pure bullshit.

– Tallulah, Madison Parish, La., Madison Times, March 27, 1886

Well there is some truth to this one. There really was a man named William Waterman aged 109. But he didn't live in Oshkosh. He lived in Grand Rapids (now known as Wisconsin Rapids). Why move him to Oshkosh then? Because when you're a newspaper editor filling up space, it's sexier to have your boozing ultracentenarian living in sin city. It's not as though, Waterman's life wasn't interesting enough. He was born six months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence and had seen George Washington in the flesh. Better yet, he married for the second time when he was 100 years old. When Waterman died at the age of 113, he was supposedly the oldest person in the United States.

As the 1800s drew to a close, myths about Oshkosh continued to be perpetrated by American newspapers. But a number of them – perhaps recognizing that the joke had gotten out of hand – attempted to put a damper on the Oshkosh phenomenon. Here's the New York Times with a feeble stab at setting the record straight about Sawdust City.

– New York Times, February 28, 1888

By the 1890s, some of the fictions were giving way to facts juicy enough for print. When Mayor Charles Oellerich launched a campaign to have Oshkosh saloons close on Sundays, the nation's newspapers took notice. Here's a story on the ensuing showdown, This appeared on the front page of the Bismarck, North Dakota Weekly Tribune on March 30, 1894. The story ran verbatim in dozens of American newspapers.

I like that bit about Oshkosh being a wide-open city. In terms of pure vice, this town had few rivals. New York City was one of them. The saloon closing caused the New York Evening World to draw the connection between these two dens of iniquity.

– April 2, 1894

Oshkosh saloonists weren't giving up their hard-won reputation that easily.

– Jamestown, North Dakota, Weekly Alert, April 12, 1894

Can you guess who won the battle? Of course, you can. By the end of the year, Oellerich was out on his ear and the saloons were going full bore all week long.

Here's another ordeal involving Oshkosh saloons that was reported nationwide.

– Rock Island, IL. Argus, December 7, 1898

Not so fast. The tradition of Oshkosh saloons giving away a free lunch to boozers proved more durable than anyone expected. Many of the pre-Prohibition saloons in the city continued offering their patrons free grub at any time of day or night. Here's an example of just that from the 1905 Oshkosh City Directory.

The building that housed Klawun's saloon still stands on the corner at Boyd and Merritt streets. You can still get lunch there, too. You'll have to pay, though. Here's what it looks like today.

Just one more. This article was widely circulated in 1897. It's about more fun with the boys from Oshkosh. Goes to show you can take the boys out of Oshkosh, but you can't take Oshkosh out of the boys...

– Princeton, Minn., Union, July 22, 1897

And Then Joseph Nigl Punched a Cop

Another visit to long ago for a lively night in the old, weird Oshkosh. This time we're at Joseph J. Nigl's Gemütlichkeit Saloon on the corner of 9th and Ohio.

Nigl's Gemütlichkeit Saloon

March 31, 1902
It was a Monday. Joe Nigl was at his bar. He was getting loaded.

It wasn't the best of times for the saloon-owning alderman from Oshkosh's Bloody Sixth Ward. Nigl was being squeezed by the Oshkosh Brewing Company. The brewery had gained control of the local beer market and forcing one price hike after another onto saloonists like Nigl. Eventually, he'd remedy that by helping to launch the Peoples Brewing Company in 1913. For now, though, Nigl was stuck footing the bill as he slung nickel mugs of the brewery's beer.

Nigl

If Nigl's mood was already sour, it didn't improve any when he saw Joe Smick walk through the door. Smick was a beat cop in the 6th Ward. And  he was none too popular with the Highholders who dominated the neighborhood.

The residents of  the 6th had little use for cops in general and for Smick in particular. Relations had been strained ever since the divisive Woodworkers' Strike of 1898. Officer Smick had come to be especially loathed. A former employee of Paine Lumber, Smick had recently made a series of arrests in the neighborhood. Highholders like Nigl viewed him with disdain. When the cop walked into Nigl's bar, the alderman wasted no time in going after him.

Smick

Here's Oshkosh Police Chief Rudolph J. Weisbrod to describe the ensuing mayhem.

"When he (Smick) entered, the proprietor asked him to stand the treat for the crowd. This the officer declined to do and said that he did not care to drink, and could not afford to treat. Upon this, the proprietor called him a dead beat and began to abuse him. One word led to another and after calling him several opprobrious names the alderman struck the officer."
      - Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, March 4, 1902.

With the crowd at the bar gathering to mob him, Smick beat a hasty retreat. Word of the event spread quickly through the 6th Ward. Nigl, already something of a legend in the neighborhood, added to his renown. He never faced charges for the attack. Smick said he didn’t want to arrest an alderman.

The following day Nigl apologized. He said he wouldn't have acted the way he had if he'd not been drinking. Smick, with one eye blackened, accepted Nigl's apology. That was the end of the matter.

Chief Weisbrod said Nigl was lucky he was dealing with Smick and not some other Oshkosh cop. He told the Northwestern, "Many of them would have found their clubs a convenient weapon of defense, and if that had proven insufficient, would have been justified in reaching into the other pocket for that more convincing argument, a revolver."

The Northwestern tried to get Nigl's take on the incident. The alderman told the reporter to get lost. The flare up faded away. Just another Monday night in Sawdust City.